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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I too didn’t know such a rumor existed, but it might be true in my area, but not with FA call points, I have no idea where I heard about that tho…
Hoo boy, you hear a lot of misconceptions over the years:
The classics,
[list]
Back when my dad was a school administrator, he had a discipline case where a student went into the bathroom presumably to smoke weed or something. There was video evidence of him walking into the bathroom, then running out of it soaking in dirty sprinkler water. Clearly, a sprinkler head had gone off over him, and those things don’t “just go off”.
Well, in the hearing, the school district couldn’t put two and two together, and thus let him off scot-free because they couldn’t connect the sprinkler system going off with the dirty water the kid was soaked with. Apparently, there wasn’t enough “evidence”.
It is really sad when people can’t put together two things that are so obvious and let the perpetrator who obviously did break a law in it go free. :roll:
Fire alarms going off trip the sprinklers, and when one sprinkler is tripped, they all activate.
Remote strobes, system smoke and heat detectors, or even pull stations make noise.
The first two are true in some cases, but not in most buildings.
Some others I’ve seen:
The horn on a pull station cover is the fire alarm
The notification appliances are the detectors & will set the system off if smoke drifts near one
If you pull the fire alarm it will squirt ink on your hands (if there is tamper dye on the pull station, it will leave ink on you, but not squirt on your hands. it’s rare to see tamper dye though)
My mom has believed that when smoke detectors sense the smoke, they’ll make noise at first, and then shoot out streams of water through the slits to extinguish the flames.
Sprinklers are set off by smoke. If there is smoke near them they will activate.
You’re able to call 911 through the small red firefighting telephones in buildings.
(Actually, they’re just hooked up to the FACP’s phone panel, working like intercoms. You can’t get access to public telephone network or 911 through them.)
Horn strobes emits powerful red rotating light beams, just like a police car beacon.
They do produce strong light, but most of’em just flash intermittently. Xenon strobes generate extremely short light pulses, while LED strobes might run on a larger duty cycle.
If you touch a alarm in a building, it will go off
Been a victim of this misconception. I tried the “duck quack” thing on a -9838, and I had to tell someone that you have to pull it to set it off.
i used to think wheelock 7002T’s were 7002’s and 7002’s were 7002T’s, and i also thought heat detectors were just cameras 
The Wheelock horn thing is an easy mistake to make
Here are a few misconceptions I had as a kid:
The first misconception is all fire alarms were battery powered, and had speakers.
The Edwards 270 & 271 shot a gas out of the reset hole.
Another common misconception is all smoke detectors are radioactive; that is true in some respects, but is not always the case. Some units have a photocell.
Another misconception that is not FA-related is that parrots will immediately imitate a person after they are done talking!
Went ahead and merged this with the existing topic so that newer people can read what was already posted.
Here’s another one - sprinkler water isn’t this clean, pure, drinkable stuff. It’s nasty, black, oily sludge!
Not sure which one is the misconception. Please clarify.
It’s a misconception that sprinkler water is clear. It almost never is - almost always this really nasty black gunk.
Muddy rusty smelly spoilt metal gravy
Probably because it’s sitting in the pipe forever.