Cable Toner Kit Doubles as Fire Speaker Test

Play a Tone Through Your Fire Alarm Speakers with a Toner

A cable toner kit can prove to be a very useful tool in the fire alarm system installation and service business. If you do not know, a cable toner is a battery operated device that places a tone across cables assisting in location and verification. You can simply connect the toner to a pair of wires and then move between junction points with the provided wand looking for the tone. Here is a little trick to help verify your fire alarm voice evacuation speakers are connected correctly.

Of course it is highly recommended to test out your fire alarm speaker circuit with a multi-meter before connecting to your amplifiers. With a multi-meter, you can test for reverse polarity (with the diode check), ground faults, shorts and continuity with the resistance setting and finally check for AC inductance with the AC voltage setting. Once you have verified all is good on your fire alarm speaker circuit we can move on to the cable toner test. I have included a simple video to show the connections and the tone you should receive at all of the speakers connected to the fire alarm circuit. Make sure to turn the cable toner to the "TONE" setting and connect it to the circuit. Red to red and black to black. This will allow the cable toner to produce a tone across the fire alarm speaker circuit and play it through the actual fire alarm speaker appliances. Once this step is completed, walk around the site and verify that you have a fire alarm sound or tone on all of the speakers on the circuit.


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Ground Fault found On PAM Relay Leg

Today I had the pleasure of working on a Saturday. It was a service call to track down and locate a ground fault on a Fire Lite FCPS24 NAC power supply. This ground fault is the reason another company felt it was necessary to disconnect the NAC circuit from the main fire control panel to the NAC circuit power supply. Read about here.

We traced out the ground fault on the negative power wire (constant power used for global HVAC shut down) to the rooftop air conditioning units. Upon a close examination of the unit with the ground fault we found that the 120VAC power leg (black) wire on the PAM-1 relay had been pinched in between the 4 S box and cover.

In this case our fire alarm control panel or FCPS24 NAC power supply was powering up the PAM-1 relays. This mean we connected our constant power to the Red (positive) and White (common) wires on the PAM-1 relay. Therefore the black wire is not used. However, the 120VAC lead (black wire) can still transfer a ground fault through the coil.

Always make sure to cap off the black lead and ensure it is not grounded out when using the PAM-1 relay for HVAC shutdown, elevator recall, door holder, etc.

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