Goodwin House, a luxurious residential/health-care facility located in Bailey Crossroads,Virginia, consists of a 360,000 square foot, 12-floor tower where more than 350 retirees conduct their daily lives.

"One floor is used for health care and another one for assisted living. The other nine are used for independent living with one floor used as a common area,"says Director of Environmental Services Jim Colston with Goodwin House.

This high-rise tower was recently joined by a newly-constructed Health and Wellness Center. Future development plans also call for a new 15-story tower to provide 106 additional condominium-style apartments with room for more Goodwin House offices. Once construction is complete, all three structures will interconnect,providing residents and employees the convenience of ready access.

Given the nature of this community and its new campus-style environment, fire protection and life safety were a major concern of its management.

"Because we're adding two new buildings that require a fire alarm in them, we decided it would be best if all three fire alarm systems were able to talk to each other," Colston adds.

Desiring an integrated solution that ties all three structures together, Goodwin House management chose theE3 Series^® Expandable Emergency Evacuation system,manufactured by Gamewell-FCI, provided by AlarmTech Solutions, LLC of Severn, Maryland and installed by Freestate Electrical Construction of Beltsville, Maryland.

Installation of a new fire and life safety system began with the existing 12-story tower. By way of digital signal technology for the SLC (signaling line circuit), Alarm Tech was able to utilize the existing metallic wire installed throughout the building, saving time and money while preventing destruction of a beautiful facility.

"The way we installed the E3 Series system resulted in no down time in protection and virtually no cutting,patching and painting, which would have been a significant cost to Goodwin House," says Marty Smith, General Manager with Alarm Tech Solutions.

Relying on true peer-to-peer, token ring passing net-work technology, the system will support up to 64 nodes,currently allowing 2 to 128 SLCs, each one accommodating up to 159 devices and 159 modules.

From firefighter phones to elevator control, detection to fire control, the E3 Series is the only system of its kind to integrate it all over a single twisted-pair cable between nodes, equaling installation ease at a lower cost.

"The system also features emergency evacuation with special messaging that's part of the facility's evacuation plan. Plus, we included smoke control, stair pressurization and exhaust and monitoring of the gas detection system," says Smith.

The 12-story tower's system includes full fan control with five separate smoke zones on a typical floor,utilizing fans and dampers to exhaust the fire floor and pressurize the floor above and floor below. In addition,magnetic door holders were utilized to isolate fire zones on each floor.

Recently extended to encompass the new Health and Wellness Center, the Goodwin House system is planned to expand again into the soon-to-be-constructed 15-story tower.

Ultimately, it was the expertise of Alarm Tech Solutions, combined with the E3 Series' expandable,cost-effective features that succeeded in meeting the end user's expectations head-on.

Gamewell-FCI
12 Clintonville Road
Northford, CT 06472 -1653
203.484.7161
www.gamewell-fci.com