I received a phone call from the Fire Alarm Control Panel monitoring station saying that there had been an issue going on at my HOA. As par of a community association management company, we go out to inspect issues such as these.

It can be difficult working in high-rise communities if you are unfamiliar with how the operating systems work. I decided it would be a good idea to make a video to show property managers, Board of Directors, and community associations what I experienced when receiving a fire trouble from the panel.

Alright. So today, we’re downtown at the beautiful Point Condominiums, long history here. And of course a lot of building going on in downtown Denver. We got a call on an issue with the fire control panel and alarms going off. So we’re going to do some research into that.

Let’s go.

So now we’re down here at the Fire Control Panel, which is here, this thing over here runs the dialer, this is the control panel. It senses the alarms which will then call the fire department, and that was an issue that we had.

So we’re going to jump in and take a look at what we have going on. Let’s get into it.

Okay, so this is a fire control panel and we’re going to go ahead and start off by doing some research here.

Alright So what we did was we hit enter then we went to programming and that says, read history and it says, 2.E—

That means 2 and enter.

This is our event history, we’re going to hit the up button here, this one. take a look at what’s been going on

07/11/20  at 7:08AM it got put back to all systems normal. Before that, It was reset.

The alarm was silence that 7 to 6 a.m. Let’s go back down. And here is an alarm monitor: main water flow at 6:50.

So that’s what tripped the alarm. All right? So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to run down to the fire pump room, and we’re going to take a look at a little bit of what’s going on down there. So let’s go to the fire pump room.

I hate this mask… stay safe out there!

Okay, now we’re in the fire pump room. And as you can see it’s a pretty tight room down here. Upon entering in— I definitely have somebody who knows how to pick locks because I’ve got no damage to the door, but I have a— I’ve got bag, a belt, I can see some drug use needles. So I got to be careful where I step. All part of the fun of  being a community manager. All right tight squeeze around here. See here’s some caps, and there’s a needle right there.

A couple of things could have happened here this monitor— right there, this thing. It senses flow, or so I’m told, a couple things could happened. One that monitors going bad and needs to be replaced. But more than likely what probably happened is there was a huge drop in City pressure which then caused the to alarm so Before I make a judgment on replacing this particular piece of equipment.

I’m going to wait a little while and see what happens. I’m going to determine whether or not it happens again. And if it does at that point, I’m going to make a recommendation to my board that we change out that monitor, but for right now I’m going to go ahead and assess that it is a drop in City pressure. This room is really big and complicated. I’ve been a  community manager for a long time and even still I don’t quite get it! That was a compressor, that just went on right over there this right here’s the pump, and this right here allows water to continue to flow so you can work on the pump.

If you got to drain it down and work on it. So some pretty cool stuff that I’ve learned— passing on the information. I am going to definitely get out of this room
because I become distracted and I’m not liking where I’m stepping. So I gotta get somebody in here to clean this up, not anybody out to fix the system right now because the seems to be normal and it’s reset.

And now I can call the fire department and let him know what’s going on.

So back to the office we go!