Fire alarms in my elementary school

Once and a while I’ll thing of my elementary school days, there was a k-3 and 4-5 school, I went to both. My K-3 school had a cool system, the school was built I believe in the 1960s. What happened in 1997, the two schools had an addition added to it. The K-3 added a library and 2 additional bathrooms and on top of that housed the art room and music room. The main building at the time, 2006-2007, had Wheelock MB-G10 bells on a RSSP retrofit plate, on top of a rssp back box. Ivory metallic raceway ran down to a Notifier BGX-101L with SB-10 back boxes (I thought they were BG-10Ls at the time). In the addition they had Wheelock MT-24-LSM’s with BGX-101L’s flush mounted to the wall. All the horns and bells were on continuous except the music room, which was on code 3 tone, and the stairwell built with the addition was on code 3 tone. The MT in the library and the MT in the vestibule upstairs between the art and music rooms were on continuous horn. The smokes looked like Notifier 2451’s, most likely the addressable version

Now to my 4-5 school, which I think is a cooler system. The school was built in the 1930s. The third floor burned down in January 1942 and was rebuilt in a couple of years.When I went there, 2007-2009, the main building houses Gamewell 69240 horns with the 69240S VALS strobe. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s a re-branded Federal Signal 450D series B2, with VALS strobe with Fire markings. The pulls were Gamewell century’s with the key lock on the bottom! Yep that’s right, the keylock was on the bottom and never seen that anywhere else in my life or on the internet. The 4-5 School also had an addition done at the same time in 1997. The architecture in fact is the same! Except in this school it was a Gymnasium added that was also the cafeteria, and 2 bathrooms were added, the same style as in the elementary school. The addition had the same horns/strobes to it, Wheelock MT-24-LSM with BGX-101L pulls. All horns in the building were continuous, including the rebranded 450d.

I’ve never seen the panel to these buildings but have seen the Annunciators, notifier LCD-80s, which leads me to believe the panels were more than likely AFP-200s which with the 2 SLC loops would be more than sufficient for these 2 schools. The smokes were also the 2451 look a likes.

Now the question I have is with the 4-5 school, the original system was added before 1994 and later than 1986. I believe it was probably a Gamewell zans-400, but what do you think? It was some sort of Gamewell panel from the 80s. Also I remember in 5th grade, the principal asked my teacher to pull the alarm for a fire drill, when she pulled it, it took about 6 seconds before the horn sounded. The zans is instantly and the afp-200 take about 2 seconds, at max! Could it been a different panel, or did the panel poll more slowly or a monitor module that takes a few seconds to report an alarm condition? I’m sure NewAgeServer definitely knows this answer. Oh and I’ve been watching his vids since 2008 (4th grade) so he has also taught me a couple of things at the time. If you see this, you can definitely chime in.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they removed the old Gamewell panel, put the new Notifier panel in its place, and connected all of the existing zones to monitor modules. That still doesn’t explain the slow response time, unless the Notifier monitor modules take longer to broadcast an alarm across the SLC than an addressable pull or smoke.

Your elementary school fire alarms seem to have a lot more variation than the system that my elementary school used while I was there and yours looks like it is a bit more interesting than mine was also. We had Simplex 4903-9219s in the hallways, Simplex 4903-9137 remote strobes in ALL bathrooms except in the cafeteria, Simplex 2901-9838 horns on 4903-9101 strobe plates in the cafeteria, the entryway outside the cafeteria, the elevator room and the storage and boiler room behind the teacher’s lounge, a vertical Wheelock AS in code-3 in the enrichment classroom and two Gentex SHGs with one being in the reading and literacy room and the other being in the ESL and physical education office.