atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Just had to pass this along

For the fire panel to be UL listed and in compliance with NFPA 70, there MUST be two telephone lines not shared or connected to anything else and not "jacked" in any way to the fire panel. I went through this exact same thing a year ago with a school. They got a brandy new Silent Knight fire panel and the alarm installers just left the telephone line connection to "the phone guys." Trying to be thorough, I contacted the AHJ, which turned out to be the fire chief, and he gave me chapter and verse of how the telephone lines had to be connected.

The problem, today, is that there is no one single entity that is responsible to make sure the job is done correctly. When I go to a new site, I poke around for hours, testing blocks for dial tone or data noise and making a complete list and diagram of the serving equipment. Then I sit down with the owner or customer and go over my findings. This usually ends up with me and the person responsible with paying the bills and, almost every time, I find POTS lines being paid for and not connected to anything. I once found a working T-1 with NO CPE terminated!

Everyone, including me, is in a hurry to "complete." BUT, to be responsible and a good technician, we must take the time to thoroughly investigate and document a site before calling the job done. Doing less is irresponsible and can lead to tragedy. Leaving alarm panels without communication to monitoring services can be viewed as criminal in some instances. If you get into a legal situation with a liability claim, you better believe a lawyer will look at "the last" responsible technical person to throw blame on if the problem was not identified and brought to proper correction.

Bottom line is spend the time and do a thorough "look up" and document everything. It might save your posterior some day.

Rcaman

An RJ31X is required by tariff. It will not have any deleterious effect on an alarm system that is installed correctly. It simply allows the customer to do his own test of the alarm dialer and phone line to determine where a fault is, so it can be reported to the proper vendor.

Datacomm technicians install telephones, data and pbx and at one time did structured cable wiring. They weren't allowed on the network side.

I've never heard of the phone lines having to be hard wired into the fire or burglar alarm panel...they normally provide cords and RJ31X jacks when you buy the panel. I would prefer if they left the RJ31X in the panel instead of outside where someone could mess with it, though.

I bet every state is different with local ordinances really different.

I'm of the opposite opinion. Sometimes the panel door is equipped with a tamper switch, so when opened, all hell breaks loose.

Yeah, I had that happen once...it was rather embarrassing!

I install my own RJ31X because the Verizon techs are not trained to understand what that means.

Be careful when working around or testing an RJ31X provided / installed by ADT. They have such a big customer base that it allows them to purchase hundreds of thousands of RJ31X jacks. They have convinced their supplier, because of the huge numbers that they buy, to create jacks with a different (opposite) color code from the "official" ones.

Instead of the dial tone coming in on the red/green pair, it goes OUT on the red/green. This can cause much confusion if you are not aware of it. They do it for no other reason than to mess with the competition.

"For the fire panel to be UL listed and in compliance with NFPA 70, there MUST be two telephone lines not shared or connected to anything else and not "jacked" in any way to the fire panel."

Almost correct. Jacks are allowed, and only one of the two lines needs to be dedicated to the panel. The other one can be shared.

I try and stay away from anything done by ADT/Tyco. Most of their stuff is proprietary (read: because they can)