A complete worked fire alarm design for a defend-in-place health care occupancy — smoke compartmentation, elevator recall, smoke control, and selective notification.
The project brief: a four-story, 120-bed community hospital, occupancy classification Institutional/health care (IBC Group I-2) — the highest life-safety risk profile covered anywhere in this program, since a meaningful fraction of occupants can't self-evacuate quickly or at all. That single fact drives a defend-in-place strategy instead of general evacuation: the building is subdivided into smoke compartments, and the response is to contain and evacuate horizontally, compartment by compartment, rather than move everyone outside at once — the same strategic fork that makes this project diverge from the School case study at almost every subsequent decision, despite both drawing on identical component fundamentals.
This module walks the whole project end to end: detection strategy for corridors and patient care areas, why elevator recall is operationally critical here rather than a code checkbox, the engineered zoned smoke control approach this building's height and risk actually require, and why Positive Alarm Sequence is commonly used in this occupancy specifically. It also works through this project's own battery standby/alarm load and NAC voltage-drop calculations, and a Sequence of Operations table reflecting compartment-selective notification. The full worked numbers and complete bill of materials are part of the unlocked module below.