Why I hate Stoppers with Horns

No, it’s not because it’s annoying when they get knocked off. It’s the fact that when they do get knocked off people think they set off the alarm in the whole building. It happened a few times last year at my school, specifically in my hallway the cover of a stopper would get knocked off. It was more the teachers fault it happened multiple times, since they didn’t put it back on properly, but still.
I feel that when someone who dosent know lifts up the cover, and I doubt in a real fire they’ll be reading very carefully and the horn starts sounding then they’ll think they’ve set the system off and leave.
I know when these happen by accident, at least in my school people think they’ve set it off, which is crazy because as we have an EST3 Voice evac system, not even horns. I just worry they take away the chances of someone actually saving lives. What do you think?

tl;dr: People can’t tell between the horn on the Stopper and the actual alarm, and I worry they won’t sound the full building alarm in a fire.

This is a great point, and I don’t think it’s been talked about enough. I’ve seen a bunch of videos where x person thinks they’ve pulled the fire alarm, and just knocked off the cover.

Maybe a voice sounder that says “tamper cover activated” would be a good improvement.

Yeah. Same here, the voice would be better, but then people would probably start looking around for a speaker or the intercom lol. The voice would have to be loud and intelligent from long distances too if it were to deter someone from pulling a false alarm, otherwise they wouldn’t be caught and it wouldn’t alert anyone to see what the problem was. Of course you’d know if it were a real fire as all the alarms in the building would activate anyways, though.

That is a better idea, I like that, it might not be perfect in stopping false alarms, but I’d rather have a false alarm every once in awhile than people get injured because someone couldn’t tell the cover from the alarm.

I don’t know how people could mistake the stopper horn for the fire alarm because they would have to know something is up if they can only hear the horn in that one place rather than all throughout the building so I think that while they might initially think its the building alarm, they won’t be confused for long when they see the horn is only sounding in that one area.

I think you may be giving people a little too much credit. We have signs that tell people not to use elevators in fires for a reason.
But I do see your point, but in an emergency your only goal should be to alert others to get out and you to get out. Not check to see if you set off alarms around the whole building. And in most cases, at least around me the closest pull is also very close to an exit or exit stairwell.

Edit: Thinking back to both crusies I’ve been on, they had issues of people not getting to their station during the drill, even with multiple announcements.