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We are now going to look at testing a fire alarm. Now this is one brand of fire alarm. It may be that in your office you have got a completely different system, or a very similar system, so it is very important that you know how to test your alarm. This video is just to give an idea on how to test a basic system. With the alarm system, you have got 2 keys. One key goes in to activate the system; and that is how you can reset it, and the other key is how you can test each of the fire alarm points.
So the first part of the test is to look at the unit and make sure that there is no warning lights on. So as you can see here there are no actual warning lights on the alarm system at all. Down here are system indicators, so if there is a particular problem, then there will be an alarm here and you will see a red light will come up and tell you exactly where the problem is. The first thing to do is just pop the key in and just turn the key, and just turn it on to make sure it is all functioning and is all okay and the display lights up. Now from here is how we are going to silence alarms and reset the alarm systems actually after the alarm system has been activated. So now we know that is all working and there are no problems there, we can take the key out and then we can test the alarm point itself.
When you are actually testing the alarm, it is actually quite important that we don't just activate the alarm from the control unit. We need to actually test the actual fire points because we need to make sure that they all actually work.So as you see on this, we have a number. So everyone in the building is numbered, so in part of the fire log, we will log the number of the fire activation switch and then we will log the time that we have tested it. We don't necessarily have to test every single one each time, but you definitely have to make sure that each one is done. So it is common that every time you come through, so maybe every Monday morning when you do your fire test, you activate it at a different point, just to make sure that each one of the alarms is working. So the key we use is the black key here, and we just insert it here into this hole and turn it. Now different alarm systems have different ways of testing. Some have a switch that you have on the bottom that you have to pushup. Others have something that you have to push up and turn. You need to make sure what type of activation works on the alarm system you have. So what we are going to do is pop the key in and activate the alarm, once I have activated the alarm, I will then move across to the bay on here and I am going to insert the key and push the silence alarm button, and that will just take the sound off so then we can just discuss the features of resetting the system. So what I have done is turn the key on and pushed the silence button. Now the alarm is still activating which is why you are getting the beep here. I haven't reset the system, but I have at least made it so that I can check to make sure that everything is working okay. So we can look down here and we can see exactly what problems are on the system. Here we have simulated an earth fault so you can just see what the light looks like. Down here you can see the stationary light which is the standard light which just shows that the alarm is sounding but is silenced. Other buttons on here, we can switch the buzzer off which is the beeping noise by pushing this button here. Now we have still got the same lights except for an extra one which has lit up to say that the buzzer has been silenced. So the next thing that we want to do is just reset the system, so that we can take these lights out. So we just hold the "reset system", take it away, and then in here we have simulated an earth fault, so if there was a fault with the alarm system and it is not working, here you can hear that we have got the beeping noise continuously. If there is a problem, you should report that problem to the fire alarm problem and they can get it out to you on the same day and get the system reset and any faults rectified.
So now you see, we have now eliminated the fault, the alarm is gone, so we can check the display, there are no other warning messages on here, so we can turn the key off and then close the unit up, and now we can document everything that we have done; the fact we have had a fault, what we have done about that fault, and also what action is being taken, and we can make sure that we have got done everything in the test properly recorded.