The American University community can take comfort in knowing that today all buildings on campus are equipped with new state-of-the-art fire alarm systems that ensure greater safety with the capability to communicate smarter, more advanced, and quicker detection signals. The new alarm panels are able to more quickly and accurately detect and identify potential smoke and fire hazards.

Facilities Management’s Electric and Life Safety (ELS) team has upgraded the simple ionization smoke detectors to smart photo electric and multi-criteria detectors. While the older devices detected only particles, the new devices sense several types of smoke, the temperature and color of the smoke, carbon monoxide, and much more. The devices are also better at preventing unwanted and false alarms. All fire alarm system signals are sent to and received at the fire alarm monitoring station, and depending on the type of signal received, the appropriate follow-up action is carried out. 

“Our campus’ updated, state-of-the-art fire alarm systems equipment significantly improves functionality and stability, leading to greater safety for everyone on campus,” said Fire Alarm certified and Master Electrician, ELS Manager, Carl Spence. “The new system takes reliability to another level meeting the latest government and UL standards, as well as anticipating upcoming code requirements.” 

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the ELS team is once again working with senior university leadership and industry professionals to develop plans for capitalizing on the additional capabilities of the new fire alarm systems to include development of updated graphical and voice notification interfaces and migrating the balance of our network from copper to fiber for improved speed and bandwidth and updating. They are also considering Cloud applications for improved system reporting. 

The new fire alarm system is the product of a years-long initiative that began in 2017 when Facilities Management began introducing next-generation fire alarm systems to strategic locations throughout campus as pilots to ensure their compatibility with existing systems. Once they were deemed compatible, the ELS team executed a migration strategy for the replacement of the old system and installation of the new system. To minimize inconvenience to the campus community, the ELS team also took advantage of the campus shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic to begin work on the most intrusive and impactful aspects of replacing and re-circuiting the old fire detection devices with the new ones.     

“The years of methodical budgeting, planning, and execution have resulted in the delivery of a sophisticated, more advanced system for keeping our campus population safe. I feel proud and gratified to have worked on such an important infrastructure investment with the ELS team of professionals whose guiding principle was to provide maximum safety to everyone on campus,” said David Osborne, Director of Energy and Engineering.