I live on-campus at Wichita State University, in a dorm hall which may as well be an apartment building. The panel, pull stations, and heat/smoke detectors are all Notifier products, with the notification appliances being white System Sensor SpectrAlert Advances. But in the apartments themselves, they don’t use horn/strobes of any kind.
They use these. And I have NO idea what the model number is. They look like baseplates for the Notifier smokes with horns built into them. When the building goes into alarm, the horn is one from a SpectrAlert Advance.
What in the world is the model number, and why are these so rare?
That’s exactly what that is: a “sounder base” to be exact. A detector (smoke, heat, CO, etc.) plugs into it & the panel can activate the base’s sounder in an alarm condition (which is why they’re found pretty much exclusively on addressable systems).
That particular one could be a Notifier, Silent Knight, or System Sensor B200S-series sounder base (System Sensor is the original manufacturer as far as I know). Weird though that the horn sound would change depending on the situation: heck I believe most sounder bases can only do one sound depending on the model (for instance Simplex makes both “normal” & low-frequency sounder bases).
The reason why they’re so “rare” is because they’re usually only used in a few particular applications: ones where there’s a high chance of false alarms, such as in a hotel: if someone burns toasts in one of the rooms, only the detector in that room will sound, but if there’s an actual fire & there’s enough smoke to drift out of the room one of the standard non-sounder base detectors outside will be activated thus triggering the entire system & dumping the whole building.
Also used in situations where you have a multi criteria device (i.e. SK-FIRE-CO) and need to have the CO sound locally, while the smoke detection activates the NACs.
Have also used them in 2 count detection scenarios, where one single detector alarm will trip the local sounder and alert the panel(and the security desk, who are supposed to investigate), then a second alarm in that zone will result in the full evacuation alarm.
