Here’s the low down, at the school I work at we recently upgraded to a 4100es panel and truealert es strobes. There are no ground faults or other troubles on the panel. We have one signal circuit that when the alarm goes off the strobes near the end either don’t flash or flash randomly as if they are not getting the proper power. All the strobes have 26-29 volts when tested. We installed a Nac repeater but that did nothing. When I force on individual stobes they work until I force on too many and bam same problem. It looks like i have 300Ma after the Nac repeater when i have those stobes forced on even though they aren’t flashing. Any ideas what could be going on?
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How many strobes are on the circuit? The total length of wiring and the wire gauge will make a difference too.
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I believe 38 total (on the entire circuit from panel), but not all of them are general evac(fire) some are other (alert) strobes that don’t go off during a fire alarm. Side note, the Alert strobes all flash when the alert button is pressed, but there are less of them. After the the Nac repeater there are about 15 general evac strobes, but as stated they still don’t function properly. Could it be a faulty device drawing too much current? I have tried breaking the cirucuit effectively disconnecting several of the strobes that were not blinking but leaving the first one that was having problems and it still did not flash properly even though it had 29vdc. Oh, and its 12ga wire
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38 strobes seem like an awful lot… If memory serves, each NAC can handle 3 amps each, which is greatly affected by the candella setting of each strobe. Just going from memory (which might be way off) generally you can have around 15-20 strobes at 35 candella, more at 15 cd, less at 75 cd and so on.
Anyway there are a number of things other than voltage drop that cold cause this. Do these strobes have a toggle switch under the cover? If these are syncronized NACs, then that toggle needs to be set to sync and not free run, which could throw things off. Also if this is a “smart sync” or Qalert circuit which has a non smart sync device on it, that could also throw things off. Even the way it’s programmed could make a difference. If these are coming off a NAC booster, that adds another layer of things that could happen…
Now, if these are truealert addressable strobes that’s a whole other ballpark.
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These are true alert es addressable strobes. Good news though, found the problem. Turns out it was a bad strobe, not sure how or why that affected others but it did. Once I popped that strobe off the others started flashing and at the correct cadence.
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Good catch!
The addressable appliances can be a double edged sword… They’re great at communicating their issue to the panel, but then most of those issues are things that wouldn’t happen if they weren’t addressable!