A fire alarm submittal has landed on your desk and you are expected to say something about it. You are not being asked to engineer it. You are being asked whether it is complete, and completeness is checkable without a license.
Who this is for
Architects, general contractors, construction managers, owner's representatives, and electrical contractors who have fire detection inside their bid package. It is written for the person who has to review a drawing set they did not produce and cannot fully evaluate, which describes almost everyone in that list. My firm produces these submittals, so the obvious disclosure applies, but nothing here depends on you hiring anybody.
Here is the position you are usually in. A fire alarm submittal arrives, it is thirty pages of symbols and abbreviations, and somebody needs a response by Friday. You are not a fire protection engineer and it would be unreasonable to expect you to catch a design error. So the temptation is to skim it, stamp it, and let the plan reviewer be the one who finds the problems.
That instinct is understandable and it is expensive. A submittal rejected by the authority having jurisdiction costs a revision cycle. A submittal that passes review but is incomplete costs you something worse, because the gaps surface during installation as requests for information and change orders, and by then your schedule has no room left in it.
What follows is not how to check whether a design is correct. It is how to check whether it is finished. Those are different jobs, and the second one is entirely within your reach.
01 What you are actually responsible for
Separate two questions that get collapsed into one. Is this design correct? Is this submittal complete? The first belongs to a licensed engineer and to the authority having jurisdiction. The second belongs to you, and it is where nearly all of the schedule risk sits.
A complete submittal is one where every question a reviewer could reasonably ask has already been answered on the drawings. An incomplete one defers those questions, and deferred questions do not disappear. They reappear during installation, when answering them costs a crew standing still.
The useful thing about completeness is that it is a checklist exercise. You do not need to know what candela rating a corridor requires in order to notice that the notification devices on this plan do not have candela ratings written on them. You do not need to be able to run a voltage drop calculation to notice that no voltage drop calculation has been included. Absence is visible to anybody who knows what should be present.
That is the whole method. Learn what a finished set contains, then check whether those things are there.
What to look for
A drawing index or sheet list on the first page.
Good is an index naming every sheet, so you can tell immediately whether anything is missing from the set you received.
Thin is a set with no index, which means you cannot prove it is complete and neither can anybody else.
02 Start at the cover sheet
Most people skip the cover and go straight to the plans. Do the opposite, because the cover tells you what kind of submittal you are holding before you invest an hour in it.
A finished cover carries the project information, the scope of work, and a vicinity map. It carries general notes. And it carries the applicable codes and standards required by your authority having jurisdiction, named specifically with editions.
That last item is the tell. A submittal that lists the governing codes with editions is one where somebody has checked what this jurisdiction has actually adopted, which is not always the newest version and is frequently amended locally. A submittal that gestures vaguely at national standards without editions was assembled from a template.
Check the scope of work against your own understanding of the project too. If the scope describes a smaller job than the one you are building, that gap is going to become a conversation eventually, and the cheapest time to have it is now.
What to look for
Codes and standards named with editions, and a scope of work that matches the project you know.
Good is specific editions, and a scope that reads as though somebody visited or at least read the architectural set.
Thin is generic code references with no editions, or a scope of work copied from a different building.
03 The bill of material
The bill of material, sometimes called the material list, is the fastest page to audit and one of the most revealing.
A complete one carries, for every item: quantity, the symbol used on the plans, a description, the model number, the manufacturer specifications, back box information, mounting height, and any applicable listings such as CSFM numbers. That is a lot of columns and each of them exists because somebody once got burned by its absence.
Two cross-checks take about ten minutes and catch a surprising amount. First, every symbol appearing on the floor plans should appear in the bill of material. Second, every item in the bill of material should appear somewhere on the plans. A symbol on a plan with no corresponding line item is something nobody has priced. A line item that appears nowhere on a plan is something somebody has priced twice or misunderstood.
Then look for two specific phrases, because they are where cost quietly moves onto your side of the ledger: as required and by others. Both are sometimes legitimate. Both are also the standard way of describing work somebody has decided not to define. Every instance deserves a question.
What to look for
Back box information and mounting heights, present for every device.
Good is a full row of data per item, including the columns that only matter to whoever installs it.
Thin is a list of model numbers and quantities. That is a price sheet, not a bill of material, and it will not survive coordination with the other trades.
04 Floor plans and device layout
This is the bulk of the set and the part people feel least qualified to review. You are more qualified than you think, because you are checking for presence rather than correctness.
The floor plans should show the location of the control panel, the evacuation panel, any remote NAC booster, and the annunciator panel. Then every initiating device and every notification device, with a diagrammatic wiring layout and wire tags.
Now the part that separates an engineered set from a sketch. Every initiating device should carry an address or zone identification. Every notification device should carry its candela rating, its circuit, and its device number. Those annotations are what make the drawing installable and testable. Without them you have a plan showing roughly where things go, which is a different and much less useful document.
You do not need to assess whether a given candela rating is correct for that space. You need to notice whether a candela rating is written there at all. If the notification devices on your plans are unlabelled circles, the set is not finished regardless of how good it looks.
What to look for
Pick any three notification devices at random. Do they each show a candela rating, a circuit, and a device number?
Good is all three annotations on all three devices, and addresses or zone identification on the initiating devices.
Thin is symbols without annotation. Ask for an annotated set before you spend any more time on the review.
05 The riser diagram
The riser diagram shows the system vertically: how circuits leave the panel, how they travel between levels, and what sits on each one. It is the single sheet that reveals whether the designer understood the building or simply populated its floors.
Check it against the floor plans, which sounds obvious and is skipped constantly. Do the circuits shown on the riser match the circuits annotated on the plans? Are all the floors present? If the building has a basement, a mezzanine, a penthouse, or a mechanical level, does the riser know about them?
Riser and floor plan disagreements are common in submittals that have been revised, because one gets updated and the other does not. Finding that disagreement now costs you a comment. Finding it during installation costs considerably more, and it is exactly the sort of thing that generates a request for information at the worst point in the schedule.
What to look for
Count the levels on the riser diagram against the levels in the architectural set.
Good is every level accounted for, including the ones nobody thinks of as floors.
Thin is a riser that is missing a level, or one whose circuit numbering does not match the floor plans.
06 Calculations, and whether they show their work
A finished submittal contains battery calculations and voltage drop calculations. If the system includes voice evacuation, it should also contain evacuation calculations and line loss calculations.
You are not checking the arithmetic. You are checking three things, and all three are visible at a glance.
First, that the calculations are present at all. The phrase calculations to be provided appears in submittals more often than it should, and it means the design has not been completed, only drawn.
Second, that they show their inputs rather than only their conclusions. A battery calculation should list what is drawing current and how much, not simply announce a battery size. A calculation you cannot follow is one nobody can check, including the plan reviewer.
Third, that the inputs match the bill of material. If the calculation accounts for forty devices and the bill of material lists fifty two, one of those documents is out of date and it matters which.
What to look for
Find the battery calculation and check whether the device counts in it match the bill of material.
Good is a calculation showing its inputs, with counts that reconcile against the material list.
Thin is a stated result with no working, or counts that do not reconcile. Both mean somebody revised one document and not the other.
07 The sequence of operations matrix
If you read only one sheet in the set, read this one, because it is the document your project will be judged against at acceptance testing.
The sequence of operations matrix, also called cause and effect, states what the system does when each thing happens. Smoke detection in a given area activates: what sounds, in which zones, what shuts down, what unlocks, what recalls, what transmits. It is a grid, and it should have a row for every initiating device type and a column for every output.
Its absence is the single most consequential gap in a fire alarm submittal, and it is also the most common. Without it, the witness test with your authority having jurisdiction is not a test. It is several people in a corridor forming competing opinions about whether what just happened was intended. I have sat through that and it is a bad afternoon for everybody, most of all the general contractor.
With it, the same test is a script. Somebody activates a device, the matrix says what should occur, and everybody watches whether it does. That is a short meeting.
What to look for
Is there a cause and effect matrix, and does it have a row for every initiating device type in the bill of material?
Good is a complete grid that somebody could run an acceptance test directly from.
Thin is no matrix, or a narrative paragraph describing system behavior in prose. Prose cannot be tested against.
08 Details, elevations, and conductor routing
These are the sheets that matter most to whoever installs the work and least to whoever approves it, which is exactly why they go missing.
A finished set includes a panel diagram, device details, and device mounting elevation details. It shows conductor routing and conductor size, and conduit where conduit is needed. Control panel wiring diagrams and point to point wiring diagrams should be present.
Mounting elevations are worth a specific mention because they are a coordination document disguised as a fire alarm document. Device heights determine whether a pull station lands behind a millwork run, whether a strobe ends up above a suspended ceiling, and whether a device conflicts with signage, casework, or a door swing. If you are the architect or the general contractor, those are your problems, and elevations are how you find them before they are built.
Conductor size and routing matter to you for a related reason. They tell your electrical contractor what pathways are needed, which affects coordination with every other trade competing for the same ceiling space.
What to look for
Device mounting elevation details, and conductor size and routing shown rather than implied.
Good is elevations you can coordinate against, and pathways your electrical contractor can price.
Thin is a set with plans and a riser and nothing else. The missing sheets become field decisions, and field decisions become change orders.
09 Everything the submittal hands to somebody else
Read the set once more, looking only for work it assigns away from itself. This is the most commercially useful pass you will make.
Fire alarm systems interface with other building systems. Access controlled doors have to release on alarm. Elevators recall. Air handling may shut down or dampers close. Every one of those is a boundary between two trades, and submittals routinely describe the fire alarm side of the boundary and go quiet about the rest.
So build a list. For each interface, the submittal should make clear who provides the relay, who provides the wiring between systems, who programs each side, and who witnesses the test that proves it works end to end. If the answer to any of those is by others, then the person holding the coordination risk is you, and you should know that before the schedule is set rather than after.
Do the same for pathways, power, patching, core drilling, and firestopping. None of that is fire alarm engineering. All of it appears on somebody's invoice eventually.
The one nobody assigns
End to end interface testing is the most commonly unassigned scope on a project. Each trade tests its own side, finds it working, and reports success. Nobody tests across the boundary, so the failure surfaces at the witness test in front of the authority having jurisdiction. Name a party responsible for it in writing, now, and it stops being your problem in three months.
What to look for
Every instance of "by others" and "as required", listed out with a question against each.
Good is a small number of them, each one obviously reasonable and clearly assigned elsewhere in the contract documents.
Thin is a set where the interfaces are described only from the fire alarm side. That is undefined scope wearing a technical vocabulary.
10 What to send back, and how to word it
You now have a list. The question is what to do with it, and the answer is narrower than approve or reject.
Do not approve a set you have found gaps in, because approval transfers a degree of ownership you do not want. Do not reject it either, unless it is genuinely unsalvageable, because rejection restarts a cycle and creates an adversarial posture with somebody you need cooperation from.
Request specifics. List the missing items by name, using the vocabulary the designer already uses. "Please provide the sequence of operations matrix" is a request anybody can act on immediately. "This seems incomplete" invites a defensive reply and another week.
Ask for a revision date and a revised drawing index, so that the next set you receive can be checked against the last one rather than reviewed from scratch. And keep your list, because you will use it again on the resubmittal, and because at closeout you should receive as-builts reflecting what was actually installed, which is the same document set one more time with the field changes in it.
One last thing worth saying plainly. If a submittal comes back thin twice, the problem is usually not that particular set. It is that the design was priced as a drawing package rather than as engineering, and no amount of comments will convert one into the other.
The review, in one pass
- Drawing index present, so you can tell the set is complete
- Codes and standards named with editions
- Scope of work matches the project you are actually building
- Bill of material with quantity, symbol, model, specs, back box, mounting height, listings
- Every plan symbol appears in the bill of material, and the reverse
- Panel, evacuation panel, NAC booster and annunciator locations shown
- Initiating devices carry address or zone identification
- Notification devices carry candela, circuit and device number
- Riser diagram accounts for every level and matches the plans
- Battery and voltage drop calculations present, showing their inputs
- Voice systems also carry evacuation and line loss calculations
- Sequence of operations matrix complete enough to test from
- Panel diagram, device details and mounting elevations included
- Conductor routing, conductor size and conduit shown
- Every interface names who provides, programs and tests each side
- Every "by others" and "as required" queried
- As-builts named as a closeout deliverable
Seventeen items, most of which are answerable by looking rather than by understanding. An hour spent this way is the cheapest hour available to you on the entire fire alarm scope, and it is the only one where finding a problem costs nothing more than a comment.
Send us a submittal and we will mark it up
Ours or anybody else's. Our New York State licensed Professional Engineers will tell you what is missing and what to ask for, in writing, at no charge. And if you are an electrical contractor with fire detection sitting inside your bid package, we produce the design package so the number you bid survives contact with the building.