I'm a volunteer firefighter in rural NM. We have a commercial property close to us that repeatedly has false alarms on its fire alarm/smoke detection system, to the point where even the best of us are suffering from "the boy who cried wolf" feelings.
Because of this, I discovered that (apparently) NY Fire Department charges $5000 per false call on an alarm system directly connected to the dispatch system.
Somethng to think about.
ABQ Fire charges $300/call for false alarms after the first three. It steps up to $500 after number ten. There is, of course, also the $25 annual permit fee for a reporting alarm system. Failure to comply with these fees is a misdemeanor. Just in case some local precedent will help advocate :)
Honestly it's remarkable to me to think that anyone ever gets to that $500 "excessive" tier, I've had one false alarm where the fire department attended in years of having an alarm system and I was mortified. felt like the biggest idiot in the world.
$500 is probably cheaper than a Simplex service call.
Pretty common in lots of places - you get charged after n false-alarms and are required to fix your broken sensors or whatever is causing the issue.
Sometimes code gets in the way. E.g. in the school I went to growing up they had to have firealarms in all kind of closets and storage rooms. We got at least once per semester a firealarm when some teacher went in to sort stuff due to the dust.
There's generally two types of smoke alarms each with pros/cons: photoelectrical which are very susceptible to dust and ionizing which generally are not:
https://www.nfpa.org/news-blogs-and-articles/blogs/2023/03/0...
I wouldn't think code dictated the alarm type. (I just replaced all nine sensors in my home due to age and went with all photoelectric this time and it was less than six months before I had my first false alarm. Never had any false alarms with previous ionizing type.)
"False" isn't really binary. In my condo building we used to have in-unit smoke detectors wired directly into the building alarm, which meant whenever anyone in any of 200 units burned their toast sirens were blaring. The smoke was real, it just wasn't a threat to the whole building. This would happen once a month or so, and because it's a highrise that sent the big ladder truck down our little street. The fire department got sick of this so we updated a few years ago to have heat detectors that are wired into the building-wide alarm but the smoke detectors only go off locally. False alarms have fallen to basically zero, but the downside is that for reasons not entirely clear to me the new system has to get inspected every 6 months, which includes making sure every one of 200 heat sensors is working, so we get days with 100s of very short bursts of the alarms twice a year.
In my aerospace days, our buildings had both ionization and temperature detectors, plus water flow on the sprinklers. Any detection would sound loud buzzers locally, but two sensors, or water flow, had to trigger before everything powered off. That's common in big installations.
We once got an alarm because the heating element in a computer room air conditioner had turned on for the first time ever. It was defective and started to smoke. Smoke detection tripped, buzzers sounded, lights on a panel showed where the problem was, and alarms went off in the security control center. But this didn't trigger building evacuation or full power down. That took confirmation from a second sensor.
Someone ran into that computer room, saw smoke coming from the A/C unit, and pulled the big red power switch, installed by the safety people, on the air conditioner. Then we had time to shut down normally, the safety people came to clear the alarm, and the HVAC people came to fix the problem. I kept the burnt heating element on my desk for a few days for people to see.
This is typical for big industrial plants. Bad stuff will happen, and you have procedures for it.
A tradie doing some welding in the kitchen I was working in some years back told me this as he disabled the smoke alarm (to prevent a false alert while he was welding): "if you set off a false alert on the fire alarm, quickly set fire to the wastepaper bin - it saves you from paying the false alert fee"
I learned this from my last landlord after I kept causing issues for the whole building by cooking bacon. The detector was installed ABOVE THE STOVE. It was cheaper for him to move the detector than to pay for the repeat call outs over a mildly smoky apartment due to my need for crispy almost burnt bacon…
Consider investing in powerful window fans. If it's setting off a detector it's causing havoc in your lungs.
Pretty sure that'll just drive people to turn it off. Or if they can't, try and set a small fire or something to get out of paying the fine
These are elegant solutions imo.
For example, my condo in Toronto charges $800 per false call.
I'm surprised the strata was able to offload that to you. Most building corps are in charge of maintaining the fire alarm system especially if it's a tower (rather than just a SFH community under a strata) where unit to unit spread needs to be addressed promptly.
It should probably be X$ per alarm regardless of it being false or not, minus first N per year.
Why? The goal is to incentivize property owners to fix broken systems not to pay for the actual cost of responding to a real call. That's covered by taxes.
> [...] not to pay for the actual cost of responding to a real call.
Not true for all places. There are places where the callee can be charged for the costs of a call and the owner of the building has to pay the firefighters (well, his mandatory government-issued insurance will pay). It's moving bills from one stack to another, but it's not free as in beer.
Depending on who is paying and how much, someone might light a small fire to avoid the fine.
Arson when the fire department is already on the way. Great idea! Firefighters hate this one simple trick.
I'd interpret the "minus first N per year" to mean that you get a few "free" fires per year - but after that your habits filling your closets with oily rags, overloading electrical extension cords, and smoking in bed will start to cost you.
Fire is one of those things that really sucks for you - but also really sucks for your neighbors.
You never want to supply any reason for someone to demur about reporting a fire.
I'm sure someone somewhere will interpret it a 3 free demos of firefighters at home for their kid, with sirens and light, pretty entertaining (It's a reference to the Freakonomics study that, if you make parents pay by the minutes for being late getting their kid, they basically take the fine as a slightly expensive childcare facility).
That will also decrease the number of true positives