I recently found out that my old elementary school is being demolished in the near future, and I’m interested in seeing if they’d let me take some alarm devices out of there. I do not live in the town anymore, and I’m wondering if anyone can give me advice on who to contact.
My advice would be to try contacting the facilities director (or similar) of whatever school district its in. That would be a good place to start.
Okay, thank you! I’ll try that. It sounds like a much better idea than being all like “fire alrms plz” on the town’s “Contact Us” page.
Getting in touch with the facilities manager or director is probably your best bet, but I wouldn’t expect too much. School districts usually require a property release form to be submitted when stuff is given away, and they wouldn’t have any real incentive to do that for you other than being nice. Also, in this type of situation, offering to pay won’t get you far since institutions often have no structure or precedent for accepting money for a one-off purchase outside their usual ecosystem. But, it’s always worth a try.
Like Destin said, it’s worth a try, but don’t expect too much. An old middle school was demolished in my town last year which I tried hard to get the parts from but never did. After talking to the building owner on the phone, he got back with me a few weeks later basically saying that all the parts were going to be reused, which I think was flat out lie, but at least it got me off his back. Unfortunately I don’t think many building owners want/have time to deal with people like us.
However I am pretty lucky that my dad is a building engineer since two of his buildings received upgrades in the past few years and I got all the parts from both of them. I suppose you just have to know the right people that are willing to work with you.
Usually a general contractor is hired to demolish a building and they will go in and strip it of everything.
I’d find out who is doing the work and try to find the foreman and asking them. They are the ones who will physically be removing the devices and tossing them in the trash or a recycling bin, and they are already being paid by the the district so they usually don’t care if you grab a few devices (as long as you sell yourself as a hobbyist and aren’t trying to grab a bunch of devices for profit).
The facilities manager should know who the general is on the demolition. Try to also find out the schedule from the facilities manager, when they will turn the building over for demo, etc… all the wiring will be ripped out first, so fire alarm is one of the first things to go.
Chris has some really good advice there. A GC is the best way to go. I haven’t been to a job site to get alarms for a long time, but when I was younger, I always had the best results by going to a job site and calling over a nearby worker. As long as you are polite and remember to stay outside the fenced off work zone unless invited in, I find that the results (at least for me) were pretty good. They usually don’t mind saving stuff for you, or even sometimes allowing you to grab a few things yourself (but that doesn’t happen often due to safety and liability issues).
I usually try to avoid people higher up on the totem pole unless there is no other way. They are usually too busy or are not directly involved with what it is you are after and generally want nothing to do with you.