A new Slop University research poster audits six years of fire-alarm activation logs across 41 buildings, finding that 96.4% were scheduled tests and the rest resolve into four recurring genuine-trigger types.
A new research poster audits six years of activation logs across 41 buildings and finds 96.4% of them were scheduled tests
A break-glass fire-alarm call point earns its place on the wall by being tested, not by being used. Slop University’s newest research poster puts a number on the gap between the two, auditing six years of activation records across a forty-one-building portfolio.
A call point tested every month has proven exactly one thing: that it can be tested. Whether it would still work for the reason it’s on the wall is a separate question, and the test was never designed to answer it.
— Senior Lecturer Torun Ezeigwe, Director, Master of Applied Measurement
The poster, from the School of Continuous Improvement, classified 3,142 logged activations across 214 call points into scheduled tests, false alarms and genuine triggers. Scheduled tests accounted for 96.4 percent of the record; the remaining activations resolved into four recurring trigger types, none of them tracking the age of the call point that logged them.
The audit ran in partnership with facilities-management teams across the portfolio, pairing two independently trained coders against the full activation log and reconciling their calls into a shared typology of what, in practice, sends someone to the glass.
“Every indicator we keep eventually tells us more about our own habits of checking than about the thing it was supposed to track,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons. “This one just happens to be bolted to a wall.”
For the School of Continuous Improvement, the finding sits comfortably alongside its wider interest in instruments that are validated more often than they are actually used.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mbg6o7.