Fire Alarm Zone
Paint detection zones, wire BS EN 54 devices onto loops, place panel markers, and export a per-marker zone plan.
The Fire Alarm Zone engine colours rooms by detection zone and produces a panel-ready zone plan. See the feature overview; this is the how-to.
Add the engine
Add the Fire Alarm Zone engine to your project. The compliance region (UK, US, EU or AU) isn’t set per engine - it comes from the app’s Settings → Region, detected from your device’s locale, and drives which standard the plan cites (the “All regions” choice uses the UK standard).
Zones
Zone painting lives on the tool rail:
- Tap Zones - the zone manager opens. Pick a zone to arm it, or Add zone (a first zone is created for you if none exist). Each new zone takes the next number automatically, plus an optional name and a fill colour.
- With a zone armed, tap rooms to paint them; each assigned room fills with the zone colour and shows the zone number in a white badge at its centre.
- Erase clears a room’s zone. Each room belongs to at most one zone.
Fill opacity is adjustable plan-wide (default 30%). Expand a zone’s row to edit its number, name or colour; deleting a zone clears its room assignments. Deletes always ask first, and stay undoable.
”You are here” markers
Place up to four markers for panel and repeater locations - after each drop the tool returns to the Pointer with the new marker selected, and once all four are placed the app asks you to delete one first. Markers drag to reposition, and each one becomes its own page in the export, so one plan can be posted in several places, each oriented to its viewer. A marker’s caption is editable and prints beside the marker - and because each export page carries only its own marker, the caption tells you which page you’re looking at.
Devices & loops
The addressable layer (the BS EN 54 family) sits on the same rail as three category bubbles: Detection (smoke detector, heat detector, multi-sensor, manual call point), Notification (sounder, sounder/beacon, beacon VAD) and Control (control panel).
- Placing - tap a category, tap the plan where the device goes, then pick the exact type from the grid that appears. The device lands selected with the tool back on the Pointer; tap it any time to change its type, loop or caption.
- Symbols - each device draws as a recognisable shape (detector = circle, call point = square, alarm = triangle, panel = rounded rectangle) with its abbreviation underneath, tinted in its loop colour (neutral until it’s on a loop).
- Loops - select a device and pick its SLC loop, or Add loop (loops are numbered, with a bold colour distinct from the zone fills). The armed loop carries across placements, so a run of devices lands on the same loop.
- Wiring - each loop draws a dashed line connecting its devices in placement order, in the loop colour. Deleting a loop unlinks its devices (they stay, just unlooped).
Layers & visibility
The eye chip hides the whole overlay - fills, badges, wiring, devices and markers - so you can read the bare drawing underneath; the export always prints the overlay. The Layers bubble opens the Visible layers sheet: Measurements, Doors, Windows, Room names and Furniture (off by default, for a clean zone plan), plus a room-name text size stepper (8–48 pt). These choices apply to both the editor and the exported PDF, and hiding doors still leaves the doorway opening in the wall.
Everything the engine draws is a true plan-scale annotation, CAD-style: symbols, badges and captions keep their size on the plan - they grow and shrink as you zoom, and print at exactly the same proportions.
Compliance guidance
The plan is an advisory aid, not a certified or guaranteed-compliant document. It names the standard it was prepared with reference to - it doesn’t assert conformance - and the responsible person confirms the current edition. The region drives the cited standard and a completeness checklist:
| Region | Standard |
|---|---|
| UK | BS 5839-1 |
| US | NFPA 72 |
| EU | EN 54 / national code |
| AU | AS 1670.1 (block plan, commonly ≤ 1:250) |
Completeness warnings nudge you toward a full plan, zones defined, rooms assigned, site and installer details, at least one marker, and flag a duplicate zone number.
The checklist also flags detection-coverage gaps, a zoned room with no automatic detector inside it (a manual call point doesn’t count as detection), and a numbered zone whose assigned rooms contain no devices at all. Unzoned rooms are deliberately left out, so a void or cupboard you left off the plan won’t raise a false warning. These are editor nudges only - nothing extra is stamped on the export.
The printed compliance statement is editable: the settings prefill the region’s advisory wording for you to adjust, Reset to default restores it, and Print compliance statement turns it off entirely. Even with it off, every exported page still prints a short, always-on advisory line stating the plan is an aid only and not a legal compliance guarantee - so a posted sheet can never be mistaken for a certified plan.
Export
Export a multi-page PDF, one page per marker (a single page when none), A4 landscape (US Letter for the US region). Each page has a header (title, site, standard, revision, date), the plan with the zone fills under the linework and that page’s marker, and a footer with the zone legend, the device/loop key, the always-on advisory line, the compliance statement, installer details, a north point and a scale bar.
The page fits everything you placed - a marker or device outside the building footprint isn’t clipped - and your layer choices carry through to the print. Add a company logo under Branding (from your photo library or a file) and it prints bottom-right on every page.
Resolve duplicate zone numbers first. Because two zones sharing a number would point at the same panel indicator, the export is blocked until every zone number is unique - you’ll be asked to fix the duplicates before the PDF can be produced. The settings checklist flags the same clash while you edit.
On the free tier, an exported zone plan carries a light watermark, so you can export a free watermarked sample or spend one export credit for a single clean copy. Full access exports clean every time. See Exporting & sharing for the detail.
Fade the base plan
The engine settings open with a Canvas → Plan opacity slider. Drag it down to fade the static floor plan in the editor so your zone fills, devices and loops stand out; it starts at 90%. It only changes how the plan looks while you work - the drawing itself and the exported PDF are unchanged - and the choice is shared across every overlay engine and remembered between sessions.