Questions · Fire detection
Do detectors expire? And the old ionisation ones I have fitted?
There is no legal expiry date, but there is a working life declared by the manufacturer, and on optical ones it is usually around ten years. An old detector does not stop working all at once: it loses sensitivity or gains it, and in both cases the system starts lying. Analogue panels warn about drift and dirt build-up, and that warning has to be dealt with instead of covered up by raising the threshold.
The decision to replace is taken with the history in front of you: which detectors are piling up dirt warnings, which ones have gone a long time without passing a smoke test, in which areas the activity has changed. Changing them all by age is expensive and sometimes unnecessary; changing none of them is what ends with a detector disconnected.
A separate case is old ionisation detectors, which carry a small radioactive source. They are no longer installed, and removing them is not throwing them away: they are a waste stream with a procedure of its own and an authorised company to handle it. If there are any left in your building, that gets planned separately; it is not solved on the maintenance visit.
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