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.


If you are interested in taking the NICET Test for "fire alarms" or "Inspection and Testing of Fire Alarms", then we have you covered!  We are now selling our CBT Levels 1 - 4 NICET practice test with preparation material.  This material is packed with tons of NICET practice test questions along with all code references as to where to find the answers.  We have also supplied the material with all of the necessary NICET applications, CBT calculator demonstrations, links and more.  If you need more information, feel free to send an email.  You can find the link to purchase our NICET Practice Test on the top left section of this site.

Fire Alarm Testing Corrections Made Easy

How do you mark the devices that need a return service trip to correct?

When you are performing a fire alarm system test or fire alarm system pre test, make sure to check every fire alarm device and notification appliance.  This includes audible visual, smoke detectors, heat detectors, pull stations, Ansul (hood systems), door holders, and the one everyone skips, duct smoke detectors.

When checking these devices it may become a burden to write down the exact location of a fire alarm device or appliance that did not function correctly.  This really applies to non addressable devices as these devices have a location/description programmed into the fire alarm control panel. Devices such as conventional initiating devices, strobes, horns and speakers are harder to keep track of.  

Here is a little trick that will help shave time off your fire alarm test.  Use small bright yellow colored stickers to mark the fire alarm devices or appliances that did not function correctly.  This will make it easy to come back and check or note deficiencies.

With door holders, you can mark the actual magnetic holder if it did not release, or you can mark the hardware mounted on the door if the door did not close and latch.  It makes it easy to come back and accurately make notes on your fire alarm test form otherwise know as the NFPA 72 testing and inspection sheets or the Record of Completion if a new system.

You can also get creative and use different colors for different scenarios.  For example, lets say you have a duct smoke detector that went into alarm but did not shut down the air.  Use a green sticker for HVAC shutdown.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

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Fire Alarm Speaker Amplifiers New vs. Old

Wow times have changed. Check out these two pictures. The first one is a cabinet full of old fire alarm speaker amplifiers found at a high rise we are currently working at. CHeck out the size that each one of these take up.
Its amazing to think that back in the day this was state of the art!

Like I mentioned earlier, we are changing this existing system out one floor at a time so we currently have our FCI E3 voice system side by side with the old fire alarm panel in the electric room. This is where you truly notice the difference in modern technology. Check out this next picture of the FCI E3 AM-50 cards. There are four installed in this one picture, each with the capability of two supervised fire alarm speaker circuits with 50 watts.

It can't wait to see what the next 40 years will bring us.

I have also included some random pictures of this install to show how we have temporarily mounted the new FCI E3 fire alarm control panel using uni-strut. Once the entire high rise building has been switched over to the new FCI E3 we will demo out the old panel and move our new system to the wall.

Make sure to join our Fire Alarms Online Facebook Group HERE.

Westin SFO Get Fire Alarm Upgrade

Notifier Onyx Series EVAC Upgrade for Westin SFO

Pyro-Comm Systems, a NESCO affiliate for Notifier just completed a rather complex fire alarm upgrade as it was for an occupied 7 story hotel in the San Francisco area.  The old Simplex 4100 was replaced with a much needed upgrade.  We installed a new Notifier NFS2-3030 with 7 SLC loop cards, full voice, fire phones and all new System Sensor speaker strobe devices.  Here are some pictures of the fire control room before paint.  Sorry for the split pictures as the room is to small to get the shot all in one.

The cabinet in the upper center is full of 5 Notifier XP6-C addressable control module cards to control the fire phones, first floor fire alarm speakers as well as the 5 elevator cabs and 4 stairwell fire alarm speaker circuits.  Below that cabinet are two battery cabinets each with 2 55aH backup batteries.  One for the Notifier NFS2-3030 and the other for the amplifier cabinet located to the right.  The amplifier cabinet is filled with 4 100 watt amps to power up the 7 floors.  Finally to the right of the amp cabinet is three new 12 amp Honeywell remote power supplies used for both the first floor strobe circuits as well as 40 door holders.

Also not shown in the pictures are the two LCD-160 remote annuciators, the fire phone jack handset storage cabinet and one system printer.  All in all it came out really clean. 

We will be writing another post soon with the details of the installation as we ran into some time consuming obstacles