VFS is pleased to announce our new Strategic Partnership with Edwards™ United Technologies. Edwards is a global leader in product emergency communication, mass notification and life safety system solutions.  VFS is a one stop provider for all fire & life safety needs.

No matter the depth and breadth of your fire & life safety needs, our Strategic Partnership with Edwards allows VFS to discover innovative ways to meet site-specific challenges.  Whether you need to protect a healthcare institution, education facility, distribution plant, refinery, aircraft hangar or any other special hazard application, VFS partnered with the Edwards product line will provide a winning solution.

The new Edwards product solutions are modular, scalable, and meet the needs of applications ranging from fire detection, to industrial signaling and institutional communications.  These solutions from Edwards offer technologically advanced innovations that deliver value and reliability for the entire service life of the product.

When facility owners, property manager, end-users, architects and engineers do business with VFS, they know that their partnership with the Edwards product line is underwritten by a solid 140-year history of dedication to alarm and detection technology. That’s why building professionals all over the world agree that when it comes to protecting people and property, Edwards systems deliver on a long standing promise of excellence that has been met for generations.

To learn more about VFS and our partnership with Edwards, contact us today!

You rely on your fire and life safety systems to protect your people, property and business, therefore regular maintenance is essential for keeping these systems running smoothly and guarantee safety.   If you’re wondering whether a preventive maintenance agreement is worth the investment, consider the following benefits

1. Predictable and Lower Costs Over the Life of the Contract

When you are managing a budget, it’s critical to understand expenses up front.  No one likes surprises – especially unexpected maintenance costs. When you enter into a preventative maintenance agreement, the majority of your expenses are determined in advance. While the thought of signing an agreement with a service may not seem necessary to many businesses, in fact it can save money over the life of the agreement.  Without a maintenance agreement in place, businesses will need to deal with that frantic day when the system goes down and will likely pay overtime/premium labor rates, rush charges on equipment or emergency rates versus the lower rates provided in a maintenance agreement.  Service companies typically offer discounted rates as part of their preventative maintenance agreement.

2. Minimizing costly downtime

With the regular testing and inspections that are included in a preventative maintenance agreement, potential problems can be identified in advance.  These issues can then be resolved based on a schedule that makes sense for the business rather than dealing with costly downtime if an emergency occurs.  With a maintenance agreement for your fire & life safety systems in place, the financial downtime impact can be minimized.

3.Reduced Stress

Emergency service calls are stressful and expensive.  You will typically pay premium rates that include minimum charges that in many cases may be more expensive than the repair itself. Your emergency could potentially require that a technician work on the repairs at night or on the weekend during premium labor wages and rates.   With a preventative maintenance agreement in place, this extra stress can be avoided.

4. Increased longevity for your systems

Routine maintenance on your equipment can increase the longevity of your fire and life safety systems. A technician can identify simple repair issues before they become a serious and potentially life threating. With regular maintenance it’s less likely that your fire & life safety systems will experience unexpected failures. With a preventative maintenance agreement in place you can be confident that your systems will continue to perform as designed optimizing their performance.

5. Priority Service

Most preventative maintenance agreements are contractually binding to a service respond time. Due to this, companies will service their customers that are covered by a preventative maintenance agreement ahead of other customers. In the fire and life safety industry most emergency calls take precedence over all non-emergency/scheduled calls. For those scheduled non-emergency calls, service providers’ bind to a maintenance agreement will schedule a service request for customers under an agreement before non-preventative maintenance customers.

To learn more about maintenance service agreements available from VFS, contact us today!

Due to technological advances, changes in consumer preferences and market forces, both Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) and Public Switch Telephone Service (PTSN) are on the road to becoming obsolete.  So why is this happening and what does it mean to a business for their fire alarm monitoring?

There are several main reasons that landlines are disappearing:

1. Large landline companies don’t want to maintain expensive copper networks. This old infrastructure served its purpose but has quickly become outdated.
2. For businesses, landlines are expensive. The newer IP phone systems offer a wider range of phone options (including conferencing, long distance and international calling) at a much lower cost.
3. Internet Protocol telephone systems offer increased flexibility. Setup is inexpensive and offices do not have to be hard wired.
4. Internet Protocol systems also offer lower overall costs for day to day usage.

So now that we know that traditional landline phone systems are going away, what does this mean for fire alarm monitoring systems that have traditionally relied on this technology?   The answer is Mesh Radio.  This type of communication network is made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways. The mesh clients are often laptops, cell phones and other wireless devices while the mesh routers forward traffic to and from the gateways which may, but need not, be connected to the Internet. A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy.  When one node can no longer operate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes.

With all these changes, VFS has implemented LiNCnet monitoring that uses mesh radio for reliable, fast and secure delivery of critical event signals.  We know that your alarm system is only as reliable as its ability to transmit signals to the central monitoring station.  Because traditional phone systems are disappearing, VFS is using mesh technology to offer high reliability and significantly faster signal transmission speed which gives you quickest response time.  Mesh Technology provides:

• High reliability
• Fast transmission speed
• NFPA complaint and UL listed solutions
• Multiple Path Smart Routing
• Easy installation and maintenance

Contact VFS today and protect your people, property, and business with our secure wireless alarm communication network dedicated to alarm monitoring.