Fire alarms in strata buildings, why so often? and, what do you do?
For anyone that’s lived in a large strata building (technically over 100 lot, but anything over 80 is getting big) you would have fallen victim to the inappropriately time false fire alarm.
These false alarms are beyond annoying and create a culture where people fail to leave the building during an alarm.
But why do they happen?
This is easy there are only a couple reasons why a fire system will trigger an alarm- detector senses smoke- detector senses fire- the sprinkler system has a leak- sprinkler system releases water via the sprinkler head (due to fire reaching the sprinkler head)
So the most common cause of an alarm being activated is detector senses smoke. Now we have all heard the saying, “where there is smoke there must be fire”.
Well, that is somewhat correct, the problem is that often the smoke is cooking smoke and it triggers a building-wide alarm because someone triggers the detector in common area after opening their front door.
Or in other words HUMAN ERROR.
So when you hear people complain about the body corporate fire alarms and the system, you might want to remind them that the problem isn’t the system it’s the residents doing the wrong thing.
How do you solve it?
Education, it’s all about teaching apartment owners, so they understand that opening the apartment door is not the solution to their apartment alarm going off.
Ways to communicate:-
- notice in lift
- make a cover page for your by-laws that you give to property managers & new owners
- letterbox drop every six months
- and any other way you want to try
