Third Party plan review
Before the Fire Marshal or City will provide you with an alarm permit many jurisdictions require that the plans and submittals need to be reviewed by a third party. Many jurisdictions have list of companies that they use on a regular basis.
A person that is a level 3 or 4 NICET certified tech or a PE (Professional Engineer) needs to design the fire alarm system. IBC/IFC will tell you when a system is needed and NFPA 72 will tell you the additional information that is required.
Most jurisdictions will accept electronic plans and submittals.
There is normally a fee for the permit and fire marshal review and additional fee for the third party plan review.
If your fire alarm design company needs to prepare the submittals and plans that is normally about a 1-2 week process to put the design on CAD and prepare the battery calculations, voltage line drop calculations and data sheets.
After that the third party review can take 1-3 weeks
The third party reviewer will send the plans directly to the city or the fire marshal and then the City will accept the plans/submittals or red line the plans with changes they may require.
Salt Lake City does their own plan reviews and the wait time can sometimes take up to 5 weeks after we submit. Often if the Fire Inspector has changes he or she wants made you have to resubmit and then wait for approval. The fees through Salt Lake City are not set fees but they vary depending on the size of the project and other factors.
I point this out so you can plan ahead because some customers think that the plan review should be quick and often it adds more than a month to the process before the alarm company can begin installation.
PCI and West Coast Consultants are two of the several 3rd party plan review companies.
Some things you can do as an owner or contractor is to be sure the conduit is installed beforehand, be sure the fire alarm panel has a 20 amp high voltage 110 V circuit installed and marked as fire alarm on the circuit breaker panel. This will help the fire alarm company complete their installation.
If you are planning on using analog phone lines to monitor your fire alarm system you will need two active analog lines at the fire alarm panel , one dedicated line and one that can be shared with something like the elevator phone. If you don’t plan on using analog phone lines your alarm company can install a cellular communicator that is a high supervision unit UL listed for fire alarm that sends one signal every hour.
After your alarm system is installed the fire marshal will want to do a 24 hour test so you will need to have the AC power shut off to the fire panel 24 hours before the fire marshal test and then the fire marshal will set off the system and the alarms will need to sound and flash for at least 5 min just running on battery power.
This test is normally scheduled by the fire alarm company through the fire marshal.