Did the schools you went to have Stoppers over the pull stations?

One of the elementary schools I went to originally didn’t have any stoppers over the pull stations. Then they installed them over the pull stations in the cafeteria after some kid pulled the fire alarm in the cafeteria. My middle school and high school had Stoppers over the pull stations except for the pull stations in portables.

My school has only been built for about 4 years and they originally didn’t have stoppers over the seimens pulls, but since they are placed on columns that protrude from the wall a few inches, they stick out. The hallways are narrow so they started getting pulled from people’s backpacks or people pressing against them. So they put stoppers on the ones in the narrow hallways. They were the newer low profile stoppers. Not your typical ones.

Yes, school-wide. We even had them in the two buildings known as the annexes, which were basically huge modular buildings with 10 classrooms in each. One of the annex ones actually wasn’t screwed in properly, and kept coming loose on a daily basis, right outside my Spanish classroom, so it was “fixed” with some tape.

Yes, but not originally. After I arrived here after I moved, they had no stoppers. But, I assume a pull station was damaged in the main gym (all 4251-20’s except for a BG-12, which probably replaced the one that got damaged) probably from a ball hitting it or something. They used to just put a bunch of mats in front of it when we played dodgeball during gym class, but I guess they decided they needed more protection, so they installed Stoppers on all the pulls in the gym (flush mounted). They didn’t have horns because they weren’t for that kind of protection (preventing false alarms) because my school has surveillance cameras everywhere so we’ve never had any false alarms in the time I’ve went there. So far the stoppers seem to be doing a good job of protecting the pulls from being damaged due to being hit by flying objects.

They did the same with the pulls in the auxiliary gym as well, for the same reason. The 4251-20’s in there were replaced probably several years ago for some reason with Honeywell 5140MPS-2 Allen reset rebranded SigCom SG-32’s. One is flush mounted but the other two are on backboxes. So there’s one flush mounted stopper (without horns) and the two others are mounted with spacers due to those two being on their original backboxes.

Yes, all the schools I have gone to have had stoppers. I know that my elementary school only had them in public areas, the kitchen and fire riser room didn’t have them.

By “newer low profile stoppers” do you mean STI Universal Stoppers or SigCom Sentry covers?

Sentry covers. The “flat-faced” ones. I’ve never seen them before until late last year. I thought they looked pretty cheap because the “red” color on it is more maroon than anything. They also feel pretty flimsy.

My old school had the Sigcom Sentry covers in the gym only. Nowhere else. (The NA’s in the gym also had wire cages on them.)
My current school is a mix. Some pull stations have Stoppers, some don’t.

*See the “What alarm do you have at work/school” topic for details on these systems.

Nope, False alarms in schools around here are very uncommon. Only had 1 false alarm in the 10 years I was in elementary school and it was caused by smoke from the A/C unit when they were fixing it. Had none whatsoever in high school.

I’m assuming you went to a PK-8 school because usually you stay in elementary school for 6 to 8 years depending on if they have a 6th grade and a preschool. When I read that at first I thought that you were saying you were held back 2 to 4 years. :lol:

Anyway my elementary school didn’t have any Stopper covers. They had single-action Simplex T-Bars in the basement and on the first floor and dual-action Simplex T-Bars on the second floor. The 4904+9838s in the cafeteria/gymnasium had wire covers over them but strangely the 8 SpectrAlert Advance speaker/strobes they have in there have no protection. Neither does the BG-12LX pull station which was replacing a single-action Simplex T-Bar which also had no Stoppers or wire cage to protect it.

In my middle school there were no Stoppers over the Edwards SPO-270s and we didn’t have pulls in the gyms but out in the stairwells that they gyms exits out to and there is only the one in each of the stairwells at both of the gyms level. The 4051+4050-80s were mounted SO high up close to the ceiling that they didn’t need wire cages to protect the alarm.

In high school the main building had Stoppers over all of the dual-action Simplex T-Bars everywhere there were the pulls within the school. The modular building which had 2 Edwards SPO-270s near the two exits had no Stopper covers over them and the 2 room Aquaculture Building which has dual-action Simplex T-Bars don’t have a Stopper cover over any of the 4 near the direct exits to the outside. As for the gym, there are wire cages over the 4 4904-9838s in there.

At my college, neither the dual-action Simplex T-Bars or the BG-12LXs they were replaced with when they junked their 4051+4050s for SpectrAlert Advance speaker/strobes have Stopper covers over them. I took that to mean because there are adults in the building that they wouldn’t expect to have someone pull the fire alarm and the two times I was caught in an alarm there was due to the staff lounge’s microwave malfunctioning.

Yeah, where I live elementary school is from Junior kindergarden to Grade 8. & thank goodness that I wasn’t :lol:

Until the time I got into the sixth grade, I was used to not seeing any Stoppers nor other protective covers over any of the pull stations. Tyler Elementary and Cass Elementary are two examples of this; both buildings originally did not have any sort of protective covers over their National Time 641 pull stations, but over the years, both schools received SigCom Sentry products to place over them. I believe National Time rebrands and distributes these under their own model.

Riley Upper Elementary already had STI Universal Stopper covers for their 641 devices when I first attended that school, and Holmes Middle used red, plastic covers in a criss-cross pattern to guard their 641s. Stevenson High used STI Universal Stopper covers for their 641 devices, but not all pull stations had any sort of covering (e.g., band room). Since the vast majority of LPS buildings have been renovated from a bond issue passed 4 years ago, I would not be surprised if any building in the future now uses Stoppers.

I’ve gone to a bunch of different schools for a variety of different reasons. Only one of them had Stoppers in all areas, and that was my first middle school. My college has stoppers in the newest section only. No idea why they suddenly decided to use Stoppers.

First elementary school:
Stoppers: No.
Pull Stations: Simplex 4251-1 chevrons, at least one Edwards 270-SPO, maybe a few T-Bars

Second elementary school:
Stoppers: No; should have been as there were a TON of false alarms.
Pull Stations: Simplex 4251-20’s, 2099-9754’s

First middle school:
Stoppers: Yes.
Pull Stations: 4251-20’s or early addressable 2099’s (panel was a 4020 or 4100)

Second middle school:
Stoppers: No; they wouldn’t fit.
Pull Stations: Gamewell “house” style pull stations (pre-Century)

Third middle school:
Stoppers: No.
Pull Stations: Old wing had 4251’s or older-style 2099’s. New wing had newer-style 2099’s.

High school:
Stoppers: No.
Pull Stations: 4251-20’s in the old wing, 2099-9795’s in the main wing, and likely 4099-9001’s in the new wing.

College:
Stoppers: Only in the 2013 addition.
Pull Stations: Old wing has a mix of Simplex 4251-1’s, 4251-20’s, and Autocall 4050-001T’s. New wing has 4099-9003’s, and the newest addition to that wing has 4099-9001’s.

None of my public schools had Stopper covers over the pulls when I attended them, but they have been installing them at my high school during this decade, due to the number of false fire alarms. (One false alarm that happened in December 2015 led them to install more Stoppers, and my brother, who works at the school, told me one of those Stopper covers even thwarted a false alarm attempt!) It does look interesting seeing the newer Stopper covers installed over the old Edwards 270-SPO pulls (although the school was built with a Simplex system in 1969-1970, they went with Edwards pulls for some reason.)
I’m pretty sure once they put in a new fire alarm system at my old middle school (which will probably be a Notifier NFS2-640 voice-evac system, given that’s what the city’s school district often goes for these days), the new pull stations (which will probably be NBG-12LXs) will have Stopper covers over them as well. At least one of the schools here that got such a new Notifier system had Stopper covers installed over several of the pulls. My middle school’s existing pull stations are the big old Gamewell Vitaguard ones, and thus they are too big for the average Stopper cover.

My college, on the other hand, has Stopper covers in some of the buildings, largely installed during the fire alarm upgrades they’ve had over time. (Strangely, when they renovated a couple parts of the ground floor of the Student Union, only one of the new pull stations (again, an NBG-12LX) had a Stopper cover installed over it!)

I have a hard time thinking of those big house pull stations being used in the interior of a building.

They’re a little smaller than the ones you see outside, but still too big for a Stopper II to be installed over…

1 Like