Honeywell Life Safety (HLS), a business unit of Honeywell India recently introduced the S300 range of smoke detector in the Indian market. This latest development from System Sensor India enhances the functionality of the conventional detector, incorporating many of the advanced features previously only provided in an analogue addressable unit.
The Series 300 acts conventionally and thinks intelligently. With the introduction of the Series 300, specifies have a much better choice between conventional and analogue addressable systems in the small to mid-size installation, enabling many of the features of a full analogue addressable system to be provided in a lower cost conventional system.
The new features in S300 have been combined to increase the ability of the fire detection system to give greater protection to a building and its occupants by reacting more swiftly to an incipient fire without false and nuisance alarms also rising. The choice of fire system technology is relatively straightforward at the two extremes; conventional systems are normally more than adequate in small installations, while analogue addressable systems are the norm in large premises.
Redefining Conventional Detector Landscape
The Series 300 is the first conventional detector from a major detector manufacturer to incorporate intelligence in the head, a development that is likely to redefine the conventional detector landscape. The onboard intelligence provides users and installers with features and capabilities previously only found in more complex analogue addressable detectors. As far as the panel is concerned, the detector is perfectly standard; no special interface is required, the Series 300 is fully compatible with most popular control panels from the major manufacturers.
According to Sudipto Datta, marketing leader, South Asia, Honeywell Life Safety “As our understanding of fire has grown over the years, so fire systems have become more sophisticated, with different detection methods characterized to particular sorts of fire. All detector developments are intended to improve the speed of response to a real fire to negate false alarms. S300 meets those expectations and much more”.
The family consists of a photoelectric smoke detector, a photo-thermal detector and thermal detectors, available as both fixed temperature and rate of rise units. The photo-thermal detector is a true multi-sensor unit; the alarm signals from both the optical and the thermal sensors are continually monitored by the internal processor, with an alarm condition only being communicated to the panel after interrogation and analysis of both signals.
While combined conventional photo and thermal detectors have been produced in the past, these have typically been two independent devices contained in the same housing; the Series 300 is one of the first conventional detectors to combine the two different technologies into one integrated unit. Two support products complete the range, a laser test unit and a wireless remote programmer with two-way communications capability. These two units make programming, testing, commissioning and maintenance an extremely simple and quick procedure.
Cost-Effective Product
The total installed cost of a fire system is heavily dependent on the size of the installation. The Series 300 is not only a technically advanced product, it is also cost-effective. The provision of installer-friendly features also reduces the total system cost, and the design ensures that optimum protection is maintained between routine maintenance visits.
Another feature of S300 is that it is not necessary for the maintenance engineer to wait until a “maintenance required” signal has been generated before the detector is cleaned, he can interrogate the unit at any time, reading both the chamber value and the percentage of total drift compensation employed.
The exact status of each point on the system can be seen without having to wait for problems to arise. Besides this another striking feature of S300 is that, an alarm signal is only enabled in the detector once the processor is satisfied that an incipient fire has been detected. By using a combination of inputs, the incidence of nuisance alarms is reduced while at the same time, the response time to an actual fire is not impaired.
The Series 300 is fully backwards compatible with the range of bases from System Sensor’s previous generation of the conventional detectors, the Series 100. Upgrades and extensions to existing installations are a matter of plugging in an alternative detector to an existing base.
