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← Fire Alarm Design Professional Training Program
Module 14 · Real Project

Real Project: Hotel Fire Alarm Design

A complete worked fire alarm design for a mid-rise hotel — corridor-based detection, in-room notification for sleeping occupants, and the code-driven differences from daytime-occupancy notification design.

The project brief: a six-story, 120-room hotel, occupancy classification Residential-transient (IBC Group R-1), with guest rooms on floors 2 through 6 and a ground floor housing the lobby, restaurant, and meeting rooms. Guests arrive unfamiliar with the building's exits, and — the fact this entire case study is built around — a large fraction of the occupant load is asleep at any given moment overnight. That single condition drives a genuinely different notification design problem than either the School case study's alert-occupant general evacuation or the Hospital case study's defend-in-place strategy, even though all three projects share the same component fundamentals from Modules 1 and 2.

This module walks the whole project end to end: R-1 occupancy analysis and why "transient" residential drives its own design philosophy, corridor and in-room detection strategy floor by floor, NFPA 72's higher-intensity/lower-frequency audible signal requirement for waking sleeping occupants (a real, specific, and frequently under-taught code requirement), a fully worked battery standby/alarm load calculation and NAC voltage-drop check reflecting a six-floor riser, and a Sequence of Operations table that includes elevator recall for a very different occupant population than the Hospital project's. The full numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished worked calculations are part of the unlocked module below.

Free related reading in this studio
→ Candela vs. Sound Pressure Level (dBA) — Two Independent Requirements→ Fire Alarm Notification Appliances: Horns, Strobes, and NAC Circuit Design→ Battery Standby/Alarm Load Calculator→ NAC Voltage Drop Calculator

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