Conducted another bell test today. This is in a 14-story apartment building (13 regular floors plus a penthouse). The system is a Siemens FireFinder with EVAC. The common areas (major rooms, hallways, and stairwells) have speaker/strobes and the apartments have sounder/smokes and heat detectors in them. There are some apartments that also have remote strobes for the hearing impaired. There are no speakers in the apartments. With the exception of studio apartments, when one apartment smoke detector is triggered, it sends a supervisory signal to the FACP. Should a second detector in that apartment activate, it initiates an alarm condition. If a heat detector activates, it automatically triggers an alarm condition. When an alarm condition is received, the floor where the alarm originated, the floor above, the floor below, and both stairwells play the slow whoop alarm tone and the apartment sounder/smokes on the floors in alarm activate as well. All other floors play the Alert message over the speakers and the sounder/smokes remain silent. All strobe lights activate regardless of what tone/message is playing. You'll notice I encounter a couple of confused residents while making my rounds, as they had activated strobe lights in their apartments and no advance notice was given about any testing taking place. I checked floors 1-5, my colleague checked the penthouse and floors 6-12, and a building maintenance employee checked the ground floor. This is the most complex EVAC system I've come across yet, as all the others have the entire building sounding the alarm tone/message at once, not in a phased manner. Neat!
UPDATE: as of 2022, this system has been replaced with a Honeywell 6820EVS.