The smallest, simplest project in the whole program — and the one built to make a single point clearly: a single-family home's fire/smoke alarm requirements aren't a scaled-down version of the commercial design method used everywhere else in this program. They're a genuinely different rulebook.
The project brief: a single-story, roughly 2,400 sq ft single-family residence, 4 bedrooms. Every other project in this program is an IBC-classified commercial or institutional occupancy, designed around the full commercial chapters of NFPA 72 and built around a central Fire Alarm Control Panel. A single-family home typically falls instead under the International Residential Code (IRC), with NFPA 72 Chapter 29, "Single- and Two-Family Dwellings," supplying the applicable requirements — a short, self-contained chapter built around interconnected smoke alarms as the baseline technology, not a central FACP.
This module walks the whole project the way a real residential designer would: the IRC/NFPA 72 Ch. 29 code basis and why it's structurally different from the commercial framework, the interconnected smoke alarm device strategy (every bedroom, outside each sleeping area, every level) versus an optional monitored system with a small residential FACP, a worked calculation showing why residential battery sizing looks nothing like the commercial §10.6.7 method, the notification design questions a home's small size and always-present occupants actually raise, and a closing look at when a single-family home genuinely does need a real monitored panel system. The full worked numbers, the complete bill of materials, and the finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.