Hello! I was thinking the other day… “Why does Honeywell have so many fire alarm brands?”
Well, in my own opinion, they shouldn’t. They should just merge all of their brands into two main Honeywell brand and have one universal, addressable protocol. For “legacy systems” that have a brand specific protocol (e.g. litespeed), all new Honeywell panels would be cross compatible with every protocol ever used by any of their brands.
So, here’s the lowdown of my concept:
Honeywell Conventional, Small Addressable, and Small Voice Evac Panels: Honeywell Celcyus Series
Basically what I did is repurposed and slightly revised Honeywell’s existing Farenhyt branding for the larger scale systems. For the lower scale systems I made it the opposite of Farenhyt, Celcyus.
Next for Honeywell Medium Addressable, Large Addressable, and Large Voice Evac Panels: Honeywell Farenhyt Series
For this series, Honeywell would create a new set of universal voice evacuation messages. I would imagine them being female ones similar to the stock Silent Knight messages.
So, that’s really it. I didn’t bother doing stand-alone voice evac amplifiers/panels or annunciators because I think you guys get the gist. Let me know what you guys think!
Considering Honeywell’s already tried putting themselves at the front by redesigning the logos of their existing brands to remove “By Honeywell” & have their logo be bigger than the brand itself, I’m not so sure this would be a good idea: if anything I’d rather see another company purchase all of Honeywell’s life safety brands & actually start to manage/take care of/treat them good, much like all of Edwards’ parent companies have done over the years (because in comparison to them Honeywell, Johnson Controls, & Eaton have allruined the brands they’ve acquired: Honeywell seemingly wasn’t always like this but first there were quality control issues with at least Silent Knight products & now they redesigned their brands’ logos to emphasis themselves more).
You seem to say that a lot, but rarely have the sources to back yourself up. Sure, QC may have diminished a bit, but saying the brands got ruined is quite the overstatement.
I think he means ruined as in discontinuing outdated products and making new LED ones, aka just being modern like any normal company would do if they wanted to stay above bankruptcy.
Uh, no, not at all: that I know is just good business practice (& I definitely think LED strobes are the future, & they are). What I mean by what I said are the decisions they’ve made when it comes to some things:
JCI indulging in extreme proprietaryness (& thus ruining Simplex’s name & reputation in the process)
Eaton all but getting rid of the Wheelock name in favor of their own & going with 2-wire over 4-wire, even though Gentex has demonstrated that it’s possible to have both in one device, which has its advantages (& even though Edwards is also guilty of this I’d say they’re still the best when it comes to “holding themselves up” as a good company so-to-speak)
Honeywell I’d say is the least egregious offender: as I said previously all they’ve done is gotten lazy when it comes to quality control & (like Eaton) ditched 4-wire in favor of 2-wire (though at least a good portion of the L-series devices they sell are still available in 4-wire I guess), & gotten egotistical by literally having their name be larger & come first in their brands’ newer logos, even though before the brand name came first & had “By Honeywell” underneath
Don’t get me started on Gent by Honeywell, their quality is meh.
For example, discontinuing the 34000 detectors in 2019 when they were still good enough to be made for longer with the newer Gent logo instead of the 1990s Gent logo
I honestly feel like they should stop producing the same panel under many names; Each panel should be its own and not be an MS4 with the Gamewell logo slapped on. I like this concept, but I feel like eliminating the other brands would not be the way to go. Instead I would transfer all the clones to one brand (ex. Fire lite) and let each brand specialize in its own area. A good example of this would be letting Silent Knight take over voice evac, Notifier over large scale solutions, and Gamewell-FCI over internet connected panels. That’s what I think at least.
Yeah, might as well: honestly not sure why they even introduced MS-series duplicates to begin with (unless it was so each brand could offer the same kinds of panels so the customer didn’t have to switch brands for just that to do so).
For me all it creates is confusion because usually with other industries the companies change quite a lot on the inside but keep the same exterior. Not the Honeywell brands they just slap their logo on it. If anyone just assumed that the MS-2 from Silent Knight somehow had expansion it would be pointless as they are all the same.
I just don’t understand why you’d have a bunch of different brands instead of just one. Like instead of telling someone, “oh yeah there’s a Notifier panel for this and a Silent Knight panel for that but you wouldn’t need those because there’s a FireLite panel that’s smaller”, you could just tell someone, “there’s a Honeywell panel for that”. Eliminating brands, although somewhat monopolistic, gets rid of some of the confusion.
True, but I feel like having specific brands catering to specific areas is a bit more simple. Instead of saying “Hey you could get an Honeywell Celsius for that!” but you specifically want something for a super small application such as as small coffee shop. Instead you can say “Get a Fire Lite they have a bunch of small panels!”
Honeywells quality has really fallen in the toilet since the discontinuation of the deltanet FS-90, That was their last good system. Honeywell used to make good fire protection products like the aforementioned deltanet or the S464A or the S473 electrically driven coded pull stations. Now honeywell makes junk products that don’t last more that 5 years, they’ve ruined the good companies they bought like gamewell or FCi
If you go by that logic of having many legacy protocols, I don’t think it is needed as all the protocols are either based of system sensor clip (198 devices) or system sensor advanced protocol (AP) (318 devices) they could use that and not use brand recognition.
