Smoke Alerts

Support
,
1

This weekend, my smoke alarm went off. After I received a call from the central station and gave them my password, they hung up, but a few minutes later, the fire department showed up. I know I have my 2GIG panel setup to “confirm” fire alerts, but apparently the system is not registering it. How do I avoid having the F.D. in my house every time there’s a bit of smoke while cooking?

I can’t remember the question’s number, but there is a setting to notify the C.S. instead of calling the fire department directly. The C.S. called me, but the F.D. showed up later, so I am not really sure if that’s part of the procedure or if the C.S. just made an honest mistake and called the F.D. anyway.

2

If you have not provided a premise phone number, the CS will dispatch the fire authorities when they receive a fire alarm signal. They will then make their way down the emergency call list. If they get a valid pass code from someone on the emergency call list, they will attempt to cancel the dispatch of the FD. Sometimes they are unable to cancel the dispatch, mostly due to the trucks being on the way or close by. From looking at the event history this weekend, that appears to be what happened.

3

Due to fire code, its not entirely up to us on how fire alarms are responded to. If there is a land line in the service address on the call list, that will be called first. Then the authorities are dispatched, followed by the rest of the call list being contacted. If there is no land line, the authorities are dispatched before calls are made.

I always advise clients to keep the central station number in their contacts list. If you do, then you can contact the team if/when there is a false fire alarm so that you can give them the all clear ASAP and reduce the chances of them having already dispatched authorities.

4

As far as the panel settings go, you shouldn’t have to change any of the settings for call forwarding. The panel will communicate to alarm.com and alarm.com communicates to our CS. The panel doesn’t even have the opportunity to communicate directly with the fire department.

5

What I suggest you do is set the smoke detectors to verify, this will reduce false alarm activations and FD dispatch

Verification means smoke must be violated twice in two minutes, or for 30 seconds continously before it will go into alarm.

Change 24 hour smoke zone from (09) to (16)

6

Thank you all for your responses:

All the smoke sensors’ zones were already set to 16. My point is that after I spoke with the CS and gave them the correct password, they either called the F.D. anyway (because as you well stated, the panel doesn’t even communicate directly with the fire department), or they did not realize that I had the 24 hour with verification, called the F.D., and then called me.

Isn’t the purpose of the verification setup to call one of the numbers on the call list first (which they did), and then (after verification) call the authorities if there is a real emergency?

I am trying to avoid false alarms as much as possible, the system responded as intended, but the verification/notification process might have failed.

7

The control panel programming is irrelevant here. When you spoke with the agent the fire department had already been dispatched. The agent did cancel the dispatch after speaking with you but the fire department came anyway. Fire departments will often not stop coming once they’ve been dispatched for a number of reasons.

The only way to ensure they don’t show up is to cancel with us before we dispatch them. There are 3 ways to accomplish this.

  1. Call us immediately at 855-348-0367 when the fire alarm is triggered and cancel. You can call us from a mobile phone and cancel. We just can't call your mobile phone before dispatching, we can only call a premise phone before dispatching.
  2. If you have 2-way voice on your account then we have the option of waiting until the 2-way voice call is connected and giving you the opportunity to cancel via 2-way voice before we dispatch the fire department. This is optional because some customers prefer to have us dispatch quickly and waiting on the 2-way voice call would delay the dispatch.
  3. Get a land line telephone at the premise and we will always call the premise number to give you a chance to cancel before we dispatch.

Changing the sensor type to 24-hour fire with verification will help reduce false alarms by not sending an alarm signal until more smoke activity is detected but it has noting to do with the central station verification process.