What are the cheapest panels you can get that aren’t Chinese or generic? If so please let me know! I am trying to get the cheapest FACP online for my first Fire Alarm Control Panel.
A Fire Lite MS-2 or MS-4 used to be found pretty cheap. These days you kind of just need to lurk around eBay until something pops up.
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My MS-2 is going up for sale shortly. Keep your eyes open.
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I thought the sfp-2402 or sfp-2404 was cheap
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Those are Notifier-rebranded versions of the MS-2 and MS-4 respectively.
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As others have said, the MS2/4 are often the cheapest, though they are going up in price. Being cheap, they are known to have reliability issues.
You can look up “Fire-Lite 411UDAC”. This is meant to be a dialer, but you can use it as a standalone fire alarm panel too. These often run under $100. Just note these do use an expensive programming tool to make any changes to the configuration.
Recently, some EST QuickStarts have popped up for around $100 + shipping, but these are known to have some issues too.
There’s combination fire alarm/burglary panels for cheap, but I don’t know much about them.
Depending on your budget, there can be a few or a lot of options. If you’re looking for anything under $200, then you’ll either have something small and cheap or a larger panel that’s broken.
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Oh do they have reliability problems to?
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All the ms-4s ive seen in pubblic dont work
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Yeah they seem to have issues, particularly the newer ones. That’s why I’d usually go for something a bit more like an MS-5UD, or something older like the MS-4424.
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For what it’s worth, the conventional panel discontinuation notices from Silent Knight, Notifier, and Gamewell FCI all say to replace the 2-zone panels with the MS-2-L8. I do not know how the MS-2-L8 differs from the MS-2, and I could not find any datasheet, but it might be more reliable.
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