Local Alert Device - Building Status Unit III

How many times have you had an important alarm go unnoticed until it caused a problem? When that happened to you, I'll bet you said, "If only I had a simple alert tone or a blinking light, I could have saved a lot of time and money. A simple little alert box could have paid for itself by preventing one incident."

Today's featured DPS product is that simple little alert box. When strategically placed, it makes it a lot harder to miss your important alarms. It's called the Building Status Unit III (or "BSU" for short), and let's take a look at it now.

A front-panel view of the BSU shows us everything we need to see. As you can see from the top and bottom brackets, it's designed for wall mounting exactly where you need it. The unit is powered by -48 volt DC power, and it has a grounding lug and a standard GMT fuse. The front face of the unit has 3 alert LEDs and a speaker for audible alerts. The speaker sounds an alarm and the appropriate severity light will blink when a new alarm is received, and this alert can be acknowledged by pressing the "Ack" button on the BSU's lower face. After acknowledgement, the speaker will go silent, but the LED will remain lit until the alarm clears.

On the left side, you'll see the 3 discrete inputs used to accept alarm information from a monitoring device. This can take one of two forms:

First, you can wire these inputs to the audiovisual relay outputs of a T/Mon master station. This is what you'd do at a manned NOC center where your staff isn't physically close to the rack-mounted T/Mon. The T/Mon can emit its own audible alerts and has a front-panel LCD display, but the Building Status Unit has the advantage of being wall-mountable just about anywhere you need it.

Second, you can install the BSU at a remote site and connect it to a NetGuardian RTU. Any NetGuardian with Derived Control outputs and at least 3 relays is compatible, and that of course includes the NetGuardian 832A and 864A. In this configuration, you'll generally place the BSU in a prominent location just inside the entry door. That way, any technician leaving the unmanned site will be alerted to any new or standing alarms. This promotes more alarm resolutions from each site visit.

As you can see, the Building Status Unit III is a simple little box that can prevent big problems in your network. And as always on DPS TV, you should contact DPS even if it's not quite what you need. In-house engineering at DPS means that product development is continuous. It's called the BSU III for a reason, as it's the newest of several hardware generations. Even the little details can be changed. I was surprised to find out that there are currently two different build options for LED light color on the BSU III. The primary build has red, yellow, and green LEDs for critical, major, and minor alarms. But when a client asked DPS for a more aggressive red, red, and yellow configuration, the engineers made it happen.

To find out more about the Building Status Unit III, or to discuss exactly what you need for your upcoming projects, call DPS at 1-800-622-3314. You can also send email to sales@dpstele.com or send Mac Smith a quick message using the form at the bottom of this webpage.