Interconnected Smoke Alarms

As of the 1^st of May 2014, all newly built homes or homes that have undergone major renovations require all smoke alarms to be interconnected to each other.

All 240V smoke alarms should have the ability to be hard-wired interconnected, and this is the most preferred and effective way to interconnect smoke alarms and is required on all new builds. There should be no reason smoke alarms cannot be hard-wired interconnected in a new build.

All manufactures will have different methods on how they are interconnected. PSA uses a Switch wire method with utilised an SDI cable linking all the alarms in a circuit in a daisy chain.

Smoke alarms have had the ability to be interconnected via an interconnecting cable for a very long time, however as mentioned, it has not been a requirement until 2014. This can cause problems on existing homes that are being renovated or in QLD, where all homes must have additional alarms installed and require to be interconnected. In many pre-existing homes, running interconnecting homes can be extremely costly or simply impossible.

This led to the introduction of wireless interconnection. Most smoke alarm manufacturers will have a wireless solution for their alarms, allowing hard-wired alarms to be wirelessly interconnected or the ability to add a wireless alarm to a pre-existing hard-wired system.