During one of our recent events, Fire Protection Expert Lee Kaiser dove into fire alarm maintenance best practices. Catch the video below and the full transcript to learn how to assess components like batteries and other supplies.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPt
Lee: Now, the batteries have some requirements too. While we're testing power supplies we'll be looking at these things for the batteries. Batteries are supposed to be permanently marked with a date of manufacture. So, understand that UL-listed fire alarm batteries as they're produced, if they're intended for fire alarm use they need to be marked with the month and year that they were manufactured and then we have in the codes it says that batteries in the panels need to be replaced 5 years after the date of manufacture.
Now, people mix this up. It's not after the date of installation. It's after the date of manufacture because depending on where you buy your batteries, those batteries could sit on the shelf for 1 or 2 years and shorten that life span that they're allowed to be installed there. Some of the fire alarm panels manufacturers require more frequent replacement, so they call for 3 years. This is what a lot of times they will say: replace those batteries after 3 years.
They're trying to acknowledge that supply chain issue where they may sit on the shelf for a while.
Now, one thing that you could do is also check the health of the existing batteries of the tester. If you want to know a little bit more detailed information about your battery condition, there's this device. This is a device that's SDI Fire sells. This is a sell checker and it does a quick health check of those batteries. It takes about 2 minutes to cycle through the health of the battery and it tells you what it is. Now, this is not code required to do, but it is an option out there to do, you know, sort of the highest standard of inspection and testing on the batteries. Now, one thing, I kind of like to tell this story at this point. We recommend to you that you write into your service contracts if you have a service contractor for fire alarm testing, that you write in battery replacement into the service contract and you just pay ahead for that. The reason is financial.
So, as a rule of thumb, I last checked this where I'm from in Louisville. A pair of batteries costs about $90.00. Okay. And then put a little labor for installation maybe $110.00. So, $110.00 every 2 years to get those batteries replaced will probably be part of your service contract. But, if you don't write that in and you don't have automatic replacement of those batteries and one of those batteries goes down, you get a trouble condition on your panel, you don't want that. You make an emergency service call to your contractor.
Emergency service call is going to cost about $400.00, maybe $500.00 to replace those batteries and we could replace a lot of batteries for that cost.
So, just think about that, writing that into your service contract to save you money over the long run. More tests that need to happen. Annual test; we need to annually test signal receipt, so signals that we receive at the fire alarm panel from these devices. Release fire alarm panels that form suppression systems, fire pump controllers or smoke control panels. Remote supervision testing; now we're sending a signal from our fire alarm panel outside of our building off site to a remote supervising station. We call them a jargon. So, we call them monitoring services, central stations, alarm services, all those things that we call.
In essence, we want to make sure that at minimum we send alarm, trouble and supervisory signals from our panels to that off-site location so they can record what's happened and then pick up the phone and call the appropriate people. For alarms, they call the fire department. For trouble and supervisory, they're going to call the responsible person at your building.
Now, we're testing, the annual test is to make sure that the monitoring service receives those signals within 90 seconds and that's the minimum standard there, and if you have an addressable fire alarm panel where you get more location information from your building and we call that Point ID, verify that that Point ID is also sent along with those signals so that the monitoring service knows to pass on where that fire condition is in the building to the fire department as they're getting dispatched.
Now, moving from the panel out to devices, let's talk about smoke detectors. We'll talk about spot smoke detectors that, you know, a lot of times installed at the ceiling. Like there's one there that I can see really easily. And so there's a couple different things that need to happen with them. They need to be inspected twice a year. So, semi-annual inspections, and as we do that, we're looking for issues of location and mounting. So, we need to know some of the code information of how it should be installed for us to look for those things. We're looking for physical damage, is it mounted correctly, is it dirty or obstructed? Are there things that would affect its operation during a fire and slow its response to smoke? All visual at this point for inspections.
And then is there any increased airflow rate? Some of the customers that show up a lot of times from mission critical spaces will install new air handling in their spaces and we want, the code says to look for that. If there's an increased airflow rate, the detector spacing would need to go down for the delusion that that increased airflow rate would cause on that smoke.
So, we need to space our detectors closer together so we can identify that in the field and then we can, you know, rectify that situation and install more detectors. Now, I want to break here for a second and, you know, semi-annual inspections. So, as a rule of thumb for fire alarm systems, I need you to think that we do inspections twice a year and then when we go to testing, we do testing annually, one time a year. So, inspections twice a year on fire alarm systems tests just once a year.
For smoke detectors we do two different tests. We do an annual functional response test.
Our jargon for this test is a smoke test. We're going to go out and smoke the detectors. So, we're testing as we apply smoke to go into the detection chamber.
- Does that detector function?
- Does it send an alarm signal into the panel?
And so, we test every detector in the building and test for signal receipt of the panel. And so, one of the ways that we do that is with smoke. This is a can of aerosol I smoke because that's fun to do in front of a crowd. You know, we just can issue a little bit of smoke to that detector up near the detector and if it goes into alarm that works.
Now, there's a couple cheats that we could do here, right? So, a lot of technicians carry with them a magnet on the end of a telescopic pole, maybe tuck in a shirt pocket there and that magnet they can wave that in front of a detector and it will activate that detector.
Now, that's useful for testing system sequences, but it doesn't meet the intent of the smoke test. Okay. And so, another thing is, this picture here shows a technician using a smoke pole. So, this is a testing device intended to test detector so a technician can test those detectors from the ground.
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