Choosing The Right Fire Alarm Monitoring System For Campuses

Fire safety is a necessity on every campus. It keeps both people and valuable assets safe. Campuses, both corporate and educational, need to follow strict safety standards by law. However, fire alarm systems can be prone to preventable failures.

Some of the failures that your fire alarm system can run into are...

1. False alarms: University campus fire alarm system malfunctions, human error, or environmental factors such as dust or humidity can cause false alarms.
2. Battery failure: If you do not regularly check and change the batteries in your fire alarms, they may fail to work when needed.
3. Equipment malfunction: Fire alarms can stop working if they are not properly maintained or if they become worn out.
4. Power outages: lack of power means lack of visibility. You are often left in the dark, are your generators still running? Are backup batteries almost drained?

To address these potential failures, it is crucial to have a reliable fire alarm monitoring system in place.

How Installing Fire Alarm Monitoring Systems Can Be Hard

As a distributor, you want your fire alarm solutions to sell to as many people as possible. A problem that you will run into is difficulty integrating into existing fire alarm systems on campuses. This happens for reasons that include...

1. Incompatible and discontinued legacy equipment: You will need a manufacturer that can promise you compatibility with older devices. Also, examples exist when your product line-up isn't compatible with recent technology and you need device mediation.
2. Infrastructure limitations: Your campus infrastructure plays a critical role during fire alarm monitoring system installations. Campuses often worry about Network Security. An alarm monitoring system sending data to a Central Station will be concerning to them.
3. Lack of documentation: The campus' fire alarm systems might be lacking instructional and informational documents. You want your product line-up to be well documented.
4. Offering accessible documentation makes you a desirable distributor. The documentation allows campuses to smoothly integrate the line-up you're selling. This also saves you from constantly answering customer calls due to inadequate or nonexistent documentation.

Why You Need A Fire Alarm Monitoring System

Fire alarm monitoring systems let you check the status of all fire alarm devices in your network. This ensures...

1. Precision: You know exactly where an alarm goes off. You're also aware of any damage or offline status of equipment such as sprinkler systems, heat detectors, smoke detectors.
2. Speed: When first responders and campus personnel know exactly what went wrong and where you can save lives and assets
3. Maintenance and monitoring: You stay on top of your equipment's status. You know if a device has gone offline. With the right type of sensor equipment, you get to customize what discrete and analog information you receive. This lets you know if you need to drive out to locations to change batteries or do maintenance without the hassle of constantly traveling to check.

The fire alarm monitoring system you choose must be highly compatible. Chances are your campus has been around for a while, so without support from the correct fire alarm monitoring system manufacturer, you may encounter issues.

Finding a compatible manufacturer is important for the future, even if your campus is new. This will lead to you having an easier time adapting to future technology.

Picking The Right Fire Alarm Monitoring System

The right fire alarm monitoring system lets you offer your customers fire protection alarm solutions that they can't turn down. The right fire alarm monitoring system will offer you...

1. Integration capabilities: Integration capabilities are your main concern. If you cannot integrate into a potential customer's system, you are obsolete to them. If you trust your manufacturers to support you and ensure smooth integration in the future, you are invaluable.
2. Scalability: If you can offer your customers compatibility, you can offer scalability. Ensure your fire alarm monitoring system from the manufacturer can adjust to future changes in campus or building infrastructure. One way to do this is with a reliable master station, such as the PRISM LX.
3. Easy User Interfaces: Campuses that want proprietary fire alarm monitoring systems will have in-house staff. The staff should be able to easily understand and interact with your fire alarm monitoring system's interface at their monitoring center.
4. Notification Options: Part of selling your product line-up as being convenient will be offering SMS and Email alarm notifications. This means that your manufacturer provides a messaging feature that sends customizable texts and emails to the staff's phones. This makes it easy for them to remotely monitor the entire fire alarm system.
5. Compliance with Regulations: Make sure that the fire alarm monitoring system follows local and national regulations such as NFPA safety requirements.

How Digitize Will Set You Apart From Competitors

Digitize was established in 1977 by experts with years of invaluable experience. Digitize already manufactures fire alarm monitoring systems for many Ivy League university campuses.

Our crown jewel at Digitize is the PRISM LX Monitoring System. When an alarm occurs, the PRISM LX collects it and displays it to the campus staff through a graphic display, along with an audible alarm and a printed record.

The PRISM LX follows FCC and NFPA rules and regulations. It offers inputs such as...

1. Remote Inputs that extend from 1 to 6 based on your request, with 4 through 6 being supervised.
2. Built-in Ethernet port to manage memory and firmware
3. 3 USB Ports

The PRISM LX offers additional features such as redundancy and backup mechanisms, which meet NFPA 72 standards. It also equips you with tried and tested communication protocols.

The PRISM LX, made in the USA by Digitize, makes you a versatile choice for any customer. You will not be limited to set form factors, which is a problem that you will run into if you rely on overseas manufacturers.

Combining the PRISM LX with Honeywell CLSS allows you to send automatic malfunction, required maintenance, and potential hazard alerts. This minimizes your customer's risk and response times. This gives campus fire safety managers visibility and control over their fire safety measures.

We do not believe in handing off a product and leaving our clients scratching their heads. If need be, we offer you and your customers training for our products. In addition, all of our equipment is well documented.

System 3505 PRISM LX In Ivy League Universities

Before 2014, the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN), an Ivy League university didn't have proper fire alarm monitoring. It is situated on a small campus in a densely populated city, and at that time the campus had a copper wire-based fire alarm monitoring system.

This gave the campus several issues during construction projects. Eventually, it resulted in a total loss of their monitoring capability, which led them to seek a customized solution at Digitize.

In 2014 they implemented our new system which saw them integrate 5 PRISM LX that collected from Digitize's VersAlarms in 147 buildings. The VersAlarm is an IP-based alarm, which ensures instant transmission to on and off-campus monitoring stations.

You can read more about how satisfied UPENN is with our customized PRISM LX solution to this day here

Make Your Manufacturer Your Engineer

Digitize commits to continuously keeping up with evolving standards and improving whenever possible. You do not want to guess if your manufacturer is following safety standards. Digitize has experts with over 40 years of experience who make sure our products and safety standards are up to date.

If your manufacturer is an expert, it takes out a lot of your leg work. At Digitize, we make sure that you can easily upgrade your campus alarm system solutions. You will not have to worry about compatibility, reliability, or expansion with us.

If you have any further questions, please reach out and I can point you in the right direction.

Call me at 973-663-1011 or Email me at info@digitize-inc.com