Leading a Fire Systems Giant Into the Future
Honeywell reshuffled its vaunted life-safety business and reached into its well of veteran talent to appoint a leader of a new umbrella organization. In an exclusive interview, Gary Lederer, explains his vision to keep the Titan-sized organization agile in reacting to customer needs within a vibrant marketplace. He also addresses industry trends and challenges, plus technologies that could one day alter the life-safety landscape.
ONLINE BONUS: Getting back to wireless, what needs to happen for that to become a practical application?
Lederer: Power consumption is one of the constraints. Under the codes, the system has to be tested periodically through the day. There’s always polling of the devices which requires an electronic impulse. It doesn’t take a lot of current, but over time it will drain the battery. These are standalone, battery-powered, so we need a reliable extended battery life. Then you get into system maintenance. Batteries can be changed and revitalized periodically. But that’s one of the constraints.
Especially on strobe devices, if you’re going to run a strobe that takes a lot of current. It’s something that can be addressed and overcome, but right now we need to look at it, the cost, and the end-to-end cost of maintaining the system.
The alignment, installation, because people change office layouts and you need to make sure the wireless detector is sending uninterrupted signals to the panel and vice versa. Just installation and alignment of devices. But there are technologies available that we’re looking at that can overcome both of those.
How soon do you expect video will be leveraged on a greater scale in fire systems?
Lederer: That’s an area that certainly is a possibility in the future. It’s in its infancy. But, yes, why not have the ability for somebody who’s monitoring a fire alarm panel to be able to see the area the detector went off in as opposed to getting up off his chair and having to walk back or whatever.
Notifier has a product called First Vision and it’s primarily a way-finding product for firefighters. There is some integration already with video cameras that they can use in some applications, where they can view where the incident is happening and see what’s going on. That’s something that will be expanded upon. Open-area detection, like atriums, that’s a great application for video. Right now we use beam detectors for the most part. But video is an alternative to that.
What is today’s installer contending with in the f
ield as these systems are becoming increasingly advanced?
Lederer: Cause and effect would be coincident detection; you want to make sure it is a fire so you wait until more than one detector goes off in the area. Elevator recall, there’s a reason the sign says, “In event of fire don’t use the elevator.” It’s programmed to go to a certain floor. If you’re in it, you can’t override that. The danger is if you go in it, it’s programmed to go to a floor. That may be where the fire is. You don’t know, so all of a sudden you’re dumped into the fire and you can’t get out. Or elevator shafts are nice chimney flues and the heat goes up those elevator shafts. You don’t want to be in them.
They would program that, any door closure, any vent closures, any dampers in the HVAC system because you don’t want smoke to be moving through a building. Closing stairwells off, they do any air movement to create negative air pressure so people have a safe place to evacuate the building from. All that stuff needs to be done for the specific application that they’re trying to protect, and that’s where they come in. It’s a pretty intensive and very responsible operation they perform.
ONLINE BONUS: What do you view as the top technology-based opportunities now?
Lederer: Let me put an umbrella over this and divide it into three main categories and then I’ll try to provide some meat on the bone on each of the three. I’d like to categorize them as continued emphasis on detection principles.
First, over the last 30 years the industry has really focused a lot on early detection — detection criteria, detection techniques to get as early a warning of a dangerous condition as possible.
The second category is evacuation notification. I think we’ve come a long way but I think we have further to go. If you look at what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to detect the dangerous condition and trying to decide if people should evacuate, and if so to get them out of the building safely and timely. A lot of the emphasis is on early detection but it’s as important to get people out of a building. That’s an important element of where technology can play a role, in terms of voice communication. Right now we rely pretty much on sound and light, strobes and sound to evacuate and nobody knows what those signals mean anyway. We do in the industry, but if you hear it and you’re not in the business you just hear a noise. It’s an alert condition.
The third category is to use technology for ease of installation or ease of performance of the system. That would be to provide tools or means to install and commission a system very efficiently, for users to use the system efficiently, for people to get information efficiently. I spoke of remote interrogation for a user. In Spain we did a metro system for the City of Barcelona that we had an interface for all of the systems. They
had multiple stations, but somebody sitting in a control area could monitor each of those stations remotely. They could do it on their iPad at home through the Internet.
The Internet has really created a lot of opportunities for conveyance of information of a fire panel. Obviously we need to make sure we have the proper security in place because we don’t want anybody breaking into and tampering with a fire system. But there are firewalls available that provide sufficient security for the system.
That’s where this is heading, to make these things intuitive. You don’t need a whole book to do it. You don’t need weeks of training to operate the system. It should be intuitive. In Europe we introduced a couple of years ago a panel that took five keystrokes to commission. That’s a real breakthrough and the panel has been very well received in the market because it doesn’t require extensive training. It’s very intuitive to do it.
On continued emphasis on detection on the front end, the early detection, let me just point out a couple aspects that often gets overlooked in the industry. What we’re trying to do is get people out of a building before the building becomes untenable. We tend to focus on early detection because we say that gives you greater time to get out of a building, which is true. But we’re also looking at before a building gets too full of smoke that you can’t find your way out, and die of smoke inhalation, gets too hot that your lungs burn, or the gas poisons you.
We focus on early detection and we still do a lot of work, a lot of research on trying to find ways we can have early detection, hence the multicriteria that not only serves to try to reduce nuisance alarms but also serves to have early detection of fire. For example, a wire can emit a particulate or a gas before it bursts in to a flame or starts to smolder. Our gas technology can detect that.
A lot of this becomes where the detector is in relation to where the trouble is. So aspiration type work where you draw air samples into a detector; we just launched our FAAST [fire alarm aspiration sensing technology] product which addresses that. It’s very effective for data rooms that have a lot of cabling that really needs early warning of fire. And the aspiration will sample the air not waiting for the smoke to get to the device. In most applications you don’t need that because you have plenty of time if there was a fire, the smoke would get to the chamber of a stationary device.
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About the Author
Rodney Bosch, Senior Editor
Although Bosch’s name is quite familiar to those in the security industry, his previous experience has been in daily newspaper journalism. Prior to joining SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION in 2006, he spent 15 years with the Los Angeles Times, where he performed a wide assortment of editorial responsibilities, including feature and metro department assignments as well as content producing for latimes.com. Bosch is a graduate of California State University, Fresno with a degree in Mass Communication & Journalism. In 2007, he successfully completed the National Burglar and Fire Alarm Association’s National Training School coursework to become a Certified Level I Alarm Technician.
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