Today's Job

Sprinkler Monitor at a town center. Panel is a Notifier NFX-50, Potter Electronics. Dry Extinguisher. Not pictured was an NG-12LX, an FSP-951, and a System Sensor P2RK One FDM-100 for the tampers and each water flow is an FMM-100. I dropped my label maker off a ladder last week, so yeah I’m a guilty sharpie technician now. Shame on me










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Failing to read manuals is a chronic problem in pretty much every industry.

Maybe the manufacturers could make the operations manual colorful and easy to read (e.g. many illustrations clearly showing the do’s and don’ts), instead of just a long wall of text?

Or maybe the manufacturers could mark the wiring terminals with numbers, and put the meanings in the operations manual (making it impossible to install without actually reading)? Siemens already does this, as shown in the operations manual for their standard detector base.

I agree, sometimes the graphics they provide can be vague and some manuals are nearly impossible to read without Ctrl/CMD+F, or the find features. Some manuals are great and they even have a troubleshooting section that could tell you precisely which diode or which card broke on the board, but for the most part you usually get paragraphs and maybe one or two diagrams. Sometimes all you get is just one diagram and you’re supposed to make sense of it, lol. I don’t think some of these companies realize the intelligence level of the average fire alarm technician that has been googling all their answers cuz they’re mentors never really taught them anything :wink:

Even for fire alarm devices, I try to keep a copy of every product manual for every product I’ve ever put in, cuz one day I might have to do a service call and this product that I put in 20 years ago is now obsolete and I haven’t put one in in over 10 years and I forgot what all the dip switches do.

Also don’t forget the part where we all say "it’s a fire alarm device I don’t see what’s so complicated about it. Red wire here black wire there done."and that’s when I have to explain to my helper why the red wire goes on the black wire on these older ADT pull stations and the black wire goes on the red wire. I’m sorry that they didn’t put symbols on this pull station like they do the system sensor ones. And then I have to explain to my helper again that just cuz you wire old pull stations like that doesn’t mean that’s how you wire a Wheelock strobe. Red to red black to Black.

This other picture’s not an alarm, but rather the rooftop to another hospital we’re building right now. We were walking the job figuring out the situation with the BDA system .

What a view from up there!

One of these is in a hospital and it’s a classic :slight_smile: !

This is another Potter pressure switch another job that happens to be right across the street.

Nice, Spectralert Classics certainly live up to their name.

Huh, never seen a pressure switch mounted to an outdoor sprinkler switch.

Me neither, but this what the plans called for and that’s what the sprinkler fitters coordinated with us way long time ago. Yeah, we even have them at the company’s office, but they’re yellowing atm.

Hope it’s at least rated for outdoor use.

Yellowing huh? Must be white Classics then (unless you mean the clear lens of the red version).

No, they’re inside the office. Yes they are the white ones. The Honeywell Vista keypads at the office are yellowing too so something tells me the systems were put in at least 10 years ago if not longer

No, I mean the pressure switch.

Yeah, probably.

Small update. They wanted the smoke moved into the enclosure and they wanted the air conditioner monitored. It’s hopefully gonna pass the fire marshal tomorrow.


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So I was tasked with moving a speaker strobe and adding two strobes at a church. Shortly after that, I manned a fire marshal at another library. Why they have to have two Vista 128s to monitor the old Fire-Lite/ADT panel… I hate take overs like that. Also another spectralert classic in the same library.




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Not my proudest work. Cross-trip setup, joining two FACPs in separate buildings. Pulled underground for a remote annuciator and SLC. Monitor modules and annuciator were placed in the same building for convenience, so customer can save a 10min just to silence the panel.






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