Whomever is your facility manager should have a contact number for your alarm company. They can call and put the system into "test" mode which will allow it to still respond to a smoke or heat trigger, but the service won't relay the call to the FD. Haze or fog the crap out of the room until the alarm trips to find the sweet spot. We just did this at my church with a hazer and weren't able to get it to go (which is a little unsettling). The building manager there claimed to have seen a bit more advanced systems that allow you to actually see which sensors are tripping and even isolate and disable certain ones. But I would guess that goes into the realm of what your fire marshal thinks is appropriate and safe.
Shouldn't be anything unsettling about that. They've been working on these sensors like they're the cure for cancer. It's incredible with some of them how they're going about distinguishing between real smoke and non-threats such as dust, haze, fog, sawdust, etc. Won't be long before nuisance alarms are a thing of the past, at least in new construction.
There was a discussion in our district regarding that, but unfortunately they've not adopted the new tech. In the case of this church though, I'd guess the duct sensors are close to 20 years old. On that note, how tragically difficult is it to retrofit a fire control system with these newer sensors? I'd love to be able to haze with wild abandon. How much do they cost and I'm guessing a licensed contractor would be required to install them?
When there are experienced people on the design team, like a professional theater consultant, or usually is standard. Usually heat detectors are used. Return air ducts present a special problem in that until someone changes the codes, particle are required.
I can't imagine that a heat or flame signature sensor would be useful in the return air system; however, I wonder how well a sensitive CO detector in conjunction with a reasonably tolerent particle detector would do at providing safety while preventing false alarms. It might depend on how these indicators tend to be distributed in a space where a fire occurs.First, I'm not a fire alarm expert. I try to plan for atmospheric effects in all of our projects, but the design team is limited. The International Building Code - the most widely adopted model building code in the US - requires smoke detectors in return air systems of 2000 cfm or greater size. NFPA 72 is the standard for fire alarms. Neither, as best I can tell, embraces the multi-criteria detectors for this application. I don't know why.
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