I'm not surprised this is happening. They still have a 50 year old alarm system in service. Something tells me it wasn't given proper maintenance at times it was necessary. Trust me, this system can work beautifully for that long but not if it's neglected.
Some of those fire alarm systems still exist today in some schools, but you are definitely right, it usually depends on the maintenance of the system and how good they take care of it
My high school system has been there since the mid 70s. And it’s still there and working it has a Simplex 4208 along with 4100 classic from 1996. But I believe they are in the middle of upgrading now because I seen some photos of L Series installed recently.
It may have something to do with the brand. I had no idea national fire alarm made their own control panels. All the old devices in the school are made by national time, but I don’t know how reliable their panels are?
Something like that happened with one of my old schools. They had a 40-year-old Simplex 4208 fire alarm system that was original to the building, tied into a newer Simplex 4010 panel. The system was failing a couple years ago and would randomly go into alarm (it even went off at four in the morning on one occasional!) So during the February break, they replaced it with a newer Notifier fire alarm system.
My middle school had AS models but only in the one wing built in 1998, then my high school was torn down and rebuilt in 2001 with NS models. However my elementary school from the 50s had single stroke bells until about 2009 when they put in SpectrAlert Advances. And finally in 2003, they built a 2 level wing with SpectrAlert classics. Fire alarms are awesome idk why I know so much about them but I do.
