Recently a Pertronic technical support engineer used FireUtils® to diagnose a configuration error in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken.
The problem: When a maintenance engineer unplugged an analogue addressable loop on panel number 2 in an F120A network, panel number 4 initiated an alarm. That wasn’t what anyone expected. Panel number 2 should not have triggered an alarm. It should have shown a fault condition because it could no longer communicate with devices on the disconnected loop.
Armed with the config file, a Pertronic technical support engineer quickly traced the link between the alarm on panel 4 and an output from panel 2. Unfortunately, finding the root cause by working through the config, line by line, was going to take a lot more work, because panel 2’s configuration was very complex.
Our engineer imported the config file into FireUtils, selected the relevant line in the “Outputs” table and opened the flow-chart-like IOTrace display. This showed that a fault relay had been mapped to a group that was, in turn, configured to activate an output that communicated an alarm over the network to panel number 4. Because of the configuration error, a fault on panel 2 would trigger an alarm at panel 4.
The maintenance company was rapt.
Their engineer did not expect such a quick solution.
Posted in Technical, Tagged FireUtils, Analogue Addressable, F120A,