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Module 14 · Case Study

Case Study: K-12 School Fire Alarm Design

A complete worked fire alarm design for a real K-12 school building — device layout, battery and voltage-drop calculations, riser diagram, and sequence of operations, from occupancy classification through to a finished design.

The project brief: a single-story K-12 elementary school, roughly 45,000 sq ft, with a two-story classroom wing, a combined gymnasium/cafeteria space, a commercial kitchen, and an administrative office suite. Occupancy classification is Educational (IBC Group E), which drives a design philosophy built around fast, unambiguous, building-wide evacuation notification — a deliberate contrast to the defend-in-place approach the Hospital case study uses instead, even though both projects draw on the exact same component vocabulary from Modules 1 and 2.

This module walks the whole project end to end the way a real designer would: detection strategy space by space (including why the kitchen and the gymnasium each need a different approach than a standard classroom), the notification layout and how the school's mass notification capability stays clearly distinct from the fire evacuation tone, a fully worked battery standby/alarm load calculation and NAC voltage-drop check with this project's real numbers, and a representative Sequence of Operations table. The full numbers, the complete bill of materials, and the finished worked calculations are part of the unlocked module below.

Free related reading in this studio
→ Mass Notification Systems: Design Requirements→ Fire Alarm System Requirements by Building Type→ Battery Standby/Alarm Load Calculator→ NAC Voltage Drop Calculator

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