Commercial Fire Alarms

The owner of a sprinklered commercial building came to us with a panel that had aged out. Parts were getting hard to find, the annual inspection was turning into an argument, and the system reported over a single phone line that the building no longer wanted to pay for. There was a second problem underneath the first one: fire, burglary and the door locks were three separate systems from three different eras, which meant three service calls, three sets of user codes and three things to test. The building needed a fire alarm that would satisfy the authority having jurisdiction without apology, and the owner wanted to stop paying three companies to look after one building.

The panel is a DMP XR150FC, which DMP builds as a fire control panel rather than a burglar panel with a fire zone bolted on. It ships in a red enclosure with an LCD fire command center keypad built into the door, so silence, reset, test and drill are where the fire department expects to find them, behind a keyed door, not buried in a menu on a keypad by the back office. It is listed to UL 864 for fire protective signaling and to UL 464 for audible signal appliances, and it carries CSFM, FDNY and LAFD approvals, which is the paperwork that stops a plan review from turning into a second submission.

Initiating devices land across 142 zones. Smoke detectors, heat detectors, duct detectors and pull stations each report as their own zone, so an alarm names the device and the location rather than a whole floor, and the panel is compatible with devices listed to UL 268. That matters at two o’clock in the morning, when the difference between “Zone 14, second floor east corridor” and “fire alarm” is the difference between a walk-through and an evacuation.

The sprinkler system ties into the same panel. Waterflow switches and valve tamper switches report as supervised zones, using devices listed to UL 364, so a closed valve is a trouble condition on the panel and a signal to the monitoring center rather than something nobody notices until the system is needed. If the building requires carbon monoxide detection, CO detectors go on the same system too, and there is no second panel to test.

Communication is where this panel separates itself. It reports over the network, over LTE cellular, and over a dial-up line, and it supports up to eight paths with dual phone line capability and DMP’s Adaptive Technology. Nothing about a commercial fire system should depend on one wire leaving the building, and this one does not. We put the primary path on the network and the backup on cellular, which let the owner drop the second phone line and pay for the cellular path with what the line had been costing.

False alarms get handled at the panel. Fire Verify makes the panel confirm a smoke detector’s alarm before it signals, and Fire Retard by Zone lets a zone that is prone to nuisance activations be treated differently from the rest of the building, both of which are features the XR150 has and the smaller panels do not. Cross zoning, swinger bypass and abort reports do the same job on the burglary side.

Then the part nobody thinks about until inspection day. The panel keeps a 12,000-event history, and every test, trouble, alarm and restoral is in it with a timestamp. When we come back for the annual NFPA 72 inspection, the record of what the system has been doing all year is already on the panel, and the report writes itself. The owner sees the same events in the Virtual Keypad app, which is also where a trouble condition shows up the day it happens instead of the day we arrive.