The school that I went to for elementary school got a fire alarm upgrade it seems. Where there were 4 9838s in the cafeteria, there are now SIX SpectrAlert Advances. The Simplex pulls were replaced with Notifier pulls. The 9838s are still up but I think they are disconnected. I’m sure the other devices in the building probably also are disconnected or removed. I’m a bit sad about this as I liked the alarms but I guess they decided it was time to upgrade.
I’m not sure what this means for my junior high school, but i’m pretty sure the alarms are still up.
Hmm. Seems a lot of schools go with Notifier nowadays. About five of them in my city have Notifier voice-evac now. (One still has TrueAlert speaker/strobes left over from the Simplex system, one has older SpectrAlert speaker/strobes, the others have SpectrAlert Advance speaker/strobes.) A couple of them replaced Simplex systems (the other had 2903+2901-9806 horn/strobes), another two replaced old Gamewell FlexAlarm systems, and another replaced a really old Edwards system that was relayed into the intercom.
As for using SpectrAlert Advances, they seem to be the go-to alarm signal nowadays for new installations. They even put them in at the Walmart I work at! (I heard them today: in a few areas it sounded pretty obnoxious, but in the break room it wasn’t that bad even if they had a horn/strobe in it!)
Notifier is a cheap and simple system with what seems like an unlimited number of dealers, the school market is 100% run on cheapest price and usually all of the services are bundled together to make the price as low as possible (ie: fire alarm, intercom, CCTV, etc. will all be sold as one package). This rules out integrator’s like Simplex. They’ll make it in every now and then, but it’s simply not their target market, there’s no money so they aren’t interested.
For a 2-3 man shop with no overhead, it’s a great place to be.
I’ve been seeing Notifier come up a little frequently here also. My college had gotten a new Notifier system when it replaced it’s old Edwards system. I also learned a high school in my city replaced their Simplex system with a Notifier Panel. The Simplex bells, remote strobes and pulls are still installed, but I saw that the Simplex 4602 panel was replaced with a Notifier annunciator panel.
I noticed that they didn’t put the cages over SpectrAlert Advances in the cafeteria like they did with the 9838s. So is it wrong of me to hope a stray dodgeball destroys one? :twisted:
I like the flexibility and wide use of the spectraadvance line. You can meet pretty much any requirement, wall, ceiling, weatherproof, and high candela applications all with 2 backboxes. i’m not aware of many other weatherproof ceiling mount appliances. Low current draw too.
Using wheelocks or something else some of those scenarios get messy.
I don’t hate them, its just that I’m sad that the old system was replaced with Notifier. I’m sure there was a good reason and I’m not gonna pretend to know why, since I graduated that school in 2004. Its over a decade now, but I can’t see how the horns in that system (9219S, 4904-9101+2903-9838s, SHGs and a vertical Wheelock AS) would break down. I mean I know it can happen as the Simplex horns were all electromechanical. I guess that they just decided to overhaul the system.
Also, I don’t know if they were speakers or horns, as I wasn’t in there that long. I went in there to vote on Election Day, then left to go to classes, at a college which also replaced their Simplex systems (4051+4050-80s, no FIRE lettering) with Notifier (Speaker/strobe SpectrAlert Advances, some are wall mount, some are just speakers and outside the main entrance is a strobe).
In a few of the school upgrades I’ve done, the existing systems, some even built in the early 90s, where no where near current codes. A lot had one device in a 150’ corridor instead of the required 3, nothing in restrooms, rooms had been redesignated and didn’t have proper coverage for their new designations, etc. In a lot of cases the devices predated syncing as well. Even if they did sync, mixing brands would never work.
Most times it’s just easier to go all new instead of trying to reuse old devices even though the likely hood of them ever failing is low. It’s a very small % of the total project budget to replace the old A/V’s anyways, and you end up with known current draws for engineering, sync’d appliances, listed with the new system, and all under a new warranty.
It just makes no sense to reuse the old ones.
The two things that drive a system upgrade are usually a renovation requiring the entire system be brought up to code, or if the FACP starts to fail. It’s never because of the condition of the notification appliances.
I notice that here as well. We have a elementary school that was completely torn down and rebuilt (wasn’t able to grab any alarms though. All mostly newer Edwards alarms) and they went with a Notifier Voice-Evac Panel, which is a change, since most schools in the district use Edwards.
I would have thought that they would have went with TrueAlerts since it was a Simplex system (with 2 SHGs and a vertical AS in the kindergarten gym) but if Notifier really is the cheapest option, then the school would have went with them. The fire alarm system wasn’t the only thing that was replaced. There was a lot of structural work done as well as maintenance to the boiler, so they might have needed the cheaper option.
Rhode Island and Massachusetts seems to LOVE using Notifier most of the time. My cousins salon had a Federal Signal 450 with an I-Strobe, but it was replaced with a Wheelock Exceeder that was put RIGHT NEXT to the station she cuts my hair at. :shock: That wasn’t a full system upgrade to my knowledge.
So I went back to my elementary school again to vote again and the upgrade seems to be complete. In the cafeteria, the T-Bars have been replaced by BG-12LX pull stations and the 9838s have finally been removed. Looks like the destruction of my childhood is complete.
Yep, I felt the same way when the first fire alarms I ever heard in my life were killed off; the Simplex 4051+4050-80 horn/lights at the school I went to for kindergarten (now a K-8 school.) Early last year, the old Simplex system was failing (Simplex 4208 panel tied into a newer 4010), so they had to replace it. They went with some kind of Fire-Lite system, and replaced the old alarms with boring SpectrAlert Advance horn/strobes on adapter plates.
I’m betting my second elementary school will be getting an upgrade/replace job real soon, too (an old Gamewell FlexAlarm system with Federal Vibratone 450 horns.)
Of course, the college I went to for undergrad slapped TrueAlerts on top of where flush-mount 4050s were in a couple buildings with no other apparent changes to the panel or for code. The TrueAlerts were only placed where 4050s existed.
The latter reason is why they upgraded the fire alarm system at the elementary school I mentioned. The old Simplex 4208 was failing, and one signal circuit wasn’t working very well, and it would randomly go into alarm (it even did so at four in the morning on one occasion, I was told!)
At my college, they’ve done upgrades usually due to either renovations, or because certain devices are no longer up to code. The college tries to keep everything as modern as possible, including the fire alarm systems. I recall a few years back, the new service company was pretty much attempting to remove all non-Honeywell systems on the campus (they got rid of quite a few Faraday systems and a Simplex 4020 system in the process.) The Liberal Arts/Humanities buildings still have a Faraday MPC-7000 addressable system, but IDK how much longer it will be there, as I’ve heard rumors it will soon be replaced (probably with another Notifier system, which is what’s mostly common on the campus right now.)
I remember one upgrade they did made a lot of sense; the Business, Science and Technology buildings were originally built in 1972 with Standard systems (with old Standard horn/lights, metal heat sensors and 200177 round pulls) with two zones each; one for the main floor where all the halls, classrooms and offices are, and one for the basement where nobody really goes (except maintenance workers.) During the 90s, each building got a new panel installed right on the main floor (Science and Technology each got a 2-zone Faraday FireWatch II, and Business got a Fire-Lite MS-4424B), and then in 2007-2008, many of the old devices were replaced so they could be ADA-compliant (they put in Space Age VA4 horn/strobes and Faraday F1G Chevron pulls on Space Age ADA-extension adapters, and also replaced most of the old heat sensors with System Sensor i3s). Then in 2011, when Johnson Controls was putting new RTU units, the three buildings got full fire alarm upgrades, to completely addressable Notifier systems rebranded by Johnson Controls (Science and Technology share an NFS2-640, Business has an NFS-320). The conventional Faraday pulls got replaced with NBG-12LXs, and the existing detectors got replaced with addressable JC/Notifier smoke and heat detectors. This really improved fire detection a lot. Then in 2012, the Space Age alarms were replaced with Wheelock Exceders, but that may be because it’s kind of tricky to sync Space Age VA4s easily on a more modern system like that.
My elementary school had their alarms replaced because they were doing upgrades to the boiler room and part of the ceiling in the library collapsed so they had to fix that so they probably decided to get everything brought up to code.
My childhood alarm systems were pretty boring. TrueAlerts and T-Bars, with the Wheelock MT for outdoors. Now, my CTE school however, is quite interesting…
I’ve been through the destruction of two systems, though I never heard the 4051s at CCRI’s campus in Lincoln ever go off and they were replaced one year after I started there. I’m pretty sure they were on some sort of march time since the alarms are just like the ones at wiley’s K school.
However, that would mean it would just be replaced, only to come back and haunt you with its presence. :twisted: