What Does Fire With Verification Mean?

Fire With Verification means that a smoke detector must be triggered twice within a short period of time for an alarm to occur. The smoke detector will still alert the panel when activated, but the system will not initiate a fire alarm until it has verified the fire via a second activation.

At Alarm Grid, we generally do not recommend the use of Fire With Verification. This is because having to receive a second activation of a smoke detector for an alarm to occur makes it take longer for your system to go into a fire alarm. If a fire occurs, it is crucial that the fire department arrives on the scene as soon as possible to control the situation. Fire With Verification will slow down this process and make it more likely for loss of life and/or property damage to occur.

Instead of using Fire With Verification, it is usually best practice to use Fire W/O Verification or Fire No Verification. This will mean that the smoke detector only needs to be triggered once for a fire alarm to occur. As soon as the panel receives the signal from the smoke detector, the system will go into a fire alarm. From there, the system will use its alarm monitoring communicator to send out an alert to the central station and/or the end user, depending on their alarm monitoring plan. By triggering an alarm after just one activation, the fire department has the best chance of arriving on the scene as soon as possible.

That said, we do understand that there are some situations where a user may be better off using Fire With Verification. This is typically done to prevent false alarms. There may be some areas in your home or business where using Fire W/O Verification or Fire No Verification may result in a false alarm when there isn't actually a fire. One common cause could be that the smoke detector is used in a kitchen, and some smoke from cooking reaches the detector. Another possibility is that someone is smoking a cigarette, and the smoke causes the smoke detector to activate once. If these are frequent occurrences, you might consider using standalone heat detectors in these areas.

It is important to understand that the Fire With Verification setting is used differently across different alarm control panels. For Honeywell Systems like the Lyric Alarm Panel and the VISTA Systems, each smoke detector is set individually by setting the Response Type for the associated zone to the appropriate option. This is also the same for 2GIG Panels like the Go!Control GC2 and the GC3. However, for Qolsys Panels like the Qolsys IQ Panel 2 Plus, the option is set within system settings. This means that if you have one smoke detector set for Fire With Verification on a Qolsys IQ Panel 2 Plus, then all of the other fire zones will have verification enabled as well.