Fire alarm NAs mounted outside on the front of supermarkets.

It’s common in my area for supermarkets to have a fire alarm NA mounted outside on the front of them near the entrance. A Publix in my area has a Wheelock AS mounted outside near the entrance. Another supermarket in my area has a SpectrAlert Advance mounted outside near the entrance.

It’s common in my area as well. A Wheelock MT-24-WM outside a Big Y, a SpectrAlert Classic outside a Stop & Shop, and a small red strobe beacon (probably a Federal Signal LP3P-012-048R) on the outside of another Stop & Shop. I worked near there at the time and got to see it go off after there was a massive water leak and the fire alarms went off. I could hear the Commander4’s inside as well.

Not really common over here for supermarkets but some stores do have fire alarms mounted outside under the overhang of the roof as well as in the stores themselves and they are usually close to the door. One plaza has a SpectrAlert hanging from conduit in front of a store and a restaurant in downtown Providence has a Wheelock NS above the window. Other than that I don’t really see it that much.

Not exactly a supermarket, but the IHOP in Warwick on Airport Road has a weatherproof Wheelock AS slapped right on the front right on top of the IHOP logo.

That actually sounds like it would be really interesting but look really ugly so I may have to go by there one of these days to check it out.

A lot of the supermarkets (and the smaller stores) tend to have SpectrAlert Classics and Advances on the exterior. Plazas that have zero SpectrAlerts (because they exist) Usually have Wheelock ASs or Amseco outdoor strobes.

A supermarket that just opened up near me has a red SpectrAlert Advance on the front. Because of such, I thought they were going to have those boring SpectrAlert Advances inside. They didn’t. The store has white Siemens ceiling-mount horn/strobes for the inside NAs.

Yeah, it’s right above the big logo so it does kinda stick out like a sore thumb.

That’s pretty common. Companies like Siemens (and until recently, Simplex), typically use weatherproof Wheelock or System Sensor A/Vs where necessary since their in-house weatherproof offerings are limited or nonexistent.

Siemens offers rebadged Wheelock AH, ASWP and MTWP signals for weatherproof applications. Still though, it’s not too farfetched to see a System Sensor signal on a Siemens system, especially if an item in the budget needed a cost cut (I’ve seen P2RK’s on a Siemens Cerberus PRO before). There is a remote possibility, however, that the SpectrAlert Advance in question could be a sprinkler/waterflow alarm, unless there’s a plainly visible sprinkler bell elsewhere.

But I thought Siemens was still required to use Wheelock notification appliances.

I thought that requirement after Wheelock sued them for using their technology expired in a decade? It happened in 2007 and I can remember that because that was the year I entered high school and Anna Nicole Smith died so surely it has to be up by now.

Also I wouldn’t think it would be too weird. When my high school replaced two of the oldest alarms in the buildings, they were replaced with new-old stock Siemens U-MMTs and I think the company that did that got them from Wheelock…

2008, actually. It expires next year, however, it is not likely that they would ever produce their own NA’s again due to the extreme hit their business has taken in the last few years.

Andrew has a video on this: