What to Expect During an Inspection

Brent Johnson, Manager of Advanced Cabling Systems, says there are five things an inspector needs to check during an inspection of your fire alarm systems. Each smoke detector needs to be individually tested using canned smoke or a smoke pole. A visual inspection is not adequate. It’s critical to test every component in the system from the smoke detectors to the communications systems and the monitoring station. Johnson says you should receive a detailed report telling of any deficiencies in your system.

Duration: 2:16

Transcription:

My name's Brent Johnson, with Advanced Cabling Systems.

The first thing you'd look for, visually inspect, but then you'd have to go through the complete system and test each individual smoke detector to make sure every one tests out properly. You can use smoke, or a smoke pole, and then just make sure that they go off when they're supposed to.

You should expect us to come in there and test 100% of the smoke detectors and the pull stations, the audible visuals. And that would be the horn strobes or speaker strobes throughout the building. And document each one that you test. And give a pass fail on each. Itemize them on the billing report. Well, alert the central station first to the monitoring station. Let them know you're gonna be testing, of course. And then, after you send the signals, you will tell on their end that they've received each signal and what the signals were and then match up with the devices that were tested.

In this area, we use a tag system, in which green would be a pass tag, yellow would be a deficiency, but your system's still operational. And then a red tag, of course, the system is impaired, where it has to be an emergency to fix.

We would have a list of items, if there was any, that needed to be repaired and then give them a price on the repair. But we'd have a full list of what needed to be repaired. A lot of times it can be done while we're on the site. We use building reports now. So you would have the full test of each individual item that we tested, including smoke detectors, pull stations, HVAC air handling unit, test the smoke detectors, all the audible visuals. So you'd have a full list of everything we tested including the communications to the central station, the back up emergency battery back up. So you'd get everything on this report. Each itemized point that we tested.