Fire Alarm Testing
Having a fire alarm installed in your home or business – office building, factory, whatever it might be – provides important peace of mind. However, simply having an alarm system installed is not enough to protect your family, yourself or your staff from the risk of fire.
Taking Care of Your Fire Alarm System
Regularly testing your fire alarm system is a vital part of making sure a home or business location is safe. Fire alarm testing can mean the difference between life and death – you need to know that your system is fully functional, and that you are protected. At SDi Fire, we maintain close contact with important industry associates and the NFPA, who offer guidelines and recommendations for fire alarm testing.
You should visually check your system on a weekly basis. From regular household smoke detectors to the most intensive and expensive industrial fire alarm systems, any good detector will have a simple, easy-to-read display to let you know whether or not it is working properly. Familiarize yourself with this display and check once a week that everything looks right – if lights or indicators change, you need to address these changes immediately.
For larger, industrial fire alarm testing, there will be additional factors that you will need to consider when testing the system. Beyond the weekly monitoring of basic indicators, you should regularly make sure that sprinkler and other emergency systems are functioning. Conduct a weekly visual inspection of the valves that connect the sprinklers to the alarm system, looking for leaks or general irregularities in pipes and connections.
In addition to these weekly checks, you should inspect your emergency system in more depth throughout the year, at quarterly and annual intervals. If you are maintaining a complete fire emergency system in an office building, factory, or any other large complex, the more factors you will need to take into consideration when you conduct your fire alarm testing. With so much to monitor, it can quickly become overwhelming, and missing even the smallest fault in a system could end up costing lives.
Accurate and Easy Fire Alarm Testing
Having the right equipment can make the difference in missing smaller details or faults in equipment that might not be obvious. Fire alarm testing can be a long, exhaustive process, and it is vital that you have tools accurately tuned to measure exactly what is needed. You not only need to test the system’s basic responsiveness, but you also need to be able to carry out cleaning and maintenance to do your part in keeping the system functional.
SDi Fire provides equipment specifically for testing the efficacy of your fire protection system. Our products are developed with strict adherence to NFPA standards and codes of practice, and our team is always investing in new technologies and setting new standards in fire safety. We can help make your fire alarm testing more efficient, more accurate and more reliable. Explore the fire safety equipment on our website and see what we can offer you. You might also be interested in some of our alarm system peripherals, built with the same knowledge and expertise.