Wheelock ET-1081?

Fire Alarm General Discussion
1

In addition to the ET-1010/1070/1080/1090, Wheelock produced the ET-1011/1071/1081/1091 according to this CSFM listing. The ET-1011 and ET-1081 are also UL listed, and the ET-1081 is mentioned in a manual for the SM. However, there is very little documentation of these devices online.

I previously suspected that these were the slow whoop signals mentioned in the late 1980s catalog, since they are shown together with the speakers. However, I recently discovered this article, which lists models ET-1081-LS-VFR-HON, ET-1081-LSM-VFR-HON, and ET-1081-IS-VFR-HON as being replaced by ET80 models. I assume the -HON suffix refers to the fact that these are being rebranded by Honeywell, but other rebrands such as the ET-1080-LSM-24-VFR-RAD use the standard ET-1080 model number. Unfortunately, I could not find any information on Honeywell rebrands on older versions of Honeywell’s website.

I also saw that some pages on older versions of Wheelock’s website, such as this archived page and this archived page, mention the option for ET speakers to handle 100 volt audio. However, neither this feature nor the ET-1081 is mentioned on any datasheet I found on the Wayback Machine.

2

I found some eBay listings for Honeywell-branded ET-1080/1081 speakers.

Both of these look like newer ET-1080 speakers, and I couldn’t find any obvious difference on the back.

There is also this ET-1010/1011 speaker, which has all of the usual ET power taps but does not mention 25 volt operation.

3

I found a listing for an older ET-1080/1081 rebranded by Honeywell, which also only claims to support 70.7 V on the label.

Looking closer, the Honeywell-branded ET speakers from this era appear to have yellow capacitors at the bottom, while the ET speakers sold by Wheelock and Cerberus Pyrotronics have black capacitors:

There is probably a difference between the capacitance on the speaker line, and this capacitor may behave oddly with a 25 V input. It should be noted that newer Wheelock ET speakers with the new tap selection also use yellow capacitors (and the corresponding Honeywell speakers claim to support 25 V).so the newer ET-1080 and ET-1081 are likely identical with a new capacitor.

Zooming in on some of the images, the older Wheelock speakers appear to use 10 µF capacitors rated for 50 V, while the Honeywell speakers use 100 V capacitors with an unknown capacitance (but they appear to belong to this datasheet), and the newer Wheelock ET speakers use capacitors rated for 250 V and are still 10 µF according to the manual. It looks like the newer Honeywell ET-1081 still uses a 100 V capacitor, so the yellow capacitors in the standard ET speakers are a coincidence.

Also, here is an SC811C with the same yellow capacitor.