More and more places are requiring voice evac these days. There is a city in the Midwest that requires voice evac even for low occupancy convenience stores from what I have read.
That’s kinda what it’s looking like these days, just like how addressable systems have pretty much completely replaced conventional ones, especially with voice evac being used increasingly in other kinds of buildings besides just high-rises (which is what voice systems started out mainly being used & meant for).
Lol no. Why would you spend more money if code isn’t requiring it
Code may not require them in all kinds of buildings, but voice systems have several advantages to simple horn/strobe systems, including being able to alert occupants to more than just fire in the way of emergencies & the ability to announce a false alarm with the same system (as opposed to needing a separate PA system for example).
Maby in the US but not in Canada
1 Like
Yeah, considering that very few Canadian voice systems are actually voice systems (that is, they don’t have voice messages, only tones) for some reason.
I was inside a hospital that had System Sensor speaker/strobes. The speaker/strobes went off while I was there and played a slow whoop tone, but didn’t play any voice message. A voice message did play on the hospitals PA speakers however saying “code red. first floor.”
Yeah that’s usually standard with hospital systems to avoid spooking/scaring anybody (though they usually have a chime tone instead of something jarring like a whoop tone).
Applications for voice evac will increase for sure, but I doubt horns will be fully obsolete. I don’t see much use for a voice system in something like a convenience store or standalone restaurant, especially considering that most of these buildings rarely have full fledged fire alarm systems, usually just security systems
yes, those are advantages.
the math for the building owner typically does not include those advantages. cost is paramount
it is not to avoid spooking people. they do not play a message because no one is supposed to take any actions until instructions are provided via page.
Not sure how much of a say the building owner really has in the system but regardless more & more buildings are being fitted with voice systems (particularly buildings that didn’t typically have voice systems before), so something’s happening to get those kinds of systems in those buildings. Also having a single system for announcements instead of two is definitely cost-saving, something that I’m sure a lot of building owners & CEOs alike appreciate.
Last I was told it is to avoid scaring both the patients & the staff (the latter is especially important in the case of say during a surgery: wouldn’t want the surgeon flinching in response to a loud alarm sounding & accidentally doing something that leads to the death of the patient in the process).
Yes, they don’t install loud fire alarms in hospitals. They will typically be some unjarring tone like chimes. In some hospital systems the fire alarm will just chime once when it first goes off and then there will be no audible signal from the alarm, but only the strobes will flash.
I don’t think horn NA’s themselves will go obsolete. Even today, with how cheap manufacturing has become for notification appliances, in the grand scheme of things they are about the same price.
What I think we will start to see in the future is one unified solution that can function as either a horn, low-frequency, a chime, or a speaker, depending on either field-selectable switches or as an addressable device through the panel.
Of course, if your panel is addressable anyhow, you might as well go for the voice option. But I also think we’re going to see more low frequency devices being used as standard “non-voice” signals. Cheaper to manufacture one big solution that covers residential and non-residential (public mode), and that might even further condition building occupants to associate “low frequency three-pulse pattern” as the audible symbol for “fire”.
I dont think that voice evac is going to be required for everywhere because some systems just play a whoop sound on the speaker strobes.
That’s still a “voice” system even if there’s no message (unless it’s a multi-tone horn/strobe like the MT that has a whoop tone built-in, but those seem to be rare compared to multi-tone horn/strobes set on horn).
I was always told what @ernestthornhill said. They don’t want any action taken until the situation has been evaluated. They get many false alarms and don’t want an evac on each one so they wait until it is evaluated. My dad was in the hospital nearly 2 years ago and there were 3 plus alarms in the week he was there pointing on how an evac tone would cause lots of problems
Yeah, it’s pretty clear there’s a big enough gap in knowledge/willingness to learn there that I didn’t feel like arguing.
For context my knowledge comes from doing FA inspections and service at several large hospital campuses. I’ve been the someone responding to false alarms while on site more than once, as well as participating in drills and some knowledge exchanges with the hospital emergency coordinator.
Pretty sure that two-stage systems can pulse horns or other non-chime signals momentarily in lieu of sounding chimes, so not sure it’s got anything to do with that (though it would make sense for hospitals, particularly big ones, to have two-stage systems given how messy a full-scale evacuation would be).
What I said is just what I know: what else do you expect me to say other than what I know?
Hospitals (and nursing homes and anywhere else with nonambulatory patients) as well as large apartment buildings don’t evacuate.
There’s general evacuation, phased evacuation, and then there’s shelter in place.
That is why there are no evacuation messages.
The immediate evacuation plan (generally) is for the area of the emergency is to move to the next fire compartment. Nearly everything beyond that is fluid and is being directed through a chain of command from a emergency meeting room somewhere in the depths of the hospital. Hospitals do not evacuate patients from hospital unless that hospital is going down.
One of the initial steps after confirmation it is not a false alarm and that the fire is not immediately extinguished will be to command a general evacuation of all visitors and nonessential personnel (e.g. the gift shop staff), but nearly everyone else medical will stay put and continue their jobs, with special additional instructions incoming from command/mgmt, in addition to general prep in case they need to take any actions. They would delay starting nonemergency surgeries and make ongoing surgeries aware they may need to close up.
These places are small cities. It’s almost a bit like the jokes about the Pentagon having a plan for everything including zombies. Nothing happens in a hospital just because. There is always a plan, a contingency, or a plan on how to make a plan quickly.