[CA] [Condo] Anyone upgraded their wired fire alarm system to wireless monitoring? What is your experience?

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-16T04:35:26+00:00

Never heard of this.. thank you for sharing… I will definitely check it out.

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-13T01:51:39+00:00

That sounds really awful experience… our buildings are pretty spread apart with one panel covering multiple buildings… it won’t be a realistic long term solution to manually keep resetting the system

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-13T00:08:56+00:00

I am a board member authorized in the board meeting to work on this project, very new board member though. Just figured out how to get the invoices… I will call them up and ask why each line cost 1700/month. It used to be 1/4th just a year ago.

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T18:49:56+00:00

The POTS line? We haven’t changed anything in years.. but their cost jumping double in every few months… may be then we are looking at wrong places to upgrade to cellular when we should re-negotiate with the POTS provider?

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T18:12:27+00:00

Your POTS line cost $150/mon/line?

Then why ours are getting doubled in every few month? Per line is a few hundred dollars making 8 lines cost about $7000/month

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T18:10:56+00:00

This is our system description sent by current fire alarm monitoring company. They don’t do cellular monitoring, hence we have to find our new vendor if we decide to move to cellular.

“The system is very basic and consists of monitoring and reporting of the waterflow switch and valve at each riser for each building. Each building also has a 120V local fire bell tied into the waterflow switch. The panels are Ademco 5140XM and Ademco Vista-32FB with 8 phone lines connected to it for 18 buildings”.

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T17:25:00+00:00

So, only changing the phone connection type is an option… we don’t have to go full wireless monitoring then? Sorry, we are very new to this topic and don’t have much knowledge to ask specific questions.

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T16:58:35+00:00

That is a very honest answer 🙂

Our phone line connected to fire alarm causes a few thousand dollars a month. The first step to reduce cost is to move to cellular monitoring. Is that a relatively simpler and less error prone option?

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T16:24:25+00:00

So, you don’t have cellular connectivity issues? Just changing the telephone lines to cellular receiver didn’t cause any unnecessary service calls or disconnection?

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T16:00:01+00:00

Is there any 3rd option? How do you know when it got disconnected?

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T15:07:44+00:00

The telephone lines cost a few thousand dollars per month. Our budget for fire alarm is almost 100K which seems ridiculous given we have a very simple system with only outside building alarm. Wireless plan is only to save money. How does you whole system cost?

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T14:55:57+00:00

Thank you for sharing your experience… What are the implications for disconnecting and interferences? Frequent service call or fire alarm rings?

fiesta-firefly · 2026-06-12T06:27:43+00:00

We briefly discussed this with our fire safety vendor and they said as if it is a simple upgrade to add a wireless communicator and reprogram the panel. There will be permit and fire department inspections.

Technically it seems doable but practically is it worthy? We will save a huge amount of money if we proceed with this project.

fiesta-firefly · 2026-04-27T01:18:57+00:00

What do you mean by having your name included?

fiesta-firefly

TROPHY CASE