Recently a Pertronic technical support engineer used FireUtils® to diagnose a configuration error in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken.

The problem: When a maintenance engineer unplugged an analogue addressable loop on panel number 2 in an F120A network, panel number 4 initiated an alarm. That wasn’t what anyone expected. Panel number 2 should not have triggered an alarm. It should have shown a fault condition because it could no longer communicate with devices on the disconnected loop.

Armed with the config file, a Pertronic technical support engineer quickly traced the link between the alarm on panel 4 and an output from panel 2. Unfortunately, finding the root cause by working through the config, line by line, was going to take a lot more work, because panel 2’s configuration was very complex.

IOTrace Cut the Problem Down to Size

Our engineer imported the config file into FireUtils, selected the relevant line in the “Outputs” table and opened the flow-chart-like IOTrace display. This showed that a fault relay had been mapped to a group that was, in turn, configured to activate an output that communicated an alarm over the network to panel number 4. Because of the configuration error, a fault on panel 2 would trigger an alarm at panel 4.

The maintenance company was rapt.

Their engineer did not expect such a quick solution.

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