Healthcare Facilty gets a Huge Awakening with AHJ Request

Last week our service department was contracted by a very prestigious healthcare firm to double check an existing Fire Lite MS-9200UDLS fire alarm system and pre-action system for accuracy in zone descriptions as well as system functions (CBE or Control by Event). The local AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) was requesting they provide and install a zone map above the lobby fire alarm annunciator as well as the fire alarm control panel.

Now keep in mind that we installed the original system which is now serviced by another very large company. I am not going to mention names but we have all heard of them and the name is made up of three letters. Unfortunately they have a national account so we never stood a chance in receiving the central station monitoring, quarterly maintenance and annual testing.

With that said we were hired simply because we had access to the original AutoCAD drawings and could speed along the process of creating the zone maps. Now for liability purposes before we could reproduce these maps I wanted to ensure that the zones were still accurate with the AutoCAD drawings we had on file.

This is were things got interesting. Our technicians arrived on site and started the inspection by placing the system on test. Upon performing simple fire control panel checks they noticed that the notification appliance circuit used to trigger the FCPS-24F remote NAC power supply was disconnected and strapped out. Once they dug a little bit deeper they uncovered the reason behind this huge liability pit fall. A NAC circuit within the FCPS-24F remote NAC power supply had a ground fault on it. Instead of troubleshooting the ground fault this other service company thought it would be a good idea to disconnect the NAC circuit and move on.

Needless to say our customer was furious when we demonstrated to him that his facility did not have any occupant notification for the last three months. This is the sort of thing that makes us legit fire alarm installation companies hate the security installers that lack true industry experience. They need to understand that if an intrusion system is temporarily down something might get stolen. If a fire alarm system is down someone might DIE!!!!

For anyone reading this post that happens to be an end user of a fire alarm system, make sure your service company is performing their job correctly. Don't just hire a company because of their size in the industry. Be careful as it is not always easy to tell if your fire alarm company is doing their job as we as a society rely to much on others. Do your homework and research companies before you award the work.

Tags: fire alarm system, healthcare, AHJ, autocad drawings, fcps-24f remote nac power supply, NAC circuits, ground fault, Fire Lite, fire alarm annunciator, Fire Alarm Panel, Notification Appliance Circuits (NAC)