What are some things that the General Public misconceives about Fire Alarms that drive you crazy?

Fire Alarm General Discussion
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[quote="Simplex 2903-9101" post_id=82382 time=1542205529 user_id=3578]

To be fair, the carpets make them seem a lot quieter, but come on, you should still know what that noise means.

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Well, if someone has grown up hearing only electronic horns in Temporal 3, and the mechanical horn is relatively quiet (due to the environment, distance from the horn, the horn itself, etc), I could see that confusion happening. Even more so if the system has no strobes, and the person has only seen fire alarm systems with strobes.

I once found a spy camera for sale online which was molded exactly like a SpectrAlert Advance, the only difference being that it had the camera lens on the center of the strobe reflector, instead of the xenon flash tube.

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Those fake A/V spy devices are available at various places. Here is one.

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Another common one: Thinking that a remote strobe makes noise.

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THAT one is the reason why I wouldn’t go to the bathroom in elementary school.

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Not sure if anyone’s said this already but Stoppers. There are endless videos of people lifting the Stoppers with sirens thinking they set off the fire alarm but this also poses a safety hazard if the alarm actually needs to be pulled and people just don’t know better

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You guys remember the age-old lie that pulling the fire alarm sprays ink on your hands to tell who pulled it or not to scare grade-school students?

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We had a different variation: they put ink on the back of the pull station to KNOW who pulls it since it turns blue after a while.

I believed based on looking into a Simplex 2099-9795 one time and seeing stuff in the back, which I now realize was just dust (Apparently that pull station hadn’t been pulled) and one time looking at one and SWEARING it was dripping ink but I’m not sure what it was.

Stopped believing it in the 5th grade when a self-contained student pulled the alarm and we happened to go by the activated station as our exit route. That was also when I realized that the T-Bars pull OUT instead of DOWN.

This leads me to another story. That year was when the OT and PT teachers were in a multipurpose room (which held two enrichment teachers, the inclusion teacher for grades 5 and 6, the OT and PT teacher and the band teacher) with the OT teacher who I saw saying that something weird happened in there. The majority of my elementary school had Simplex 4903-9219 horn/strobes but that room had a Wheelock AS-2415 horn/strobe that was set to code-3 while everything else was set to continuous. She thought that the student tried to push the pull station back in which was why it stopped and started.

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[quote="Simplex 4051" post_id=82414 time=1542433267 user_id=18]

We had a different variation: they put ink on the back of the pull station to KNOW who pulls it since it turns blue after a while.

[/quote]

Said product does exists, and it might have indeed been used in your school: http://www.american-time.com/products-by-family/specialty-products/fire-alarm-accessories/tamper-dye-for-fire-alarms

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[quote="Retired STR-SG" post_id=82400 time=1542311577 user_id=3047]

Those fake A/V spy devices are available at various places. Here is one.

[/quote]

Aren’t those like illegal?

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Then maybe the pull stations did have tamper dye on them but I remember the one outside the kindergarten classrooms was the only one that looked like it was leaking and that was the only one I remember. Of course, by the time I started to take more notice of fire alarms, we had a new principal so maybe he didn’t use the dye and there was dye on other pull stations but I didn’t see it.

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“oh my god the pull station smell smoke so the fire sprinnkles spray water”. In the first spongebob movie the all of the fire sprinklers in shell city activated because smoke touched one of them. People overestimate the sensitivity and false alarm proneness of fire alarm systems.

Spongebob and Patrick would have burned to death if they existed in real life.

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Yeah but that was a children’s movie and I doubt having the protagonists, despite together have a combined IQ someone in the low 200s burn alive wouldn’t be good for movie sales.

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[quote="Simplex 4051" post_id=82424 time=1542500859 user_id=18]

Then maybe the pull stations did have tamper dye on them but I remember the one outside the kindergarten classrooms was the only one that looked like it was leaking and that was the only one I remember. Of course, by the time I started to take more notice of fire alarms, we had a new principal so maybe he didn’t use the dye and there was dye on other pull stations but I didn’t see it.

[/quote]

An apartment company we work for has them all over their pull stations, and the dye is very hard to get off.

Also I’ve always hated when people will point to the heat detector and tell me it’s beeping. I get many service calls for this, the one time this lady was very persistent the beeping noise was coming from her heat detector. I heard the beeps and found out it was her water heater :roll:

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OHHHHHHHH THIS IS A GOOD ONE I SINCERELY APOLOGIZE FOR NOT TELLING THIS STORY EARLIER. So when we were practicing our emergency drills on the third day of school, our history teacher pointed to the new Siemens ALERT speaker/strobe on the ceiling, but she completely confused those with the lockdown strobes found outside, and in areas IE the gyms/commons because they are both white. Even though the alarm clearly had a clear strobe (ha), she said that it flashed BLUE like those other ones. Even some other students were confused with that assumption.

It never went off the whole time lol

Thankfully later in the year where the school decided to get us to understand where to go for a lockdown, or print media teacher (shes in a lot of technology based “jobs” so she understands this stuff) said that the blue strobes are for when the school goes on lockdown so any buses that come can see them and as such will take the students elsewhere for safety. The speaker/strobes would let the occupants know there is a lockdown and would list off several places to go (pre-recorded by school I’m guessing) and it would say to not go outdoors.

NOTE: I did not actually hear the message thats just what the teacher told us:

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Well I’m sure that eventually you will get to hear the message.

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I agree that the assumption of strobes making noise is annoying. We were at my church and I had to explain to my dad that a Gentex Commander 3 strobe did not make sound by comparing it to a horn-strobe, which obviously makes a sound because it has slits.

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I am also guilty of that because in elementary school I REFUSED to go to the bathroom because I thought the 4903 strobes were alarms. Thinking back on it, I realize how dumb that was. :lol:

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People thinking that call point upon activation spill ink on your fingers. This drives me bananas every time I see hear someone affirming it mordicus (=affirm as it was true)

But yeah I also believed it, oh well.

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I didn’t even know that there was a variation of that rumor that was used with call points instead of just pulls. You learn something new everyday.

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[quote="Simplex 4051" post_id=83256 time=1551674141 user_id=18]

I am also guilty of that because in elementary school I REFUSED to go to the bathroom because I thought the 4903 strobes were alarms. Thinking back on it, I realize how dumb that was. :lol:

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My elementary school had no remote strobes. They had Wheelock 7004ts. The bathrooms either had a Wheelock 7004t. or no NA inside.

I used to think the NAs detected smoke and that the actual smoke detectors were not connected to the fire alarm system, but were like household ones detecting smoke and sounding an alarm from the detector itself.