I would have taken pictures, but my iPhone’s memory was full!
It’s been a year since I went to the ice rink, and I went again today. Still all the same problems with the system, and I couldn’t get a good view of the panel.
That’s crazy. I’m surprised they haven’ gotten written up or something to come up to code with that system.
Well, those photos could be evidence enough for an inspection…
Stayed at a motel last summer. The building was moderately older ( Probably 60s-70s). The first thing I noticed was when we got to our floor, one of the bells (12") was missing its cover, and the bell striker thing was painted over. Also, the only other signal in that hall was a Wheelock non ADA strobe, which had a significant amount of paint on the side and a portion of the front also. Now, I went to the downstairs area the next morning, and the alarms were pretty shoddy there too. They had Wheelock 7002 h/s down there, and one of them was literally hanging by its wires, and another one was covered (on the sides) with that drywall spray stuff. The BG-6 down there was also Duct taped shut. Also, the panel wasn’t even on (let the main office know about that… It was on the next day :D), and it too had a lot of paint all over the sides. Now, the outdoor alarms were in TERRIBLE shape (They were bells that looked original to the building), and they were rusted out, and you could barely notice that at one time they were red (the color appeared rust/ a hint of pink). Overall, I think it was one of the shoddier systems I’ve seen. I have some pics of the alarms on my old phone, but I lost the phone…
Lambda, you’re going to have another field day with this:
Parts of image blurred for privacy reasons.
They installed the 4099-9006 higher than the Chevron, which is already above ADA height. Not to mention that conduit job with the wire hanging out! Oh, and don’t forget all the other violations there are.
1 Like
Wow. I recognize that clock/speaker unit there; it’s made by Dukane (though the clock is Simplex.) They used them at my high school (which also had Simplex clocks, but most of them were square.) Is that 10" Simplex bell one of the old fire alarm signals, or is it a school bell? (One of my elementary schools had that type of bell outside with protective covers over them, but they never worked.)
It’s possible they had to install the pull up high due to that fire extinguisher, and they didn’t have enough wire or conduit to re-route it a bit lower. Reminded me of at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Cambridge MA, where there was a 4099-9003 dual-action pull installed above the ADA-height, but that was probably because it was installed right where an old one was (the hotel apparently had an old 2001 or 2120 voice-evac system in the past, but was upgraded to a 4100-series system.)
Here’s a shoddy install job I’ve seen as well, which I’ve often shared here:
You have a Simplex 4051 horn mounted on two 4x4 backboxes that are mounted onto the 4050-80 light plate, with conduit passing through one backbox and going to the 4251-30 pull (it was vandalized a bit, as you can see.) I can tell that alarm was clearly NOT originally installed like that when the school was built in the 70s, but was probably done during a panel/duct detector upgrade in the 90s (they installed a bunch of new Simplex duct detectors in 1998; the panel setup until recently was a Simplex 4010 tied into the original 4208.)
Now last year, the Simplex system failed and had to be replaced. But what did they do with this setup?
Now it looks even worse! They simply removed the 4051 horn and put a SpectrAlert Advance in its place, leaving the two backboxes and 4050-80 intact! My understanding is that since this “upgrade” took place during the school year, they did not have enough time to disassemble that setup and have it installed properly (i.e. with a SpectrAlert Advance backbox on the adapter plate or something), so they had to do it this way. As for the other alarms, they removed both the 4051s and 4050-80s, and used SpectrAlert Advances on red trim plates (they went with some cheap-o Fire-Lite system.)
1 Like
The thing is that that is one of the only pulls within the 200’ (edit: I think) requirement for some areas. Couldn’t they have tapped into the box for the Chevron?
Nice slack. At least get a wire tie and coil that up a little. It is possible they were grandfathered in for the pull station height. Unless they are doing a total renovation, they may not have to bring up the system to today’s code. Hard to tell, those rules vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
I don’t think it was grandfathered in, the system had a total redo in the early 2000s, and that pull station is there because of me; in 2012-ish,I told the guy who was in charge of the system, and it was put in. The pull wasn’t even put on a Simplex box, and I think it was put there because there was already a hole there.
The bell is not for the bell system, but I don’t know about the fire alarm, as I haven’t had a fire drill whil in the room. There is a TrueAlert right next to the bell (out of frame), so my guess is no, and it was disconnected.
How come the Chevron is still installed?
I’ve covered this before - it’s wasn’t in the scope of work to remove it! Technically yes, it needs to be removed. And it’s usually the boiler rooms, mechanical room, or those out of the way locations where you will find orphaned devices.
The janitor actually showed me an old device in the boiler room. A break glass boiler shutoff.
Ahh, makes sense. Don’t forget Gyms and change rooms, I’ve always seen old devices from former system still installed on the walls. Which I find funny, since most of the time they are up there anyways installing the new devices right beside it, why not just remove it? Most of the time they just paint over the device so it blends into the wall :roll:
Yeah, they did that at my parents’ old middle school. When they renovated in 2008, they deactivated and disconnected the old fire alarm devices, leaving the old Faraday Type 2 horns from the 1952 Gamewell system on the wall, disconnected and painted over in white. They also disconnected and painted over the old IBM 6" school bells, too. But I recall the gym had the original alarm and bell not painted over, though they were still most likely disconnected. Most of the old Gamewell M Vitaguard pulls were removed and plated over, except in the cafeteria, where one stayed, but it was covered with garbage bag pieces. A new Notifier NFS-640 voice-evac system was installed with SpectrAlert speaker/strobes and SpectrAlert Advance remote strobes; the new speaker/strobes were often placed near the old horns in the hallways. But the Faraday horn in the gym was mounted up pretty close to the ceiling, so the new speaker/strobes were installed much lower (i.e. their usual wall height from the floor.)
Keep in mind too that quite often you’re keeping the existing system working in place while installing the new system. So removing the old devices while installing the new is out of the question.
Yeah, thats true, although I haven’t actually seen it that much. Ususally around here, for schools they just come in during the summer break & replace the panel and the NAs. Most times (or pretty much every time), they don’t even bother to install new conduit, just slap the new alarms were the old ones were, sometimes having to add another one in between. & Other times, they just have the odd alarm from the old system intact. There was one school in Hamilton that still had all of its old system NAs installed. I believe they were wheelock/notifier bells, couldn’t tell since they were all behind grilles. The new alarms were EST Genesis.
Going back to this photo:
I’m pretty sure it’s the only one within 200’ for some areas, and there is a Chevron that got removed, but not replaced by the exit to left of this room.
At my high school, a lot of the Genesis horns were slapped over what looked like 4040/4050 flush mount grilles. Know it was a Simplex system of some sort because, when I first got there, most of the pulls were T-bars and the panel/annunciator were Simplex… In a couple parts of the building, whatever was there was behind grates and Genesises were put on top of the grates. Many of them were moved down to ADA height with extras added for strobe coverage and remote strobes in restrooms and new SIGA-278s were installed at ADA height between my freshman and sophomore years.