Skip to main content
Stesso

Fire Alarm Electrical Quiz and Discussion

0:00
1:01
41.2K views

At 0:00 in

Master Electrician Teaches Son about Commercial Fire Alarm Electrical, and the wiring, Thoughts?

Watch on YouTube

What happens here

A master electrician dad quizzes his apprentice son on fire alarm electrical wiring. The dad asks about the type of wire used for fire alarms. The son initially struggles but the dad clarifies that plenum-rated wire is typically used. The dad then asks about the number of conductors in the fire alarm cable, to which the son incorrectly replies 'two'. The dad corrects him by showing an image of a red fire alarm cable with four conductors (red, black, white, and a bare ground wire) and emphasizes that commercial fire alarm wiring typically uses more than two conductors, differentiating it from residential applications. Finally, they discuss normally open versus normally closed circuits in the context of fire alarm triggers, with the dad explaining that fire alarm circuits are normally open, meaning they close to trigger an alarm.

Goal: Educate and understand fire alarm electrical principles

Tools and materials

  • Fire Alarm Wiring Diagram N/A — Visual aid for discussing wire types and conductor count

What they say

Hide

You know what kind of wire you would use for the fire alarm? >> It's like small like How many conductors in the cable? Uh two? Two. Only two. Like 18 two or red and a black. It's a black and a white usually. Plenum rated wire. Yeah. And [music] you can feed that in there and that'll go right into normally open or normally closed? It's uh it's open. Normally open. [music] Right? Because when this trips, we want that to close and we want the fire alarm to know. So, when you put in a fire alarm wire, it stays open. Yeah. If you put them together, what happens? >> [music] >> Close. If I took a fire alarm cable on a zone and I put it together on the end, what what happened? Trigger it? Yeah. You trigger it. I would know that cuz residential the hardwired smoke detector was two wires. Yeah, but that's different. Residential Oh, you're talking Yeah, it's usually there's a wire in and a wire out. We'll go over that later. But, any questions? Nah, I think that's We got to get this guy a price.

Auto-generated from the video audio.