Here’s something I’ve been curious about for a while now… what’s the largest system (in terms of total square footage), that contains horns as opposed to speakers in your area? Also, is there a point where it could actually be considered unsafe to have horns as opposed to speakers?
Anyways, I’ve got two systems that I’m going to share. [b]
River’s Edge Convention Center | St. Cloud, MN | Approx. 150,000 Sq. Ft.
Wheelock NS, NH, ZNS, ZRS, and ZNH alarms. Notifier system.
[/b]
This system may not seem large compared to the system I’m about to share, but given it’s a convention center and there can potentially be thousands of people inside the building at any given time, I feel it was worth sharing. Now, onto the fun system…
CentraCare Health Plaza | St. Cloud, MN | Approx. 330,000 Sq. Ft
Simplex TrueAlert horn/strobes and strobes. I’m assuming the panel is a Simplex 4100.
I can’t imagine a building with over 300,000 square feet not having a voice-evacuation system.
OMC/BRP Plant | Waukegan, IL | 500,000 square foot facility.
Entire facility was protected by 5 Edwards 120V general signalling horns, connected to one 270-SPO pull station and run by a computer UPS as a “panel”.
Demolished last year, so problem solved. I considered the system so poor that I took it upon myself to remove it
Mall has 1.7 million square feet of retail space. Take out the stores that are on an evac system and add in the hallways and you’re still talking over 1.7M square feet. Main mall is on an EST system, stores are on various systems networked with the main mall. NAs in the main mall are Wheelock ASes in the old wing, Wheelock MT4s in the new wing, Exceders near Lord and Taylor and EST Genesises in other renovated areas. Most stores have an EST or Simplex system. Movie theater and Dave & Busters are on EVAC systems, but the entire mall minus the Genesis horns is on continuous.
St. Laurent Centre, Ottawa, ON. This 970,000 square foot mall has a two-stage EST3 system with Genesis horns.
There are two other slightly smaller malls (883,000 square feet and 734,000 square feet) in my area that also have non-voice evac systems. These two buildings, however, use bells for signalling.
I’m sure there’s plenty larger around here, but this is the one I’m most familiar with (because I work there) This is a news story from back when my closest HEB opened.
It’s 182,000 square feet and it has Exceder signals and Bosch/Sigcom pulls.
Not my area, but I once went into a high-rise (must’ve been around 30 floors tall) in Mexico City, and the fire alarm signals were System Sensor SpectrAlert Advance P2R-SP. I guess that might be because fire alarm codes are nonexistent in Mexico, or maybe because there are no Spanish versions of the voice evac messages, and an English-talking system would be ineffective since most people wouldn’t understand it.
Also, I haven’t verified this one in person, but I once saw a video of the Mall of Dubai (largest mall in the world) and spotted in the mall’s corridors what appeared to be System Sensor SpectrAlert Advance horn/strobes, red with standard “FIRE” lettering. They did look like horn strobes rather than speaker strobes, based on the size and shape. There were also System Sensor 2151-like smoke detectors in the ceiling.
voice evac messages can be custom made all day long. we did a system where it first announced the fire message in english, and then in arabic. we had to get a random receptionist at the facility that spoke arabic to make the messages for it us, but it was done with no problems.
we just hope she said the correct message instead of trolling us with something else, we had no way to double check!
I think the biggest building would be the OLG casino near downtown London. They have Edwards Genesis everywhere, and I’m assuming the panel is an EST 3 or similar. Other than that, the 2 major malls in my city have two stage bell systems, and all high rises have 2 stage voice evac by code.
I think aroun Austin, MN it’s the Hormel plant, which I believe has Advances.
Otherwise it’s probably our high school. Main building is almost 3 blocks long plus an annex. The main building is 4 floors (3 + basement which houses the cafeteria) There’s a tunner that connects the main building to the Annex (which also has a basement that has a small old gym, weight room, small auditorium and choir room) so us students don’t have to cross the street in the cold winter months.
System is a Simplex 4001, Alarms are -9838s on 9501 plates, but when I toured it back in 2009 for our 15 year class reunion there were a couple of TrueAlerts that replaced dead 9838s and Advances that were installed in areas of the school that weren’t finished when we graduated (they did a complete remodel starting in '93 and added a gym, which made the building almost 3 blocks long [was 2 blocks], with only the Annex retaining its original look.)
Here’s a photo album I took when we toured it.
Original system was some old Gamewell panel which had Standard 60A horns in a slow pulsed pattern.
I’d probably have to say Shaw Park in Winnipeg. It’s home to the Winnipeg Goldeyes, an American Association baseball team, and can seat up to 7,500. It’s been a few years since I last went to a game, but IIRC, the system was some sort of large Notifier system, including SpectrAlert Classic horns (no strobes!) and NFM-series pulls under Stopper IIs.
Maybe also Holiday Inn Airport West, which uses a large 2-stage Edwards 6500 Mk. II, with 10-inch bells for the NAs.
My local mall used to have the really old System Sensor MASS looking speaker strobes, but all of them were replaced with Edwards Genesis’s white horn strobes with “fire” lettering. Both ceiling and wall models. The wall models all have white trim plates with no lettering. The mall has super high Ceilings and the speakers apparently were never loud enough to standards so they replaced them all about 5 years ago. Although, one store still has system Sensor MASS sounder strobes, but that department store just closed. Outside there are several SpectrAlert Advance P2RK’s and a few integritys as well. Very interesting for a while building to be full of horn strobes. Aproxx square footage, 1.7 million
The largest would probably have to be my high school. It was opened in 1970, and still has most of its’ original fire alarm equipment intact. It’s a 548,000 square foot campus comprised of three big buildings linked via overpasses. Each building was built with a Simplex 4247 fire alarm system, with the alarms being 4040 horns that were loud enough to cause tinnitus (most of them were flush-mounted.) Ceiling-mount initiating devices mainly consisted of Simplex 4255-1 heat sensors (rebranded Chemtronics 501s) and a few 4265 heat sensors (Chemtronics 400-series), but strangely, the original pulls were Edwards 270-SPOs. During the 70s and 80s, some Edwards pulls that failed got replaced with Simplex 4251-20 single-action pulls, and in the 90s up to today they used newer Edwards/AIP/GE 270 pulls to replace old ones. Some time in the 90s, the main building had an FCI FC-72 panel installed to replace the Simplex 4247 there (pretty big one, with 24 zones!) Starting early this decade, they began installing Stopper II covers over the pulls.
There are plans to expand and renovate the existing high school campus (including a new science and technology wing), so they will probably get a new voice-evacuation fire alarm system as part of it.
I would say in my area is the Capital Health hospital in Pennington/Hopewell NJ. It’s around 900,000 sqft and has Siemens branded ZNS horn/strobes with the standard Siemens pull stations. It was built in 2010 so I would guess it’s a firefinder XLS system. Their Trenton campus has a Simplex 4100/4100u system with Truealert Speaker strobes. I’m confused why they went with horn/strobes however I believe they have a overhead paging system which can call out other emergencies like code red/blue .etc. I guess it’s just how the funding/bidding went.
I know this is kind of an old topic, but I really like it, and have a pretty big system with horns to mention.
The largest system with horns in my area (eastern Massachusetts) has got to be the IKEA in Stoughton - it’s around 415,575 square feet!
The system is a large Siemens system (possibly a MXL or FireFinder XLS) from 2005 with ceiling-mounted U-MMT horn/strobes, U-MCS strobes, (I THINK the expansion to the self-serve furniture area has Siemens-branded ZNS horn/strobes) single-action pull stations, and FirePrint smoke/heat detectors.
BTW, should I start an opposite of this topic? (something like Smallest System with Speakers in Your Area?)
Since the building was fully sprinklered and the waterflow switches were monitored by the security system, the fire marshal was satisfied.
However, the fire department would always get PO’ed during false alarm calls when they asked to see the fire panel and were told there was not one on site.
I actually ended up “borrowing” this system when the building was demolished. Extended borrowing.
