Discovery Response Modes

A major objective in designing a detection system is to achieve the best detection performance while keeping the number of unwanted alarms to a minimum. Unwanted alarms are normally caused by environmental influences and, generally speaking, the higher the sensitivity, the more frequent the unwanted alarms.

Each detector in the Discovery range can operate in one of five response modes, any of which can be selected from the control panel. Each mode corresponds to a unique response behaviour, which can be broadly related to sensitivity to fire. Whatever the type of detector, mode 1 will give higher sensitivity to fire than mode 5.

Therefore, Discovery detectors set to mode 1 will be most suitable for environments in which sources of unwanted alarms are rare, for example cleanrooms and computer suites. At the other extreme, response mode 5 will be suited to more dusty or smoky enviroments such as loading areas where diesel forklift trucks are operating. Response mode 3 is a general-purpose setting for which the response is similar to that of the corresponding XP95 detector. The table below illustrates typical applications and their modes.