Intruder detection · Paradox
Three families, and three installations that look nothing alike.
Paradox is not one panel: it is three lines that are cabled, extended and maintained differently. What each one does, how it behaves with false alarms and what has to be decided before the first metre of bus.
What Paradox is and where it turns up.
A Canadian house of control panels and detectors, sold in Spain through distribution. You find it in the mid-range: houses, clinics, offices, chain shops, workshops and small industrial units. It is not the brand for a critical infrastructure specification and it does not pretend to be.
There are three lines and choosing badly is not fixed with a module. EVO is the big one, with a bus off which hang expanders, keypads and readers. Spectra is hybrid: some zones by cable and others by radio. Magellan is the wireless one, for where a cable cannot be run.
And there is the scenario almost every call comes out of: a panel from this house in a cabinet, fitted by somebody who does not come back, with two zones isolated since a refurbishment and nobody holding the installer code.
How it's built.
A four-wire bus leaves the panel and picks up the modules, carrying data and power on the same cable. That is paid for on site: the further away and the higher the current draw, the more the voltage drops. A badly sized bus gives faults that look like software and are fixed with auxiliary power supplies spread about.
Zones can be doubled up to put two detectors on one pair of wires. In a refurbishment that is legitimate; on a new build it is laziness: two detectors on the same input are harder to diagnose the day one of them fails.
The partitions decide whether the system will still be armed a year from now: if closing the office means arming the store where somebody is still working, it is not that it gets armed badly, it is that it does not get armed. And the wireless side has its rules — a battery with a date, supervision so that a mute detector reports a fault, and coverage measured on site and not on the drawing.
What the data sheet decides.
Six answers worth having before asking for a price.
- How many zones today and how many in three years, and what goes by cable and what by radio. Extending a bus with the ceiling closed costs far more than the module that is missing.
- Power supply and autonomy calculated with everything hanging off it, sounders included. The battery is a consumable with a date on it, and a six-year-old one is a panel that raises no alarm at night.
- How it raises the alert, and how it raises it if the first route goes down: IP and mobile data with supervision. Watch out for the old ones that dialled out by telephone — many stopped reporting the day the client moved to fibre, and nobody found out.
- Whether the alert goes to an alarm receiving centre, to a telephone or to both. A notification on a phone is not an alarm receiving centre: it is an alert to somebody who may be asleep.
- How it joins up with the video and the access control. Through contacts and relays it is crude and it always works; whatever a brochure calls integration is tested on a mock-up before it is promised.
How it behaves with false alarms.
The panel is not what rules most here. But it has three tools, and they are almost never configured.
What decides is the detector and the place it is put. One aimed at a tarpaulin, at a hot air outlet or at a metal sheet cooling at dusk will give you trouble with any panel.
The panel adds three things: requiring two different detectors to see the same thing before firing, which is a decision per zone because it costs a little sensitivity; isolating on its own the zone that has fired several times in one arming; and the event log, where the pattern of hour and zone is, before anybody touches a screw. What is not done is lowering the sensitivity: that turns a noisy alarm into a deaf one.
And there is one more step: looking before you send somebody out. A detector says something has crossed; the image says what. Here we declare what has to be declared: IRIS Neural is the NVMS of Infinity Neural, the other company in this group, which is to say our own product. It does not replace the panel: it puts an image on its alerts.
The grade, and the alarm receiving centre.
The EN 50131 standards classify alarm systems into security grades, and each grade demands specific things of the equipment, the cabling, the power supply and what happens if somebody tampers with a detector. The grade is set by the risk of the activity and, in many cases, by the insurance policy. It is not a marketing label.
Two things get confused: equipment being declared for a grade, and an installation meeting that grade. The second includes the cabling, the power supply, the autonomy, the response to tampering and what is written down. What grade each model from this house supports is read in its documentation, item by item.
So the question —to us as well— is what grade is being handed over, and that it be handed over in writing. We do not state it here: it depends on the design and on the equipment, and it is asserted by whoever signs. And connecting to an alarm receiving centre is another decision, with its own regulations and its own contract: who provides it and on what terms is settled in a quotation, not on a website.
Who it fits, and who it doesn't.
It fits one building or a few, with real partitions —house and unit, office and store—. And it fits extensions: a bus you hang an expander off is the cheapest way of growing.
The wireless line fits where the cable will not go: listed buildings, refurbishments with the floor laid, rented premises. In exchange you take on maintenance with dates on it — batteries, coverage, and a plan for when they move the furniture and block a detector.
It does not fit if there are many sites to govern from one place, with users synchronised to the directory and centralised audit: it is not the number of zones, it is that this range is not designed to be administered as a fleet. And it does not fit if nobody is going to maintain it: with an old battery and two isolated zones, a panel is switched on and protects nothing.
What we do with it.
- The design before the brand. Zone by zone: which detector, at what height, looking where, and what is in that field of view that moves and is not a person.
- The night visit when the protection is at night. What moves in a yard at three looks nothing like what you see on a mid-morning visit.
- The sizing with the numbers in front of us: zones, keypads, partitions, bus current draw and the autonomy that comes out of it. Calculated, not estimated.
- The installation: the bus with its cross-section, tamper detection on every element, sounders where they can be heard and not where they are easy to fit, and the two routes for the alert.
- The commissioning with a certificate written beforehand: walking in front of every detector, checking the alert reaches the end of the route —panel, receiver and the telephone of whoever has to find out—, with the time and the result. What is not in the certificate was not tested.
- The maintenance with a calendar, the log read to catch the false alarms the client no longer even reports, and the documentation and the keys in the client's name: if tomorrow they want to change supplier, they have to be able to.
Who operates it once we leave.
The day-to-day belongs to the client. The layer underneath does not.
Arming and disarming, managing users and codes, isolating a zone because there is building work in a room and looking up last night's log: the client runs that and should run it. That is what the user levels are for: whoever opens up in the morning has no need to be able to change what a zone does.
What the client does not touch is adding an expander, changing a zone's type, touching the entry and exit times, altering the reporting to the alarm receiving centre or upgrading firmware. Not to keep work for ourselves: a mistake there is not seen until the day the alarm was needed.
And the isolation that got left in place —the zone that was a nuisance— is the most common way for a good system to stop being any use. Every isolation with an expiry date, the inspection hunting them down, and a file saying which detector each number on the keypad is and who the system calls.
The other eight in this group.
Four control panels and five outdoor perimeter houses. None is better than another: what changes is how they grow, how they behave with the false alarm and what ground they hold up on.
Get started
How many times did it go off last month?
That number tells you whether your system works or is only switched on. Tell us what panel there is, how many zones, how many alerts come in and how many were real, and we will tell you whether it is fixed with settings, with different detectors or by changing panel.