Slob Electrician who cares not to do his job correctly put lives at risk and caused headaches because he mis-wired a Duct Detector on Fire Alarm

Yes it is absolutely amazing the number of so called professional electricians there are in the field who could care less about how they do their job and who they put at risk.

Take a call  I got from a fellow alarm dealer who was having issues at a supermarket where he took over the servicing of the fire alarm after it was constantly false alarming every time power went out.
Every time  this happened lives where put at risk this community uses volunteers this means men and women having to leave what they are doing and rushing to the fire hall to get geared up and then  rushing to the store not knowing what they are going to find.  This happened several times and resulted in the threat of fines if not fixed. Thats when my friend was asked to find cause of the false alarms since he only did the Burglar Alarm at the time, and an electrician with a dubious reputation put in the fire alarm. 


He mainly does Burglar alarms and has some knowledge of  fire systems but this one was baffling him.
He checked out the fire panel which was tied to contact on his burglar alarm which should not have been done that way since this is a required system , but at time he did not know it was a code violation. So something else was going on and it had him baffled . Thats when he called me.

First thing we did was take the simple one zone  fire system off the burglar alarm system panel and instead installed a proper supervised Silent Knight 5104B Fire Alarm Dialer to make system legal. I then tested panel dropped power to it and no false alarms so had to be something in the field wiring .
 So we started tracing all the lines and where they went to..

Thats when I spotted wires running back along some duct work used to exhaust heat build up in attic  and found a duct detector which was improperly wired .
Duct detectors sense smoke in duct work and shut down the air  handler to keep it from spreading while also notifying building occupants to the problem. 

As you can see the wiring on the detector is wired to the supervisory terminals of the Duct Detector 3&13
instead of the Alarm Contacts 4&5  where it should be.
Supervisory is used to advise if there is a problem with the detector like a power failure or detector has stopped working . Which in this case every time power dropped to detector the supervisory contacts closed and caused a false alarm .this does not happen when properly wired to alarm contacts.

Now the other problem is the electrician never wired in the remote control station for the detector either so it cant be reset if it trips and also shows when it has activated something we have ordered and will install in the future at the site.

This just goes to show once again the amount of slobs their are doing their trade and not caring who they put at risk. The general overall wiring in the store is a mess also which management was shown and told about as well. Its a dam shame you pay good money for proper work and get results like this.