Fire Alarm Faults: What is reasonable ?

[Midland Retty]

Opinions as always please, this is once again hypothetical scenario, its not a barbed question.

Lets say Im a landlord of a HMO. A tenant contacts me at 7.00pm to tell me that there is a fault showing on the fire alarm panel.

What is reasonable. Do i assume the fault may be minor and the system would perform as expected if there was a fire, and leave it to the next day, or maybe later?

Would you expect me to get down there and install say some temporary detection (if that was an acceptable interim measures)

Would you expect me to have a contract with a fire alarm company with say a guaranteed 4 hour response to try and rectify the fault that night.

What is reasonable, and what if there was a fire the very same day or night the fault was reported?

Discuss>

[Wiz]

As a landlord I presume you might have certain responsibilities to support the facilities for which you are providing to your customers at a charge to them.

I believe you should have a service contract in place with a competent person that included a maximum 4 hour attendance time for dealing with faults etc.

Obviously some faults indicated on a control are not as critical as others. For example,  a temporary mains failure due to a power cut, as opposed to the failure of sounder circuits. But you would still have to have someone who can differentiate between these type of faults.

A very competent fire alarm engineer, with the right sort of panel and the correct information of fault status might be able to make an appropriate desicion on how urgently the fault needed to be attended to by just a conversation on the telephone.

I'm pretty sure that if your tenants are resonable in their interaction with the system, and you find a competent fire alarm engineer who can provide the contractural service, then the cost of this will surely be far cheaper than you going to site and installing temporary detection facilities whenever there is any sort of fault.

[nearlythere]

Opinions as always please, this is once again hypothetical scenario, its not a barbed question.

Lets say Im a landlord of a HMO. A tenant contacts me at 7.00pm to tell me that there is a fault showing on the fire alarm panel.

What is reasonable. Do i assume the fault may be minor and the system would perform as expected if there was a fire, and leave it to the next day, or maybe later?

Would you expect me to get down there and install say some temporary detection (if that was an acceptable interim measures)

Would you expect me to have a contract with a fire alarm company with say a guaranteed 4 hour response to try and rectify the fault that night.

What is reasonable, and what if there was a fire the very same day or night the fault was reported?

Discuss>

That's one of those situations MR where all will become clear in a court room. Up to then there will be multitude of opinions to pick from, mostly all very sound - until something goes wrong.
Judges tend to live in cloud cuckoo land and houses of qestionable repute.

[Midland Retty]

Thanks Wiz and Nearlythere. Your responses echo my own thoughts to some extent.

On one hand yes I do have a legal responsibility as a landlord and should do everything reasonably practicable to address a problem which might put my tenants at risk even if it is the early hours of the morning.

On the other who is to say what is reasonable, other than a judge and jury?

The reason I ask is two fold really. One harks back to the lack of info out there for responsible persons on what they should do when such a fault occurs. Wiz your response is exactly what i tell my punters they should do in such situations, but you seldom find that written down anywhere in official guidance.

Some of those punters understand the risk associated with leaving a sleeping risk overnight without AFD coverage, others seem to wing it and are happy to leave the system in fault til the next day, or even the next week, not knowing if the fault is serious.

I was wondering if I was being over the top, and what others thought.

I think we would all agree leaving a fire alarm system in fault for more than 24 hours is a bit naughty...(?) or would your response be thus:- If fitted correctly there should no general fault with a fire alarm system that totally disables is capability to function (unless both power supplies have been disconnected, or key components has been damaged or vandalised??  )

In other words, does a general "fault" light showing on the panel is normally indicative of something minor

[Graeme]

and a company could take up to 8 hours respond to BS

[kurnal]

It all depends on the fault. And how will anybody know what that is on a conventional system?

The RP could always operate a call point or two in seperate zones (or detectors) to see if the alarm still works? It may not be definitive but will give an indication of whether it is totally shot or still has some functionality.

[Wiz]

Midland, the 'common fault' indicator on a control panel will operate whatever type of fault has occured. Often there is a second indicator that may describe the specifics. Sometimes this second indicator can only be seen when the control panel is opened (for use by engineers).

Unfortunately, the second indicator might still be very general in scope of coverage i.e. if it was a 'Power Supply' fault this might be because of loss of mains supply, disconnection of battery, failure of charge or battery fuses, incorrect battery charging, temporary variation of mains supply voltage outside certain parameters etc etc.

Graeme is right about BS 5839 recommending a service contract requiring an attendance to deal with faults within 8 hours, but unless the premises is really difficult to get to, I believe there should be no reason why this couldn't be reduced to 4 hours. The most important thing is to employ a good service company and rely on them to know just what needs the most urgent investigation.

[SamFIRT]

Investigated a fire recently that had started inside the control panel of a fire alarm system ( how ironic?). A smouldering fire had occurred inside the box and progressed eventually to flame, taking out the roof. I believe the battery charging circuitry to have failed

However; the relevance to this post you ask?  Well interestingly the control box was located in the loft. The occupiers had tried to re-set the fault alarm, which was keeping the occupants of the bedrooms underneath awake, then when the audible sounder was driving them nuts they simply inserted gum in the sounder outlet.

 Caught fire the next day.

[AnthonyB]

A further unanticipated reason as to why there are rules on where to site control panels....