North Road Academy, an Islamic primary school in Stoke-on-Trent, initially considered a complete replacement of its fire system. Following a site survey, specialist electrical company W R Fire & Security recognised that the existing conventional system could instead be enhanced by converting it to an addressable system using C-TEC's FastConvert zone converter.
Before selecting FastConvert, the project team assessed three other upgrade options. Each addressed part of the school's requirements, but each carried a penalty in cabling, cost, disruption or system capability.
- New conventional panel: This would have allowed the zones to be separated and additional zones to be created. It would also have required extra cabling, and the school would still have had a conventional system limited to reporting zonal fire and fault information.
- Full re-cable: A complete re-cable was ruled out by budget. It would have added an estimated £10,000 in materials and additional labour, along with far greater disruption and a longer installation timescale.
- Convert remaining zones into loops: This route would have added around a week to the installation for two engineers, plus additional cabling, materials and disruption, at an estimated extra cost of £3,000 to £4,000.
FastConvert was the only option that avoided all three drawbacks at once. It reused the existing wiring, delivered a genuine loop-based addressable system rather than a conventional one, and did so without the extra cost, labour or disruption. The article states that this made it the obvious choice for the school.
The upgrade converted the legacy conventional system into an open-protocol CAST addressable system. The resulting system is described as capable of lockdown alert functionality and internet connectivity, and able to accommodate C-TEC's award-winning CAST-PRO false-alarm-resistant combined fire detection and alarm devices. To achieve this, two radials were combined into a single loop, with a dedicated two-loop panel installed for FastConvert.
Wayne Riley, managing director of W R Fire & Security, said the company was very impressed with FastConvert and regarded it as extremely innovative. He compared it with a full rewire, which would have added around £10,000 to the job, and with converting the remaining zones into loops, which would have cost an extra £3,000 to £4,000 and a week's extra labour for two engineers. In his view, FastConvert was the clear winner: it massively reduced installation time, site disruption and labour costs, and saved approximately £3,500 on the project.
Riley also said the new CAST-PRO devices were far superior to other manufacturers' products because the sounder/VADs and multi-sensors are built into the heads, so separate sounder bases are not needed. These statements describe the contractor's assessment of the chosen equipment and the reported project outcome.