2 wire vs 4 wire smokes

[Del91574]

Lou, if you're in my neck of the woods, I have a set of safety glasses, hard hat and cut resistant gloves, so I'll invite you to swing by any of the sites I'm on and see the systems in action that tech's don't seem to be showing you. I'll introduce you to the marshal that is the AHJ for the city as well as the campus itself and let you speak to the engineers that I'm working with.

I'm done pointing out the facts to the install methodology and frankly, the wheel doesn't need to be reinvented, since the documentation for the systems and hardware are black and white.....when you're bound by code and AHJ, one learns the word SHALL very quickly, as well as I/A/W the manufacturer's instruction.

In my case, we do mid and mid-high end residential as well as everything up to enterprise sized campus and healthcare. We have networked fire systems with 50 network nodes and somewhere in the neighborhood of 50K smoke detectors and about the same as far as modules and manual pullstations. This is not factoring in special systems such as VESDA and preaction/releasing panels only connected to modules monitored by the networked panels. We've running Eschelon based networks as well as the proprietary networks based on ARCnet protocol.

I went the 2W-MOD, RRS and 2WTAB route in my case. I'm running 12 2WTAB's, a mix of heats (separate zone) and a separate partition with heats only. Separate zone for the supervisory "clean me" feature.

 

[pete_c]

Two years ago I "enlarged" a small server room maybe to 1/3 larger than the original size. Basically expanded into an older chemistry lab with concretes. I had to update the fire suppression system, electrical, new CRAC unit, etc. A project; maybe something like 300 servers in racks.

I spent hours learning much of the fire suppression system from the alarm guru. The server room was some 25 feet underground and hadn't been updated in like 10 years.

It was a bit difficult to do all of this with an "in production" server room. I did feel like a contractor coordinating this and that.

I learned much from the fire suppression Guru; about code and standards; he was well versed and did a great job. I added additional duplicate remote montoring patterned a bit from what I learned from the "guru"

I am just saying all of the information provided has been very informative and I sincerely appreciate everyone's input.

When folks have "passion" in their written words about what they do and how they do it personally means that they care much and enjoy what they do.

And for my home it's an added bonus to learn a bit more about the life saftey devices and how they work.