ARC System Maintenance

Monitoring and maintaining your ARCs system is a requirement, for the health and safety of our emergency response team as well as your building residents. The value of properly maintaining your system will result in reducing the chance of crippling breakdowns, prolong your equipment life, and provides optimal quality communication.

A Central Monitoring Station (CMS) is a relay station. It relays (re-transmits) fire alarms from automatic fire alarm systems in buildings to the fire department. The CMS (Central Monitoring Station) also relays other signals from the automatic fire alarms systems to the owners of the building. The automatic fire detection and alarm system in a building will call about any and all fires that it has detected, the problem is that it will also call if there are other compromises to the alarm system. To prevent the fire department from getting an influx of non-emergency phone calls, someone is needed to sort out the emergency calls for the fire department from the non-emergency calls for the building owners.

The Central Monitoring Station is in the chain of communication and is capable of sorting . When an automatic fire alarm system relays a call to the fire alarm monitoring station with an emergency message, the CMS immediately contacts the fire department to dispatch the trucks. When an automatic fire alarm system calls the CMS with a non-emergency message, the CMS has to verify the non-emergency call with someone on-site or someone from a call list. Then a technician can be dispatched to fix anything that happens with the automatic fire alarm system, the Central Monitoring Station may also call the fire alarm service company.

The Central Monitoring Station must also keep records of the calls from the building’s automatic fire alarm system. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) will make sure the communication system works from the building being protected by an automatic fire alarm system to the fire department’s dispatch center.

Because the central monitoring station is part of the emergency communication system for reporting fires, the FDNY also governs the maintenance of the CMS facilities. Before issuing a Certificate of Operation, the FDNY inspects the CMS facilities to make sure the facility will operate correctly. The FDNY also requires continued listing or approval by a nationally recognized testing laboratory (like Underwriters Laboratory {UL}) and the testing laboratory will also inspect the facilities regularly and require proper record-keeping by the CMS.

Once the Central Monitoring Station has been certified by the FDNY, all individual fire alarm systems that the CMS is monitoring have to also be approved by, and inspected by the FDNY. This inspection is to make sure the automatic fire alarm system will properly protect the building or all it’s occupants. All of this works in conjunction with your alarm and ARCS system to ensure proper compliance and consistent and safe monitoring and management.