A complete worked fire alarm design for a 40-story high-rise office tower — networked multi-panel architecture, phased/voice evacuation, stairwell pressurization, and a fire command center. The most complex project in the program.
The project brief: a 40-story, roughly 1.1 million sq ft high-rise office tower, Business occupancy (IBC Group B) office floors, ground-floor retail, and a below-grade parking garage. Cross IBC 403's high-rise threshold — an occupied floor more than 75 feet above the lowest level of fire department vehicle access — and a whole additional layer of regulatory requirements applies on top of the base occupancy: full-building sprinklers, a dedicated fire command center, and emergency/standby power beyond a standard fire alarm battery calculation. This is deliberately the capstone-complexity project of the entire eight-project series, standing in the sharpest possible contrast to the Single-Family Home project at the other end of that series, and it scales the Office Building baseline's simple single-riser architecture up to something categorically different.
This module walks the whole project end to end: why height alone forces a networked multi-panel architecture that no other project in this program needs, phased/voice evacuation and why it replaces general alarm at this scale, the engineered zoned smoke control and stairwell pressurization system the fire alarm system initiates and monitors, and the fire command center as the physical room where fire department officers actually run the response. It also works through this project's per-zone battery sizing calculations and a tallest-floor voltage-drop example, plus a network riser narrative and a Sequence of Operations table reflecting phased-evacuation logic. The full worked numbers and complete bill of materials are part of the unlocked module below.