Powering Up the Right Equipment

Any power supply performing a mandatory function of a new or upgraded European fire alarm system must be third-party approved as being fully compliant with EN 54 part 4 Amendment 2. This includes not just the fire alarm system's CIE (fire alarm control panel) but also any PSU that controls a beam detector, digital communicator, aspirating smoke detector or sounder control unit.

The reasoning behind this is obvious. A fire alarm/fire protection system is a piece of life safety equipment and any PSU forming part of it must be reliable and capable of supplying the relevant load under normal, fire and fault conditions or be fail safe. If it isn't, and if it doesn't, the consequences could be devastating for both life and property - a detector failing to detect, a sounder failing to sound or a digital communicator failing to call up the emergency services.

Specifically designed to comply with EN 54-4/A2, C-Tec's extensive range of EN54 power supplies are easy-to-install and extremely cost-effective.
The range comprises four different 24 V boxed power supply units rated at 1.5 A (two versions), 3 A and 5 A, all of which are capable of housing and charging a variety of different sized standby batteries to suit a host of applications. A 12 V 2 A boxed version - the world's first to be certificated to EN 54-4/A2 - is also available for use in auto-dial applications. All of the above are third-party approved by the VdS or LPCB to EN 54-4:1997/A2:2006.
Features available across the range include low current consumption, link selectable battery charging capacity, battery impedance monitoring, a single-pole volt-free changeover relay that switches for any fault condition and three LED indicators (supply present, general fault and auxiliary fault).
The entire range is also designed to be environmentally friendly. Rather than using a resistor as the current limiting device for battery charging, an alternative method is used which results in minimal power being dissipated by the charging circuit (typically just 0.35 W compared to the estimated industry norm of around 2.55 W). This and the fact they use switching rather than linear technology reduces the amount of heat/energy lost into the environment.

PCB and caged versions of C-Tec‘s PSUs are also available with exactly the same electronics used in its approved EN54-4/A2 boxed PSUs.