General Information
Inspection date: 5/10/203X
Prepared by: Sparky W. Sands
Building: Amco / American Fire Alarm Co.
Address: 2120 Prospect Boulevard – Hazard City, PA 18111
Site Contact: Mark Ashton, Owner/Operator
System: Red Aegis IPF-50
Monitored by: Hazard City Fire Department (City Box 212)
Notes
- System trips city box. Notify Hazard City Fire Department at beginning and end of inspection.
- Lift required to reach button-type heat detectors in garage.
- Devices in closets are smoke/heat combos.
Recommendations
- Recommend replacing button-type heat detectors with a restorable model that can be tested with a Heat Ray.
- Recommend installing protective cages around garage devices.
- Recommend reconfiguring outdoor bell to sound on waterflow only.
Summary
The inaugural installment in this series of Inspector’s Logs will be a practice inspection at our company headquarters, to be performed by our new intern, Priscilla “Prissy” Czoschke. She was hand-picked from Ashton’s Principles of Fire Alarm Systems class at Punxsutawney Technical College, and we hope she’ll make a great addition to [what’s left of] our team.
Starting next week, we’ll be partnering with the Exposition & Intervention Taskforce (EXIT), established by the Hazard City government to drag our city’s aging fire protection infrastructure into the 21st century, kicking and screaming if necessary. We’ll be in charge of – you guessed it – fire alarms. We had to ensure that Ms. Czoschke was able to translate those book smarts into field smarts.
Ashton was still in the process of configuring Prissy’s OmniMeter, the powerful handheld that we technicians use to test electrical circuits and store system documentation. Her user profile had to be created, and a bunch of panel programming software had to be installed. This meant I would be staying at the fire alarm control panel (FACP) to read the device addresses, and mark them as “tested” on the OmniMap report. Without OmniTalk, we’d have to communicate with old two-way radios.
Our office’s FACP was a Red Aegis IPF-50, an addressable panel capable of supporting up to 50 system points (detectors, pull stations, or modules), using one of two addressable protocols. One protocol was simply called AG, which used devices similar to other Honeycomb brands such as Lucifire and Fire-Brite. The other was the 5-7-5 protocol, which used devices manufactured by the Japanese company Haiku – the same company that manufactured Synthex’s detectors for decades, until the introduction of the RiteAlarm series in the year 200X.
Looks extra snazzy with the dress panel.
The biggest difference between the two is that AG devices use rotary dials to set the addresses. Haiku devices are software-addressed, either by wiring them to the panel’s programming terminals, or by snapping them into a programming tool that resembled a handheld electronic game. Ashton insisted that companies using this tedious process were disciples of Satan (with Satan in this case being Fezworths and their oft-maligned GIGA protocol).
Are you paying attention, Prissy?
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Fezworths, Gristmill wgah'nagl fhtagn.