North Road Academy, an Islamic primary school in Stoke-on-Trent, has upgraded its fire detection system by converting the existing conventional installation to an addressable loop rather than replacing it, using C-TEC's FastConvert zone converter.
The school had initially considered a complete replacement of its fire system. Specialist electrical contractor W R Fire & Security carried out a site survey and identified that the existing conventional system could instead be enhanced by converting it to addressable operation with FastConvert.
Three upgrade routes priced
Before settling on FastConvert, the project team assessed three other upgrade options:
- A new conventional panel. This would have allowed the zones to be separated out and additional zones created, but it required extra cabling and would have left the school with a conventional system able to report only zonal fire and fault information.
- A full re-cable. Ruled out on budget grounds, as it was estimated to add around £10,000 in materials and additional labour, together with far greater disruption and a longer installation timescale.
- Converting the remaining six zones into loops. This would have added roughly a week to the installation for two engineers, plus additional cabling, materials and disruption, at an estimated extra cost of £3,000 to £4,000.
According to C-TEC, FastConvert was the only option that avoided all three drawbacks at once: it reuses the existing wiring, delivers a genuine loop-based addressable system rather than a conventional one, and achieves this without the extra cost, labour or disruption.
Two radials combined into one loop
Working with the legacy system's wiring, the converter turned the school's conventional installation into an open-protocol CAST addressable system. The resulting system is described as capable of lockdown alert functionality and internet connectivity, and able to accommodate C-TEC's CAST-PRO combined fire detection and alarm devices, which the manufacturer describes as false-alarm resistant and which house the sounders/VADs and multi-sensors within the detector head. Two radials were combined into a single loop, with a dedicated two-loop panel installed for FastConvert.
Installer's assessment
Wayne Riley, managing director of W R Fire & Security, said the company was very impressed with the converter and considers it highly innovative in what it can do. He set the result against the alternatives: a full re-wire would have added around £10,000 to the job, while converting the remaining zones into loops would have cost an extra £3,000 to £4,000 plus a week of additional labour for two engineers. FastConvert, he said, substantially reduced installation time, site disruption and labour costs, and saved approximately £3,500 on the project.
Riley also commented on the CAST-PRO devices, which he rated as superior to other manufacturers' products because the sounder/VADs and multi-sensors are built into the heads, so separate sounder bases are not needed.
The case illustrates how existing conventional infrastructure can be retained while moving to addressable monitoring. The cost and time figures quoted are the installer's estimates for the options it priced and the saving it reports on this project, rather than a general performance guarantee.