Common Misconceptions about Fire Alarms

These are the common misconceptions for people who don’t know about Fire Alarms.

1st being that Fire Alarms spread out ink
This statement is false due to the fact that 2 of my Pull Stations don’t have ink dispensers at all. It would be a waste of time and money to have ink dispensers in pull stations.

2nd being that all fire alarms make sound
this statement is false due to the fact that not all fire alarms make sound. There’s these things called remote strobes that don’t make sound at all. Usually There easy to spot the difference.

This is a horn strobes due to the fact it has a cutouts for the horn.



This is a remote strobe due to the fact it doesn’t have a cut out for the Horn.

Note is that there is some alarms that have the remote strobe and the horn strobes which uses the same cover (like the EST Genesis horn strobes and remote strobes)

3rd is that the noise comes from the smoke detectors
This statement is true and false at the same time. Regular smoke detectors don’t have horns or piezo. As for Home Smoke Alarms, yes they do make noise. There is also sounder bases.

4th is that fire alarm notification appliances run off of AC Power
This statement is true and false at the same time because regular electrical appliances in buildings run off of 120V AC. fire alarm notification appliances after the 1980s run off of 24V DC instead of 120V AC because fire alarm systems are required to have battery backup incase of a power outage to run the notification appliances on 24V DC which is from the batteries or still run off of 24V DC when the system has AC power normally.

5th is that all fire alarms have an option to change the sound to voice evac sometimes
This statement is false due to regular fire alarms not having an option to change the sound from a Code-3 Horn to a voice evac message. There's these things called speaker strobes which play the voice evac message from a voice evac system with the use of a tone generator and a voice card that has the voice evac message pre-recorded at the factory or manually imported through software and then those audio signals go into an amplifier which then send the audio signals to the speakers of the speaker strobes.