HSU was the prime contractor on this life safety project to upgrade the entire fire alarm system backbone at the Building 10 Complex (the NIH Clinical Center Hospital). The facility of 2.5 million square feet is the largest at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, MD. The newly installed Siemens XLS Firefighter system, modified to fulfill NIH and code requirements, is the first of its kind to have selective paging to 500 different speaker zones. The work entailed installation of 260,000 feet of fire alarm wiring, 10,000 feet of fiber, new fire alarm control panels that feed thousands of circuits for notification devices, smoke detectors, manual pull stations, and included 5 new Network Command Centers with the latest Siemens software.
HSU overcame challenges presented by the limitations of the standard Siemens XLS system in order to meet the requirements for a building of this size. The existing Siemens MXL panels with fire alarm voice devices exceeded the new Siemens system node XLS panel limitation for a single global voice system. Similarly, the NIH’s 428 speaker groups in the system’s global voice paging far exceeded the new system’s maximum capacity of 250 speaker groups. Through effective leadership and communication, HSU coordinated with NIH and Siemens to design and implement solutions to fulfill the Building 10 Complex requirements. Existing fire alarm panels were consolidated to accommodate the limited nodes in the new system and a custom software solution expanded the total number of speaker zones from 250 to 500. As a result, the project produced the largest Siemens XLS FireFinder system currently in operation.