Choosing the Best Fire Alarms Systems

There are fire alarm systems and security alarm systems, but there are also integrated systems that include both types, which are called fire alarms. Their advantage is a single unit of hardware and software. A fire alarm system can be a part of an automatic fire-extinguishing, smoke protection or complex security system of the object’s territory along with the access control system, video surveillance and others or be an independent element.

The task of fire alarms systems is the receipt, processing, transmission and presentation in a given form to consumers with the help of technical information about penetration into protected objects and the fire on them. Modern security and fire alarm systems should provide round-the-clock monitoring of the state of the territory of the facility; detect a fire in the earliest stages of ignition; precisely determine the place of ignition or penetration of the object; do not have false positives; provide information about the incident in a simple and convenient form; independently conduct diagnostics of the serviceability of detection, alerting and response devices; monitor attempts at hacking the system; have a backup power system.

All fire alarm systems can be divided into three types:

• Conventional (threshold) – they are equipped mainly with small areas of objects, their system, most often, includes the simplest sensors, the number of which and the address of the premises are not transferred to the control panel, displaying only the detector loop number.

• Addressed FAS are designed to control medium and large objects and allow to determine the specific place of occurrence of a fire or entry into the territory, thanks to built-in installation bases or the detectors themselves, address setting schemes and information exchange protocols.

• Address-analog FAS are the most reliable and effective, their monitoring systems continuously analyze all the telemetric information coming from the sensors: air temperature, presence of smoke, etc.

The fundamental difference between this FAS and the others is the following: the decision about the alarm is taken by the central processor on the basis of the integral parameter of a set of parameters, and not the detector itself, which almost completely eliminates the possibility of false positives; in address-analog FAS a priori there cannot be faulty sensors. They continuously transmit all information to the control panel and in case of a fault they will be immediately detected by the head equipment; in the presence of highly sensitive sensors, the address-analogue system can be set to warning levels.

Any types of fire alarm systems consist of the following elements:

• Detectors (sensors);
• Receiving-control equipment;
• Notification devices;
• Communication lines (loop, radio, Internet, GSM-GPRS);
• Stand-by autonomous power supply (battery, gasoline or diesel generator);
• other peripheral devices;
• Software.

According to the technology of detecting a fire or the violator of the territory and the physical principle of operation, the sensors are divided into:

• Infrared active and passive;
• Ultrasound;
• Radio wave;
• Magnetic contact;
• Vibration;
• Light;
• Acoustic;
• Combined, etc.

When choosing a company-installer, you need to make sure that its specialists know everything about fire suppression as well as the company has all necessary certificates.