Remote Life Safety System Monitoring for Safer Buildings
Around-the-Clock Awareness: How Remote System Monitoring Advances Life Safety Across Buildings
Today’s facility teams are busier than ever, and their responsibilities keep growing. Regardless of how packed their days are, they must continue to meet their critical priorities, like ensuring the safety of occupants within their buildings. This is why they rely on specifying professionals to recommend fire and life safety technologies that streamline tasks and optimize resources.
This is especially true for teams responsible for protecting multiple buildings and large campuses. Each fire alarm control unit can have a discrete set of alarms and alerts that require different responses during incidents. Maintenance details and schedules vary between panels, requiring detailed recordkeeping and scheduling.
In these types of complex facilities, addressing life safety system issues typically requires knowledgeable on-site personnel, but a facility manager or other trained staff may not always be available when issues occur.
One technology that helps address this issue in large, complex buildings and campuses is real-time system monitoring for connected life safety systems. By including remote system monitoring in a building specification, fire protection engineers and contractors can help facility teams view fire alarm control unit info from anywhere, streamline maintenance and service, receive real-time notifications, and facilitate emergency response.
1. View Fire Alarm Control Unit Information Anywhere, Any Time
Keeping track of fire safety panel status in buildings across multiple locations can be time-consuming and difficult. Currently, many facility managers and personnel must physically travel to individual panels within each building to see the panel’s status and check for alerts. Without the presence of trained, authorized personnel on site, troubleshooting over the phone can be difficult.
Specifying a remote system monitoring solution with a secure online portal can make it easier for teams to view and manage information across panels from a single location. Users can view information related to alarms and issues to quickly identify and make informed maintenance decisions. These monitoring solutions also provide data that helps teams be more proactive by helping prevent potential issues from becoming bigger problems.
By having detailed information on hand 24/7, facility managers and personnel no longer need to spend time traveling from panel to panel and building to building. The online dashboard makes it easy to see notifications for events, such as pre-alarms, fires and faults. As a result, teams can spend their time more wisely, better prioritize daily responsibilities and improve their productivity.
2. Streamline Maintenance and Service
With remote access to life safety system data, facility managers and technicians can more effectively plan maintenance tasks and reduce downtime. When everything is running smoothly, they can maintain confidence and focus on other tasks. When problems do occur, they can quickly access information related to the event to help troubleshoot problems and restore operation.
Remote system monitoring can help save money for facilities that outsource fire alarm system maintenance, especially with service providers that charge for each call. By providing them with remote access to fire alarm panels, providers can see a panel’s status before they send a technician to the site and use the information to:
- Determine if a site visit is necessary
- Ensure the technician has the correct parts
- Minimize on-site service calls
If a site visit is necessary, the maintenance team can already understand what’s happening before arriving. Or an off-site engineer can easily view system data to understand what’s happening and effectively advise on-site technicians. In both situations, these teams are making informed decisions and acting faster, saving time and resources.
3. Receive Real-Time Notifications
With a facility team’s busy schedules, it can be difficult to proactively check the status of life safety systems throughout the day. By enabling real-time notifications to their emails and mobile devices, facility managers can stay in touch with their life safety systems as if they were standing in front of the physical control unit itself.
Users can receive notifications of system status changes and alerts for all types of events. This allows them to prioritize responses, such as calling a local service provider or checking the area for abnormal conditions. Real-time notifications give facility managers the power to remain proactive and alert throughout the workday and beyond.
4. Improve Emergency Response
Life safety systems with remote system monitoring should always be used in conjunction with a central station service. However, traditional fire alarm systems can only connect to central station monitoring and local fire departments via telephone lines. While this facilitates a fast response when an alarm sounds, it provides little information beyond notice that the alarm has been triggered. In most cases, emergency personnel are only alerted to basic information, such as the building location or the zone where the alarm was triggered. These traditional systems usually cannot convey detailed information such as the floor or room number where the emergency is happening.
Advanced life safety remote system monitoring solutions connect with and provide detailed critical information to the central station or local fire department. These details include device type, event, zone, point text and point address. Having this information means emergency teams can focus their time and energy on getting occupants to safety and resolving the issue rather than figuring out details about the event.
Remote life safety system status monitoring is not a substitute for real-time central station monitoring of a fire alarm system. It is intended to complement central station monitoring and enhance the ability for teams to manage their fire and life safety systems effectively.
Solving Real Customer Challenges
For ASG Integrated Systems LTD in Southport, England, remote life safety system status monitoring is helping teams address real customer needs. ASG installs, commissions and maintains fire detection and alarm systems across a wide range of buildings, including hotels, schools, healthcare facilities and domestic dwellings. The company currently leverages the FireClass SafeLINC remote life safety system status monitoring solution from Johnson Controls at 22 customer sites, with additional installations planned.
“Our team now has the capability to remotely monitor the live status of fire detection and alarm systems nationwide—from our office, on site or via a smartphone app,” said Dale Robertson, director of ASG Integrated Systems LTD. “We can track false alarm rates, review event logs and diagnose faults before attending site, ensuring our engineers arrive fully prepared with the correct replacement parts and spares.”
The live system status monitoring and notifications allow the ASG team to proactively respond to alarm or fault conditions before the customer even reports an issue. Clients appreciate the proactive approach, especially when the team contacts them to advise that a fault has been detected.
“One of our clients uses the SafeLINC portal to confirm that their staff on remote sites are carrying out weekly fire alarm tests—and confirming that a different manual call point is tested each week. They can view live status and download event logs for reporting and compliance purposes,” Robertson said. “As a team of young, tech-savvy engineers, we’re excited to help bring the fire detection and alarm sector into the modern age by embracing remote diagnostics and app-based system management.”
Author: Colm Healy, Senior Product Manager
To learn more about remote life safety system status monitoring for commercial buildings , please visit johnsoncontrols.co.uk
