Albany Stratton VA Medical Center
SNew York’s Albany Stratton VA Medical Center was a similar retrofit of a 20-year old, zoned system that was rife with false alarms. The main hospital is 16 floors connected to a number of nearby ancillary buildings and serves approximately 32,000 vets/year.
“They’ve had problems in the past where they weren’t able to locate an alarm on an existing zone,” said Brad Nelson of Alarm & Suppression, Inc. “With patient safety involved, they really needed a system that would eliminate that.”

Alarm & Suppression and electrical contractor Clifford R. Gray, Inc. installed two ONYXWorks workstations, three DVCs, 13 NFS2-640 fire alarm control panels, five NFS-320 panels and two network annunciators, all on a fiber network carrying digital audio loops and all fire alarm systems.

Nelson also created customized commands in the ONYXWorks system to simplify maintenance. “I’ve set up macros for them. With one click of a button, they can disable all the strobes, all the elevator recalls, fan shut downs …”

The system also includes 68 digital audio amplifiers to allow for separate, zoned voice communications. As in the Colorado case, when an alarm goes off in one part of a building, that zone gets an individual message.

“They’ve got a very specific voice evacuation plan, where only in the smoke-zone in-alarm does it activate strobes and an audible alert. The rest of the floor and the rest of the hospital get a different announcement,” said Nelson.

According to Nelson, the ease of setting up the points in the field was valuable to the project. With the smoke detectors, pull stations and other initiating devices being addressable, contractors could follow the integrator’s plans and install each device without having to fool with the usual dipswitches or bar codes.

As was the case with Grand Junction’s VA, Albany’s fire protection system had to be expandable with enough capacity to support additions. “They wanted something that was easy to add on to and had a lot of room for future expansions,” said Nelson.