A fire alarm is one of the most important elements of fire safety and should be high priority on ensuring implementation and maintenance. It provides a crucial alert should it be needed when there is a fire. It is there to sound and alert your staff and visitors to evacuate the building should ity be required. In this blog, you will know A guide to good practice to fire alarm testing.
Ensuring that your alarm is in full working order, should be your utmost priority. If your fire alarm is faulty, it may not sound under fire conditions and give your employees and clients that important alert that they may need. A guide to good practice to fire alarm testing-
Checking your fire alarms system is actually quite easy, Ive highlighted some helpful tips below.
Daily check to carry out
You don’t have to do a daily check, but it is highly recommended and is regarded as very good practice. Have a quick look over your fire alarm panel to ensure there is no errors and ensure that all the functional lights are working on the alarms and sounders. That’s it that simple, If you find any functional faults, report it to your fire alarm maintenance team so that they can get it looked at asap
Weekly check to carry out
Weekly fire alarm tests are regarded as very good practice, they are a bit more important than the usual daily test and should be put in place by your responsible person. Notify all your employees / staff that at a certain point of the day the fire alarm will sound. For the fire alarm test, activate a single point and check that all the sounders are working correctly. On completion, it is important to reset the system correctly and ensure that the panel is showing no faults. Some systems have a code to reset them so make sure that you this to hand.
Best practice is to check a different call point each week so that the whole system gets checked over a period of time. Always ensure that you notify you’re your employees / Staff on the day, We always say to do them the same time and day every week. Weekly fire alarm tests are actually in the fire reform regulations (Fire Safety or 2005). The test and finding should be logged in the site log book for future reference. If there are any faults then report them to your maintenance company.
Monthly check to carry out
Once a month it highly recommend to check up on the back battery supply, this is an important thing to have and should be maintained where required. This will usually come up on your fire alarm panel. If there are any poroblems then report to your fire alarm maintenance team.
6 Monthly check to carry out
After carrying out all the above, it is still essential that you carry out your 6 monthly test. It is a requirement under the British standards BS5839 to ensure that this is done and in place. Your responsible person should make sure that this is part of there fire safety plan and make sure a maintenance team is in place to undertake these tests every 6 months and also yearly.
