Tyco,Massive in life saftey. Honeywell massive as well. What if Tyco bought Honeywell…Or Visa Verca… :roll:
If the former, we’d all be screwed.
If the latter, it would be awesome.
lol, you make it sound as if it could only happen in a fantasy world.
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Then we would have Simplex Spectralert advances and System Sensor Truealerts
What?!!
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Although the “new” Tyco is primarily in the fire/security/safety business, Honeywell’s main industry is not their fire protection arm. Additionally, Honeywell, as a company, is roughly twice as large than Tyco (when comparing revenue, employees, etc.). It wouldn’t be very likely at all to see Tyco try to purchase Honeywell. It would be slightly more realistic to consider Tyco buying just Honeywell’s fire protection business, or maybe even Honeywell purchasing Tyco, but who knows if a deal like that would make it past the FTC.
Also, Simplex and the Honeywell brands both conduct business in very different ways where Simplex offers installation, maintenance, and other “exclusive” support for their products, whereas Honeywell is more “open” with who can install their products and so forth.
I realize that this is just a “what if” thread, but I doubt that a deal like this would ever happen (although who knows haha).
I vaguely remember a fake press release that Destin put on the site a few years ago announcing a deal like this for April Fools day, although I couldn’t relocate it.
Simplex control panels
Simplex voice evac
Simplex SBG-12
Simplex systems with SpectrAlert Advances
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As U8oL0 mentioned, Honeywell’s core business is in other areas (like aerospace and transportation). If anything, I could see Tyco buying out just the fire/security/automation branch of Honeywell to get into the controls business.
If that happened, Honeywell’s energy/automation business would be re-branded Simplex and merged. The fire business would probably be carved out and sold to someone else or continue to be manufactured under the Honeywell name for awhile. Probably either the simplex or the notifier line would eventually be phased out in favor of the other, in which case I’d assume they’d keep Notifier. Simplex itself has always been kind of really far behind in fire panel development since they’ve always favored the sprinkler side.
We saw basically the same thing when UTC bought GE Fire&Security from GE. GE Security has all but been phased out in favor of the Lenel stuff (although those cassi panels were ready to go anyways), and Edwards is only still around because it targets a specific market segment UTC’s other fire lines don’t really address. I’m not an expert on UTC’s fire line though.
It’s never gonna happen. if Tyco were to buy Honeywell’s fire/security stuff, a lot of brand redundancy would probably be eliminated and I am going to bet that Simplex would be favored over Notifier. Why? – Simplex has been around longer and Tyco has owned them much longer. Simplex’s products have always (tried) to be more advanced and they are probably the brand that makes Tyco the most money because they’re so recognizable. Also for the record, Simplex was not much into sprinklers until they got merged with Grinnell / Autocall when Tyco bought Simplex.
Here’s my opinions on the current states of each major company:
Edwards / EST / UTCFS: Slowly dying. They are trying to come up with something new but in recent years I have noticed a lot of their products’ best selling points are also what cause them the worst problems. One example is their Mapping function, with the idea being that it can generate a tree map of all the devices in the system and their locations relative to each other. However, this fails frequently, giving random Map Fault troubles. While being one of the cheapest, the quality of their Chinese-manufactured products has declined significantly to the point where they end up with cheap and flimsy feeling products. I will say Edwards under General Signal, before GE bought them, was much more reliable.
Siemens (Cerberus Pyrotronics and Faraday): A decent competitor to everyone, they make nice products and are available just about anywhere there is a Siemens Building Technologies office. Unfortunately I can’t say much about their products since I have only encountered three in the field and got locked out of each panel due to a competitor changing ALL the codes… so I was unable to see how they worked and stuff.
Tyco, SimplexGrinnell, etc:
This is an interesting one. Simplex has always been perceived as a “luxury” brand due to the more advanced nature of their products. However, this “more advanced” mainly only extends to the number of bells and whistles vs the number of useful features. We all know with anything that when you add bells and whistles, you increase the chance of a catastrophic failure. I’ve had to hard-reboot several higher end Simplex systems. They’re still the most expensive brand on the system component level – who wants a fixed candela horn/strobe for $120 when you can buy a Wheelock multi-candela for $50?
Honeywell Fire & Security:
While they have the most brands, I believe that Honeywell’s group of 5 companies are making the most useful advances in the industry so far. Notifier and Gamewell-FCI are tied with the fastest addressable SLC in the industry (FlashScan and Velociti, respectively) and there are other technologies that they do which others do not. A lot of product sharing goes on, however, especially with Fire-Lite products ended up being rebranded as Notifier, Gamewell-FCI, and Silent Knight. It is as if Fire-Lite’s job is to fill in the gaps for the smaller, simpler system requirements so that the bigger brands can focus on larger, more advanced systems.
Mircom Group of Companies (Mircom, Secutron, Summit):
Kind of the quiet underdog brand, they develop some pretty nice panels but use everyone else’s peripherals. I have never worked on one in person so I cannot give an opinion on them at this time.
To a conglomerate it’s not about what’s been around longer, it’s about what makes more money. Fair enough simplex wasn’t into sprinklers until merging with Grinnell, but ever since it seems their fire alarm business has taken a back seat to the sprinkler business which they dominate. At least that’s what I’ve seen, they seem to operate independently even if they are in the same office. I’m not sure their fire alarm salesmen talk to their sprinkler system salesmen at all.
EST used to be a really nice panel but there’s been little development ever since GE bought them out, they have to be specifically set up for that device mapping stuff and it’s easier to just wire everything in series if you’re worried about it.
If there’s anything you want to know about Siemens, ask away. It suffers from the “luxury” brand label just as much as Simplex. I think mainly because it’s always been marketed towards larger more complex systems, and has done very little in the way of systems for small buildings. The SXL/PXL/whatever came out and was phased out in the 90s, ever since they’ve been riding the MXL/XLS lines which are both large, complex, expensive systems. The only conventional panel they still make is the System3 which is a super expensive but bullet proof system from the 70s.
Simplex has a very special things I really like, especially in the mass notification arena (The LED bars). The addressable NAC’s are overpriced and pointless though. Do you really need a notification appliance to talk back to the panel? “Hey guys, this is NAC1-1-1, still here… let me know if you need anything…”. A supervised NAC circuit accomplishes the same and is a lot more reliable. Does anyone actually install these things? Are there any other advantages? I’ve also heard a lot of complaints with networking certain things, but I think all FACP’s suffer from caveats in this area.
You can find the notifier stuff anywhere, hundreds of dealers, very competitively priced. Gamewell-FCI is more focus’d on smaller to midsize applications. Firelite is the cheap brand anyone can buy and install in any building, which is why you find them in buildings with few devices, like big box stores. Silent Knight is geared more towards dialers and sprinkler supervisory services, not full blown fire alarm systems.
I know nothing about Mircom, it doesn’t exist here.
This discussion is gold.
I’ll just leave this: The Honeywell Fire Systems has 60% of the “over the counter” business, 30% of the ESD business, and 75% of the devices/AVs business. Right now all 4 brands + System Sensor are firing on all cylinders and Honeywell loves the way we are owning the Domestic market. Its going to get better as UTC pulls their R&D and moves manufacturing to China. Simplex is their own worst enemy: Great products, crap installs and cant serve the customer. Siemens finally got their act together and should continue to grow. Mircom is about 5 years away from making big impact if they can get good distribution.
America is losing what it once had… :mad:
^If you’re thinking that way now, just wait until you get older. Your views on where this country is headed won’t get any more rosy.
…but I’ll leave it at that and not turn this into a political discussion. 
I’m tired of the bull crap. Also how everything is making the next generations dumb
Yeah, good idea Firefly. Let’s try to refrain from going off topic and turning this thread into some sort of political discussion.
NOTE: My last post was about alarms…
Cheap Chinese stuff is anbad idea for life safety. A i3 not activating because of crappy manufacturing could get people killed
Got it, my mistake.
And just because something is manufactured overseas doesn’t necessarily mean it’s quality goes down, you know.
Compare a wrech made in the US to one in China… Which one breakes first?
Usually the Chinese one.
However, in the security camera world, a brand called “Hikvision” is a Chinese company who makes their equipment in China as well and the quality of their products is phenomenal. Even better than some of the more expensive, better known brands.
Compare a car made in the US to one in Japan or Korea… Which one breaks first?
Like Andrew said, quality of a product depends a lot more on how it is made rather than where it is made. Lots of crappy stuff gets manufactured in the US.
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