Yet another annoying story from the old days........fire alarms

The thread about the tragic fire keyed my memory

19 Dead in fire Bronx NY

Another annoying story from the old days. In the late 90s one of our jobs was a communications/ paging/ E911 upgrade for Ritzville WA, and I built a new control for the door locks. Jail doors, and there were two court doors for transferring prisoners in and out of court.


The court doors were different. They had to be powered at all times to be locked. Dropping power caused them to unlock. This is a fairly old building, has been hacked/ remodeled / added on a few times. I got most of the locks working and could NOT get the court locks to work. Simply, I could not get wiring continuity. Of course there were no diagrams, blueprints, or even a maintenance guy who was "for sure." These last two locks got push aside, and we were nearing job completion, I had still not found "it." One day I was working in the dispatch, and two alarm guys were in there, and one of them said something about the "relays in the boiler room."

Something just CLICKED!!

I turned to them and said, "WHAT did you just say?"

They were startled of course, as neither of us "concerned" the other. Of course it turned out that there were relay interlocks in the boiler---that when the fire alarm energized, some relays in the boiler room dropped out and killed the boiler AND ALSO DROPPED POWER to the courtroom doors. These guys had these relays disconnected during the alarm upgrade, and it was summer, so the "boiler did not care."

I could post some photos but this is the "spare" computer as my "main" one blew up, temporarily LOL

On a side note the old radio console was a software controlled deal on an IBM DOS desktop. When we got the switchover to the new control consoles done and tested, and switched off the old consoles, the CRT image did not change at all LOL. The images were permanently burned into the CRT phosphor on the displays

I definitely feel your pain been at it a long time.

Mike

I've run into plenty of interesting (stupid) wiring jobs at schools. Things that went places before going to the right place. There were a few that it was easier to abandon what was there and run it logically...