Afam| Reliability

Our system has been designed to provide extremely high performance and reliability.

The monitoring unit (CTU) is able to charge and maintain a standard 7Ahr battery, allowing it to continue working for (at least) 24 hours without mains power. The battery is tested every 24 hours and any failure is reported.
In the event of a cellular connection failure, the CTU will continue to send its messages via the telephone line. The telephone line is automatically checked every 24 hours.
An alert is immediately raised if the monitoring unit becomes unable to determine the state of the connected fire alarm equipment.
An alert is raised if the CTU fails to communicate at any time.
In the event of a major outage of our primary system (natural disaster, etc), the CTU’s are programmed to automatically redirect their communications to an emergency system, located in an alternate geographic location.

Our Message Handling System (MHS) is a completely duplicated system and is housed in fire protected premises with battery-mains generator back-up.
We maintain two dedicated and independent communications paths to the NZFS Message Handling System. All messages require acknowledgement and if this is not received, the unacknowledged message is sent to the Emergency Watchroom where an operator will ensure its prompt delivery.
Three times a day, a reminder message is sent to the Service Agent for any Fire Alarm System that are in a condition that has previously been reported but is still awaiting correction.
If requested, building owners (or other nominated persons) can be sent messages for specific occurrences.
All events and messages are automatically logged and stored for audit purposes.