UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- In order to take advantage of new technologies allowing for improved central control, Penn State's University Park campus will be upgrading its central fire alarm monitoring system beginning at 9 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 29.
The changeover is projected to take 1-3 hours to complete, and during this time all building fire alarm systems will remain in full operation. However, communication between individual building fire alarm panels and the central monitoring station will be lost while the upgrade takes place, meaning the panels will be unable to report alarms to the central station during the outage.
The communication outage will result in building fire alarm panels going into trouble condition, causing an audible beep that will last until communication is restored or individual panels are manually reset by technicians.
The date and time for the work was selected in order to minimize the impact to students, faculty and staff. The central station monitors control panels in most major University facilities, including residence halls.During the changeover, the Office of Physical Plant (OPP) work control center will be taking calls at 814-865-4731 regarding any panels that are located near offices or classrooms where the trouble signal is too disruptive for classes or other events. Technicians will be dispatched to manually silence trouble signals at these identified locations.
In preparation for the upgrade, please forward concerns for events scheduled between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Aug. 29 to Kathleen Wilson (kaw47@psu.edu) in the Physical Security office by Thursday, Aug. 27, so OPP personnel can make plans to silence trouble signals at these pre-identified facilities.