Commercial Fire Alarm Budgeting

[ed downey]

Does anyone have a good SF rule for fire alarm devices in commercial buildings? I work on a lot of budgets and I generally just use a $/SF for the fire alarm. I wanted to put together a little more information for the budgets ie smoke detectors/SF, pull stations/SF, horn strobes/SF, etc.

any help would be appreciated.

-Ed

 

[bdarnell]

Re: Commercial Fire Alarm Budgeting

$4-$5 ft? usually works out OK for us. That would include horn/strobes, pulls, flows, tampers, FACP, FAAP, duct detectors. We don't do residential, so no ideas there.

 

[ron]

Re: Commercial Fire Alarm Budgeting

Although I'm sure you realize, that some building have special requirements. Such as high rises have voice evacuation. Buildings with high air flow environments have detectors more tightly spaced. etc.

 

[ed downey]

Re: Commercial Fire Alarm Budgeting

Brad,

That is quite a bit more than I normally see for this type of work. I am closer to $1/SF to $2.5/SF.

But I was trying to put something together like I have done for the power distribution (ie one electrical room every 15,000 SF with a complement of (1) 480/277V panel & 75 KVA transformer and (2) 120/208V panels) and then I price up these individual items to come up with my dollars per SF for the project.

-Ed

 

[bdarnell]

Re: Commercial Fire Alarm Budgeting

Ed -

I looked at some historical data and you are closer than I originally posted. Looks like $2.50 to a top end of $3.25 is closer. That's for the typical warehouse office or big box that we do. High rise would no doubt be more per ft?.

I was using Means data and that's typically way high.

[ February 01, 2006, 04:09 PM: Message edited by: bdarnell ]

 

[cdslotz]

Re: Commercial Fire Alarm Budgeting

It runs about $1.00/ft here in my area. And that's on the high side. Jobs where systems are locked in could run run double that.