Personal views only. Anything I publish here reflects my own opinions and experience, not the views, policies or position of my employer, clients or any other organisation I work...
Personal views only. Anything I publish here reflects my own opinions and experience, not the views, policies or position of my employer, clients or any other organisation I work with.
I’m a qualified electrician and life safety specialist with a particular interest in the places where different systems meet.
My work spans electrical infrastructure, fire detection, smoke control, access control, networking, controls and system integration, but the bit I enjoy most is fault finding. Especially the awkward problems that do not fit neatly into one discipline.
A fault might look electrical but actually be caused by control logic. A fire alarm issue might really be a network problem. A smoke control system might appear to operate correctly until you look at the power supplies, ATS, VSD, fan duty or cause and effect behind it.
That crossover is where I tend to be most useful.
I’m interested in how systems actually behave in the real world, not just how they are supposed to behave on a drawing. I place a lot of value on good engineering practice, proper testing, clear documentation and being honest about what has and has not been verified.
Ultimately, I like solving difficult technical problems, understanding why something failed, and leaving systems in a condition that is safer, clearer and more maintainable than when I found them.
Published guidance and updates from this author.
A practical look at fire alarm earth faults, including what they are, what commonly causes them, why they can be so difficult to locate, and the strange problems they can create on an addressable loop.
See more →A practical look at how RS-485 actually works, from differential signalling and twisted pairs to termination, biasing, bus topology and common-mode voltage. Written for engineers who use RS-485 in the field and want to understand what is really happening on the A and B...
See more →Fire alarm zones are meant to help people quickly locate a fire, not to make a panel configuration look neat. This article looks at how overcomplicated zoning, poor device descriptions and programming-led design can make systems harder to use, and why geographical clarity should...
See more →Mechanical smoke ventilation systems can include three-phase fans, automatic transfer switches, VSDs, motor controls and secondary power supplies. Treating all of that as an extension of routine fire alarm servicing creates a serious competence problem.
See more →FireSecure UK’s sister platform, My Golden Thread, has launched as an independent resource focused on the practical management of building safety information. The idea is simple: the Golden Thread should stay with the building, not disappear with a contractor, managing agent or...
See more →Replacing a fire alarm CIE can be far more than a hardware swap. If the system logic has to be rebuilt, interfaces recommissioned and missing design information reconstructed, the work may amount to a substantial system modification requiring proper design, commissioning and...
See more →AI has made it easier than ever to build polished SaaS products, but generating an interface is not the same as understanding security, compliance, data protection or operational resilience. In the fire and security industry, where software may hold safety-critical records...
See more →“Like-for-like” is one of the most overused phrases in fire alarm maintenance. A replacement can fit the same base, use the same protocol and perform the same broad function, yet still change the way the system behaves.
See more →Cause and effect is one of the most important parts of a fire alarm system, yet it’s often treated as little more than panel programming. We look at the mistakes engineers repeatedly make, from poor zoning and device-level logic to inadequate interface testing and undocumented...
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