A fire safety upgrade at a primary school in Stoke-on-Trent has avoided the cost and disruption of a full system replacement by converting the existing conventional fire system to an addressable one with C-TEC's FastConvert zone converter.
North Road Academy, an Islamic primary school, had initially considered replacing its fire system outright. Following a site survey, electrical specialist W R Fire & Security identified the potential to enhance the existing conventional system instead, converting it to an addressable system using FastConvert.
Three alternatives weighed
Before settling on FastConvert, the contractor assessed three other upgrade routes:
- A new conventional panel, which would have allowed the zones to be separated out and additional zones created, but would have required extra cabling and still left the school with a conventional system limited to reporting zonal fire and fault information.
- A full re-cable, ruled out on budget grounds: an estimated £10,000 in materials and additional labour, along with far greater disruption and a longer installation timescale.
- Converting the remaining six zones into loops, which would have added around a week to the installation for two engineers, plus additional cabling, materials and disruption, at an estimated extra cost of £3,000–£4,000.
The case for FastConvert rested on avoiding all three drawbacks at once: it reuses the existing wiring, delivers a genuine loop-based addressable system rather than a conventional one, and does so without the added cost, labour or disruption.
What was installed
By utilising the old system's wiring, FastConvert upgraded the school's legacy conventional system into an open-protocol CAST addressable system. That system is designed to support lockdown alert functionality and internet connectivity, and to accommodate C-TEC's CAST-PRO false alarm resistant combined fire detection and alarm devices. Two radials were combined into a single loop, with a dedicated two-loop panel installed for FastConvert.
Contractor's view
Wayne Riley, managing director of W R Fire & Security, said the company was very impressed with FastConvert and described it as extremely innovative in terms of what it can do. Set against a full re-wire, which would have added around £10,000 to the job, or converting the remaining zones into loops, which would have cost an extra £3,000–£4,000 and a week's extra labour for two engineers, he called FastConvert the clear winner. He added that it massively reduced installation time, site disruption and labour costs, and saved approximately £3,500 on the project.
Riley also said the new CAST-PRO devices were well received and that the company considers them far superior to other manufacturers' products, because the sounder/VADs and multi-sensors are built into the heads, so separate sounder bases are not needed.