Silencing Audible Alarms? - a survey

Do you have general vessel alarms (for bilges, tank levels, etc) with provision for silencing an active alarm without affecting the others or subsequent instances? And, would a simple, low cost electronic module to do this seem useful, 'IYO'? Not considering here sophisticated monitoring systems but the simple basics - What do you have, on what sort of boat (if it isn't your avatar)? Thanks!

Bilge alarm
Engine temp alarm
Genset temp alarm
Battery alarm.

All individual alarms independent of each other.
All silenced at the push of a button.

This is what we had on our old Hatteras

caltexflanc said:

This is what we had on our old Hatteras

Click to expand...

I like that. Even with the networking, glass bridges and digital gauges on yachts now; the basic, "look and hear me now" methods of fault location many times still relies on timely eye scan.

The company I work for makes the light boxes and drive electronics like these:

I think there is a place for such a unit or system and perhaps you are considering marketing one. Each alarm and the silencing of it needs to be independent of the others. An Aqualarm or similar could be ignored for a short while, but an engine coolant alarm that might follow shouldn't be ignored.


David

I think those Hatteras panels, and the associated relay boards, were also used on Bertrams. Those do silence and reset independently. The Aqualarm models I know of have a common silencing for all inputs.

Again the nuke example, having been figured out by human factors folk long ago.

An alarm comes in, the associated light box flashes, the audible signal starts.
The operator eventually acknowledges the alarm, and the light goes from flash to constant ON. At the point where folks are actively debugging the system, the silence button gets hit. Constant noise generation is counterproductive, once the alarm is being acted upon. Only at the point where the defect is below alarm level, does the lamp go out.
fyi, in the nuke example, each alarm and ack is timestamped to the nearest millisecond and stored for later review.

Maybe an alarm switch that was timed or one that reset when the engine was restarted or shut off.

True story. We had a neighbor that had added a switch to his alarms. An overheat alarm went off one day while he was out. He hit the switch and shut the engine down. He found he had lost an impeller which he replaced. He forgot the alarm was off and took off again. The engine overheated to the point he cracked the block. He had sucked a plastic bag that had caused the impeller to fail in the first place.

Yes, the thing I'm referring to is, silence resets when fault is cleared, same if power is cycled. Engine alarms would be powered from the keyswitch.