What got you into the fire alarm hobby

Fire Alarm General Discussion
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Ok. Have you moved any topics yet??

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trust me Iv tried and he never got back to me

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I think a good thing for this site would be if we could like buy and sell alarms too

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I think that I was the one who got my friend @kalebalarms into the hobby

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As for me. The earliest memory of alarms was back in like elementary school since I liked the Spectralert Classics. I do remember not liking the Wheelock devices because of the font and any alarms that had that thin font I didnā€™t like. As for maybe earliest memory was like in Kindergarten and First Grade, I remember that the alarms went off for a drill but thatā€™s it. This was back in 2012 to 2014. As for earliest memory, Iā€™m not sure if this is a false memory but I do remember seeing a 4903-9221 at my dadā€™s school that I started to remember when I found out that school had them. I started to really get interested in 2015 when I moved schools, I remember hating the alarms at my new school (System Sensor P2Ws and SWs) and I missed the Spectralert Classics back at my old school. I didnā€™t like these because there white (now I love seeing white devices, especially the older ones). I do remember when the System Sensor L-Series came out (I was in 4th grade when that happened) and wishing that my school get some (that happened). I joined the community in 2020 after I decided to make a YouTube account. Afterwards I got my first alarm in February of 2021 being a Edwards 270A-SPO then in March receiving my 4903-9176. I got my first panel in May of 2021 which is a 4006 and I got that at a very low price of $34 off of eBay with $70 shipping. Ended up getting a AFP-400 in 2022 and couldnā€™t get it to work until 2023 because of a CPU power cable in needed which I found another enthusiast near me to do it. Now Iā€™m standing with 4 panels and a big collection with some rare stuff like the White EH, CWS1T and Ceiling UMMT.

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Yes, and then we may have lawsuits for violation of COPPA and, of course, little kids who will probably be annoying and profane the forums.

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Actually, @SER_Safety is already on this forum but has only posted once, years ago.

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Wow, I never realized that!

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For me it was back around 2016 at my old elementary school. The signals there are Wheelock NS-24MCWā€™s. I got fascinated with the strobes flashing immediately after the output sound of the horn. The horn output was loud as hell. Over in my area there arenā€™t any horn strobes or strobe onlys in the classrooms, only in the hallways. Fast forward to 2019 in my middle school, we had bells or as I like to call them ā€œFire Bellsā€. It was a weird coding system. Going into 2022, I wanted to find out the models of the alarms in the middle school and sure enough, they were Simplex 2901-9833 ā€œfire bellsā€. I have been watching S.E.R Safety and 4050-80 and since 2022, I have been hooked ever since.

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Part of it was the fear that I used to have, the other part of it was just my obsessions with random systems.

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I would say that the thing that got me most into the fire alarm hobby is my local fire department. In elementary school, they would visit us every year and talk about fire safety. We also would sometimes take field trips to the fire station where we would learn even more about fire safety and how they do things. This was cool, but the thing that got me the most interested was the RV. They had an RV that they would take to all of the schools to demonstrate fire safety with. In there, the demonstrated things like electrical hazards, escape plans, etc. They also had a fog machine to demonstrate the evacuation out the window.

Among all of this, was the fire alarm. They had a simple 24v power supply hooked up to a Firelite BG-8, a System Sensor Spectralert Classic horn strobe, and a MASS series remote strobe in the bedroom which we would escape out of. They actually asked the students to volunteer to pull the pull station to teach them how they work and what to do in a fire. Of course, everyone wanted to do it. I never actually got to do it but it still sparked my interest in that previously terrifying but interesting technology.

This was also a confusing sound to me because, before this, I had only experienced fire alarms on continuous. For some reason, it seems like my area didnā€™t adopt code 3 at all. They donā€™t really care about your fire alarm coding. This is also part of what made me first realize that there is more to fire alarms than what first meets the eye.

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