Prosecution / Notice served for non-action of UWFs action plan ??

[Dragonmaster]

I love an optimist Stevo

[jokar]

The point is that many Brigades do not use the guidnace in BS5839 Part 1 2002 about numbers of Uwfs, when they should be investigated and whether that is by the engineer or the Rp for the FA.  When a system has hundreds of device and the FRS send a letter after 2 incidents then that belittles what they are attempting to do.  Also, there is an issue for some FRS with recording the actual address of a premises and the details that officers record\afetr an incident.  All false alarms are not all false alarms.

[Steven N]

I love an optimist Stevo

lol I know Dragonmaster but you can dream!! Jokar I agree totally with your points about recording & the number of heads in relation to size

[AFD]

As an add on to this... forgeting the cause of the alarm for the moment, is it acceptable for staff in a care home to call the fire service when the alarm actuates before investigating?

Yes it would be definitely acceptable. My Brigade have exempted certian premises including resi care from any form of call challenge & still attend every call from these premises.
Away from resi care many of the false alarms are down to poor management:
Builders not managed correctly when working
Forgetting to tell the arc when carrying out a weekly test
Alarm engineers not putting the system offline whilst working on it
Get the management right & loads more UWFs will disapear.

If you look at a lot of brigades web sites they state their UWFS policy exempts Resi care, but I can assure you they are sending letters telling homes to investigate before they call following 1 'false alarm' in over a year ( size of system not taken into account either ). After receiving these letters I have checked their web sites.

[Dragonmaster]

The point is that many Brigades do not use the guidnace in BS5839 Part 1 2002 about numbers of Uwfs, when they should be investigated and whether that is by the engineer or the Rp for the FA.  When a system has hundreds of device and the FRS send a letter after 2 incidents then that belittles what they are attempting to do.  Also, there is an issue for some FRS with recording the actual address of a premises and the details that officers record\afetr an incident.  All false alarms are not all false alarms.

I agree that BS 5893 does 'allow' a certain failure rate, but i can't believe you would be happy to allow UwFS to continue. In some premises i deal with, where that is all they have (no history of fires), it leads to a de-sensitising of the response to an activation.

Acheivable or not, our target has to be zero false alarms, and we will continue to seek reductions even when a premises is 'performing' in the lower zones defined in the BS.

What would you do if the system was aging fast and becoming less reliable, but because there were a large number of heads, and the rate of increase wasn't too high - would you allow this to continue until the number crossed the first threshold?