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Some kid at the supply house said he never uses a can of smoke to test detectors, just a broom handle
I was standing in line at a supply house in Tulsa picking up a 12 zone panel when I heard this installer maybe 19 years old telling the counter guy he tests smoke heads by poking them with a broom handle from below. He said it saves on canned smoke and he has never had a callback. I have been doing this 21 years and I wanted to say something but I kept my mouth shut. Here is the thing, poking the head only trips the magnet test on some models, it does not prove the chamber actually sees smoke, and on a 4 wire duct detector it does nothing at all. I have pulled a dozen of those cheap broom tested heads and half of them were so full of drywall dust they would never alarm in a real fire. Going rate for a can of test smoke is 12 bucks and it lasts a month if you are not hosing every head. I would rather spend the 12 bucks than find out at 2am that my test was fake. Anyone else seen this shortcut catching on or am I the only one who still cracks a can?
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ray_miller4110d ago
Man that broom handle trick bugs me too and you did the right thing keeping your mouth shut in the store because that kid would not have listened anyway. I have seen the same thing around here and every head I pull that got the poke test is packed with dust or paint overspray. Spend the 12 bucks and sleep at night, it is cheap insurance.
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blakem3710d ago
Maybe I'm missing something here but the poke test isn't always the worst thing, @ray_miller41. If a head is packed with dust, that usually means the filter let it through, so poking it just shows you where the weak spot is instead of hiding it. A vacuum test or a water test tells you a whole lot more than shoving a broom handle through the pleats. Twelve bucks is cheap, sure, but some of these filters are junk right out of the box and no amount of money fixes that.
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