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Alarm Testing for Corporate Clients

Recognising the critical importance of regularly testing alarms and ensuring the safety of equipment, especially during those moments when an urgent call is necessary, we’re working closely with our valued business customers to ensure efficient testing takes place.

We are experiencing more incidents of clients carrying out mass testing either on a different day to their normal plan, or where a decision is made by a client to do additional testing with no prior warning to Astraline.

This is beginning to impact on Astraline and the service that we provide. Our resource forecasting is based on call history and takes into account your testing days. When a client goes outside of their normal routine, this does not allow us to plan accordingly.

We have sought advise from the TSA regarding suggested testing frequency and as per guidelines laid out by the BSI, the following should be applied;

    • Fire panel testing – this should be carried out weekly on the pre agreed day, with the notification call made to Astraline within 15 minutes of the test to take place. Any calls received after 15 minutes will be treated as an actual fire and emergency services will be called.

    • Fire Alarm / smoke alarm testing – if you wish to carry out individual testing, one test call from the main fire panel to Astraline is sufficient to confirm a positive response, subsequent testing from individual devices MUST then be done ON SITE and not through to Astraline

    • Telecare device testing ANALOGUE schemes – for schemes this should be done monthly, with one call through to Astraline from the main control panel, and then all other individual testing should be done ON SITE and not through to Astraline. Please note that due to the improved functionality of digital devices, these do not need to be tested as the presence of a ‘ heartbeat’ will notify the user and / or Astraline if there is a fault

    • Telecare device testing ANALOGUE dispersed alarms – For ANALOGUE dispersed devices, testing should be done monthly with one call through to Astraline however if a dispersed alarm has been activated as a live call during the month, this does not have to take place. Reports are available on request to allow clients to identify those devices that have not presented an alarm during the month. Please contact clientservices@astraline.co.uk. Please note that due to the improved functionality of digital devices, these do not need to be tested as the presence of a ‘ heartbeat’ will notify the user and / or Astraline if there is a fault

    • Line testing from schemes – during the course of the day, Astraline will test the telephone connection between our operating centre and the scheme main control panel. If there is an error, the operator will be presented with a fault which will be called through to our named contact for further investigation.

    • Lone Worker – for our customers using our lone worker devices, this should be done monthly.

All test calls should ensure that a verbal response is received between the tester and the operator, activating a device and then leaving the device before a response has been received will result in emergency response procedure being invoked. This is especially important when an engineer is on site and testing.