North Road Academy, a primary school in Stoke-on-Trent, has upgraded its fire detection system with FastConvert, a conventional-to-addressable zone converter made by C-TEC, in a project that avoided the cost and disruption of a full system replacement.
The school had initially considered replacing its fire system outright. Specialist electrical contractor W R Fire & Security carried out a site survey and identified the potential to keep the existing conventional installation and convert it to an addressable system instead.
Three upgrade routes compared
Before opting for FastConvert, the project team assessed three alternatives:
- A new conventional panel. This would have allowed the zones to be separated and additional zones created, but it required extra cabling and would still have left the school with a conventional system able to report only zonal fire and fault information.
- A full re-cable. This was ruled out on budget grounds, as it was estimated to add around £10,000 in materials and labour, together with greater disruption and a longer installation timescale.
- Converting the remaining six zones into loops. This would have added roughly a week of work for two engineers, plus further cabling and materials, at an estimated extra cost of £3,000–£4,000.
According to C-TEC, FastConvert was the only option that avoided all three drawbacks at once: it reuses the existing wiring, delivers a genuine loop-based addressable system rather than a conventional one, and does so without the additional cost, labour or disruption.
What the converted system provides
By reusing the legacy system's cabling, the converter upgraded the school's conventional installation into an open-protocol CAST addressable system. The resulting system is described as supporting lockdown alert functionality and internet connectivity, and as able to accommodate C-TEC's CAST-PRO combined fire detection and alarm devices, which the manufacturer describes as false-alarm resistant and which have received industry recognition.
The distinction matters because a conventional panel reports only the zone in which a fire or fault has occurred, whereas an addressable loop can identify individual devices. To achieve the conversion at North Road Academy, two radials were combined into a single loop, with a dedicated two-loop panel installed for FastConvert.
Contractor's assessment
Wayne Riley, managing director of W R Fire & Security, said the team had been impressed by the converter and considered it highly innovative in terms of what it can do. Measured against a full rewire, which he estimated would have added around £10,000 to the job, or converting the remaining zones into loops, which he put at £3,000–£4,000 plus a week of extra labour for two engineers, he described FastConvert as the clear winner. He said it substantially reduced installation time, site disruption and labour costs, and saved the contractor approximately £3,500 on the project.
Riley added that the new CAST-PRO devices had been well received, and that he regarded them as superior to other manufacturers' products because the sounders and VADs and the multi-sensors are built into the heads, so separate sounder bases are not needed.