Fire Protection Blog | ORR Protection Systems

Fire Panel Series: Recommended Fire Panel Locations

Written by Lee Kaiser | Jun 26, 2023 10:00:00 AM

Join ORR Protection experts Lee Kaiser and Aaron Wille as they discuss the recommended locations for fire panels. 

To view the entire webinar, visit the Webinar Replay and gain access to the full video content. Also, visit our YouTube channel to check out our library of video content subscribe for future video releases. 

Transcript

Where's the best recommended location to place fire panels, whether that's a data center or a hotel or a mall or school or an office building or warehouse. Where's the best location to put the panel? Well, in a strip mall or something like that, I think in a common electrical room. And the only reason I say this is because typically that fire panel is gonna be used for all of those different individual spaces, right? You're gonna have one area and an electrical room works really well for that. You put a FACP inside, sticker on the door, the fire department knows where to go.So for that instance, I'd say an electrical room. Make sure it's dry, make sure it's not gonna get wet, it's not gonna be out exposed to the elements.


But for your data centers and stuff like that, we typically have a control room for those data centers where we have somebody in that room most of the time, 24 hours a day. Because it's a manned facility for 24 hours, and they wanna know quickly when there's an event happening in their facility. So we typically, in a data center like that, would put it in that control room environment. That way, when it starts making noise, they can look around and look at it on the wall and identify pretty quickly if there's an issue. One thing that we didn't really talk about was remote enunciators. So, remote enunciators can make this question a moot point, right? We can put a remote enunciator to tell you what's going on with the fire panel in any location and a lot of times the fire department's gonna want to have some input on where that goes.


They're gonna want something known as the fire attack entrance. But, like your data center example, the remote enunciator could go into the control room so that they could get the data on what's going on with the system there, but yet if they don't have enough wall space, the panel itself doesn't necessarily go on the wall. I like that you brought up the electrical room. I think that's a great place for hardware to go, in electrical rooms, not because that's where everybody's gonna go to see the panel front. That's where the enunciator discussion comes in. But, it's a safe place for that hardware. It's not publicly generally accessible. The last thing I would say is if you don't have an electrical room, a non-public space, you don't want those systems to be tampered with, people to open up the door and do whatever. To mess it up. So generally a non-public space for location, electrical rooms, are good. And then use the enunciator features to make sure that you get the outputs, the button functionality, the readouts, and locations that are useful.