12/02/2022 Bell Test Montage

For the week of 11/28-12/02, we tested numerous buildings at a campus for disadvantaged teens and young adults. We tested 8 buildings total and here is a montage of 5 of them. The bell tests in these buildings also doubled as the monthly fire drill.

The first building is one of the dorms. The system is a Siemens FireFinder XLS. The hallways and common areas (study rooms, etc.) have red Siemens ZH and ZR signals and each dorm room has a ZH-MC-W in it. Although not seen in the video, we did find a few rooms whose signals didn't work, which may be related to an internal power supply issue at the FACP. The pulls are Siemens HMS-Ds and the smokes are actually smoke/heat combos (Siemens OH921s). There are some heat only sensors mixed in as well (Siemens model HI921).

The second building is an automotive shop. The panel is a Notifier NFW2-100, the pull stations are NOT-BG-12LXs, the signals are System Sensor P2R horn/strobes and SR remote strobes. There's also NP-100 smokes, NH-100 heats, and System Sensor CO1224T CO detectors. Other than the panel batteries, no flaws were found with this system.

The third building is a facility maintenance building. This system fairly mirrors the automotive shop, as the same control panel, initiating devices and signals can be found, but this building has an N-ANN-80 annunciator at one of the entrances since the panel is located in an office. You can see it at the end when we use it to reset the system.

The fourth building is the vocational building, which is actually two buildings. Both buildings are controlled by a Simplex 4001 located in the main vocational building. The main vocational building has Simplex 2901-9333 bells on Simplex 4903-9101 strobe plates. Right off the bat, the 4903-9101 strobe isn't functional. Most of the pulls are Simplex 4251-20s, but some have been replaced with 2099-9754s. The smokes in the main building are 2098-9201s, a few of which have been replaced with 4098-9601s. There are also numerous Edwards 282B-PL heat detectors (rebranded by Simplex).In the other building, which acts as an annex building, all the smokes are 4098-9601s. When I walk in the first entrance, I was surprised to see a Simplex 4904-9168 remote strobe. For the horn/strobe it's a Wheelock HS signal (or the Siemens equivalent). The next two rooms are accessible only from the outside. This inadvertently created a problem as for whatever reason, only remote strobes (Siemens ZR-MC-Rs) were installed. You can hear zero audible sound in the first room (which is partly why the woman shouting "get out of the building") and although the strobe works, it's partly obscured by the TV, so without an audible, one would have to be pretty vigilant to recognize the strobe flashing. Even the safety officer who was with me agreed that the signal should really be a horn/strobe. In the other room, it's more of the same, but with an even bigger problem - the strobe doesn't even work! As a side note, my colleague accidentally silenced the alarm before we could get into the room, so I said I'd simply pull the station where I am to resound the signals (the main vocational building is zone 1, the room with the horn/strobe is zone 3, and the remaining two rooms are zone 2), but I had to ask my colleague if it was ringing where he was and he confirmed it was, which meant the signal was bad where I was, so that will need to be replaced (and hopefully with a horn/strobe).

The last building was the main building. This building also has a Siemens FireFinder XLS, however the devices for this building are conventional: the smokes are Siemens PE-11s, the heats are Honeywell T4057s, the pulls are a mix of Honeywell S464s (some single-action, some dual-action) and Siemens MS-151s, and the signals for the most part are Honeywell SC807A1029s (Honeywell branded Wheelock 7002Ts), however you can see in the video, several of them are not in good operating condition and a few have already been replaced with other signals (mainly Siemens HS-MC-Rs, but one Wheelock EH-EL1-WM-24). The basement area has EST Integrity horn/strobes (plus one SC807A1029), which functioned fine. We were eventually able to get into the area we couldn't get into at 10:07 and turns out there wasn't a signal in there (though there was a pull station). The facility is very eager to upgrade the main building system because of the age of its components and our company has quoted them a price for an upgrade; the facility is waiting for our report to present to the state and make their case for a needed upgrade.

The only other buildings not seen were another dorm (same system setup as the dorm seen in this video), a rec center (again, same system setup as the dorms) and a campus "Welcome Center", which is is really just a guardhouse that had a Honeywell XLS-2Z1R control panel, Integrity horn/strobes, 6269B smokes, 281B-PL heats (all of which we wrote up for being defective) and 276B-1120 pulls.

All that said, enjoy the montage!