I am wondering why at each hospital I have been to for various reasons which I will not get into, they always have Cerberus Pyrotronics/Siemens fire alarm systems. I went to one which has what appears to be Wheelock exceeder speaker strobes in the bathrooms, no alarms in the rooms, unknown alarms in the hallways, and judging by the size of the hospital complex it must have had an MXL panel at some point. I’m not sure whether it has voice evacuation, as the two times they have done fire alarm testing while I was there, either I fell asleep during it, or they did it silent, as I didn’t hear a single thing. they even offered me noise-cancelling headphones like there was going to be noise. they had Cerberus Pyrotronics pull stations in a hallway that you usually aren’t in. another local hospital has some sort of Siemens Chime Strobes, Siemens variants of what looks like the ESL dual-action pull stations. feel free to reply if you’ve had similar experiences.
My local hospital also has a Siemens/Cerberus Pyrotronics system. I think that they were super common systems around 30 years ago and that many hospitals just haven’t been able to fully shut down their systems and move to different brands. It’s not like a hospital can shut down for a little bit.
One likely reason is that hospitals are often big places & thus need big systems: Siemens (who now own Cerberus Pyrotronics) is one of the few manufacturers that sells systems for such applications, alongside Simplex, Notifier, & Edwards.
I agree with you, that’s the same with all the major government buildings and airports in my area.
A few months ago i replaced the existing Cerberus System 3 panel to a Simplex 4100ES and to minimize the down time we did the following: made a hole in the wall nearby for the new panel tub and gradually moved over circuits to the new panel and kept an interconnect until the end to have panels activate eachothers.
The photos i took from the cerberus panel are not at the very beginning and not at the very end either. The end result was a bit better.
What happened to the System 3? They’re kinda rare panels now days
Yeah: I hope it was preserved, especially a rare large model like that one!
The client wanted to keep all old parts in boxes, not sure if they trashed them since.
Good to know, thanks. Really hope it wasn’t trashed.
If you really want them you can ask the maintenance team of boundary hospital in Idaho
Siemens is a large proprietary company, why they are most likely in all of these buildings. I know they have the contract to the Canadian federal buildings for one.
Edwards/EST is also a large one. I’m currently inspecting a hospital right now, not a super large one, but definitley large enough. We’ve had the service contract for well over 20 years now, and got it since my boss worked for Edwards and did the hospital back then as well. The original system was an Edwards 8500 with 333D single stroke bells and then 339D single stroke chimes. The hospital also had an Edwards clock system, and an Edwards intercom system. All now not used or replaced with a brand new PA system.
In the early 2000s, they added a new section, and then an EST 3. From there, they gradually moved everything to the EST, and then took the bells and chimes out and added EST Genesis Horns. I mean, they might be chimes, but I doubt it. We’ll find out tomorrow when we ring them. They (Chubb Edwards) are also replacing the 270-GAOs to addressable. They just do programming, we do the entire annual and repairs to system.
Just a few years ago we replaced all the old Edwards 281Cs, there was well over 200 of them and took us a week or so.
So in Omaha, At least 3 of the hospitals in the CHI Health network have Siemens systems. The biggest system is at Bergan Mercy, and I think it is a MXL network system, since there are many additions that have been done to the hospital over the years. Lakeside Hospital’s main building uses a Siemens system, I do not know what kind of system it is, but it is a Voice Evac system. There are other buildings connected to the main hospital, but they use different systems, at least one of them uses a Notifier system, and another possibly uses a Simplex 4010. Midlands Hospital uses a Siemens system, and it is not voice evac. The NAs are Siemens UMMTs, and Wheelock ZNS. Those are the only ones that I know of that use Siemens in my area.