Fire alarm repair in London

What we repair

• Panel faults: loop, zone, earth, mains and charger faults on the control equipment itself.
• Detector faults: contaminated, drifted or failed detectors, and heads reporting on the wrong address.
• Cabling faults: open circuits, short circuits and the intermittent ones that clear before you arrive.
• Battery and supply: standby batteries that no longer carry the system through a mains failure.
• Sounder and beacon circuits: devices that do not operate, or operate at the wrong volume for the space.
• Repeat unwanted alarms: tracing what is actually triggering the system, and changing the detection if the design is the cause.

Unwanted alarms are a design problem more often than a fault

When the same detector keeps going off, replacing it usually buys a few weeks. The question worth asking is why a detector is there at all in a place where steam, dust, aerosols or cooking fumes reach it. BS 5839-1 covers the choice of detector type for exactly this reason: an optical smoke detector in a corridor outside a shower room will keep responding to steam because that is what it is built to do. A heat detector in the same position will not.

So the fix is sometimes a different detector, sometimes a different position, and sometimes a different category of system altogether. That is a design conversation, not a repair, and we would rather have it once than send an engineer out every month.

What the law asks of you

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 the Responsible Person must keep fire safety equipment in efficient working order and in good repair. A system standing in fault is not in efficient working order, and the duty does not pause while you decide what to do about it.

The Order sets no deadline in hours, which is often misread as leniency. It is the opposite: the obligation is continuous, so what creates exposure is the period a known fault is left alone, not the fault occurring in the first place. Faults happen on well-maintained systems too. Recording the fault, the date and what was done about it is what demonstrates you met the duty.

When repair stops making sense

Some systems reach a point where repair is the wrong answer: obsolete panels with no parts available, detection that has been extended piecemeal until no drawing matches the building, or a system installed to a category that no longer suits how the premises are used. We will tell you when you are there, and what replacement would involve, rather than returning for the same fault.

If you are unhappy with the company currently looking after the system, the ordinary route is a takeover rather than a repair, which begins with an inspection of what you actually have.