Smoke/thermals and paritions/areas

[newalarm]

Our house will be divided into multiple areas (or partitions). It is a two floor home plus a basement. Half of basement will be a studio rental, with its own access from the back yard. We also have a separate building about 35 feet away that is a garage/workshop, currently non insulated.
 
The house already has a 120v smokes with sounders, rental and house are all on one zone (garage not tied to this system). The Elk M1G smoke/thermals will be a secondary system tied to monitoring company.
 
I currently have rental and home on one zone with all smokes. My concern is that if the smoke goes off in the rental, i would like to direct the fire department to know that they need to go to the rental. Second, if it is a false alarm, how do you deal with the call list. My concern is that tenant would trigger alarm by burning something on range, be neglectful and ignore the call, and fire department would break down our front door to main house if we were not home.
 
I thought of removing the smoke in the rental (since there already is the 120v smoke, i would be covered by code), and simply install a thermal on an independent zone.
 
Thank you.
 

 

[Del91574]

Thermal would work or you could have fire with verification. In theory, a properly installed and located PE detector should not false, people are more accustomed to the cheaper ionization units that false when you make toast.
 
IMHO one inherent issue with fire on multiple areas would be to generate a full property evac vs. just notify the area the unit is attached to. The account and notification for a CS is easy enough. How you generate the site evac is the variable, as you could in theory tie a panel output that is triggered via rules on the rental area to trip a zone on your area to evac your area, as a fire alarm in the other area would not trip "your" system otherwise.

 

[newalarm]

Thanks Del, I am more worried about the burning something on the stove. So far, i have yet to have any false alarms on the system, except for some programing mistakes (occasionally). I placed the SS smoke in the far corner of the studio, but was going to add a thermal about 8' from the range. the studio is only about 400 square feet, give or take. I have turned off all voice announcements, expect alarm. So burglar, fire, CO, would voice over entire system and prompt evacuation, or inspection at least.
 
Issue is call from monitoring company. We could give tenant use of house phone, but they might not answer. I want to make sure that i get the call to make sure i can mitigate any false alarms.
 
downside is if one person trips alarm accidentally, then everyone is affected. but hopefully, won't happen too often.
 
Now the elk keypads should tell you what the emergency is, even if it is from another Area right? ie: if someone broke into garage, Area 3, then keypads in Area 1 and 2 will show "motion detected Garage" or similar.

 

[apostolakisl]

As I believe is your intention, a fire alarm in your basement apartment should sound the alarm on all of your smokes in the whole house.  Real fires spread through the house without special regard for partitions between tenant and home owner.  False alarms are annoying, but you still have to treat them as real until proven otherwise.
 
It is possible to reset the smokes from any area so if the tenant sets off a false alarm, they can reset it themselves in your absence.  Consider programming an F key to do that for simplicity.  Notification will still go out even if the alarm is reset, so CS will have to respond.  Thus if the tenant tries to reset a fire alarm that actually occurred on your part of the house, this fact will still be known by you (assuming you set up a text or email) and CS and proper investigation can ensue.  I don't know that you really want your tenant to have the authority to stop CS from sending fire.  You would need to discuss this with your CS and perhaps they will allow your tenant area to have a separate notify phone number and password if it triggered in their area.  I would say the same should hold true for burglar alarm.  Basically it would be like they were two accounts, and perhaps they will only do it if you pay for two accounts.
 
Like the other thread about fire alarms here yesterday, it is not hard to hook a 4 wire system across multiple zones, but still keep the powering of the detectors together.  This will allow for a single reset procedure as well as coincident sounding of all detectors when polarity is reversed.  By having the zones different, you can assign different detectors to different areas.

 

[Del91574]

There's all sorts of a variation of a theme, however personally, I'd limit what a tennant is able to do in regards to reset, etc.
 
Honestly, fire with verification should be more than enough. If there's enough smoke to set off a PE detector, there's something obviously wrong, and by nature, assuming a detector with a sounder, it does give an opportunity to fan and remove smoke. It takes enough smoke to stratify in the air to really set off a PE detector, not just a basic puff.
 
Most CS' dictate a dispatch first on fire, call second, usually with a municipality required response. Whether or not they roll the entire fleet is dependent on the municipality and whether or not the CS (or you/you agents) get in touch with them quickly enough.
 
Honestly, I'd be concerned if the CS did NOT dispatch on any fire alarm (or trouble for that matter, if no answer or contact is made) and allowed a cancel via phone to suffice....what if little Johnny is playing with matches and answers the phone and says everything is OK, or there's a smouldering fire somewhere that is in the incipient stage? The reason why I say this is because these 3 events happened to accounts of mine and the issues were discovered by the first responders, with the worst being the CS not dispatching the FD on a fire trouble after not being able to contact a keyholder...that was a $5 mil. mistake on the CS that is presently in litigation as the house (historic property, stone house) was gutted and burned to the ground.
 
If the proper PIC holder is not reached, it should be a dispatch then go through the call list/notification list irregardless.

 

[newalarm]

A lot to think about. Thanks. Alarmrelay allows for a separate call list for a separate area for an additional $6/month, is what I was told. The idea of the separate zone was really to focus the police/fire dept on the proper part of the house. But installing an additional thermal on a separate zone, I think i can achieve same goal.