Whelen 2XXX Control Boxes

[holler]

No they are one way, two tone.

I know we can make our own lights, but there is no need to add them when all it takes is a few minutes in the cabinet to figure out what's working and what's not.. It just would have been nice if they had been ordered with the status lights.

[EWS Rules]

Wow.. Two tone... Whelen's prices are a little out of this world... Do have replace controller with LCD's

[holler]

There is nothing wrong with two tone, and Whelen is priced about the same as everybody else.

When did price get brought into this discussion anyway?

[Brendan Ahern]

I thought the status indicators were standard. Maybe not on the Vortex. Wow, two-tone? You don't see that too much anymore. But if you don't need to set off sirens individually, two-tone is just fine. Does it use a Whelen base station, or just using a paging system for activation?

[holler]

Uses the paging encoder at the 911 center. Two tone is still very common down here. System is a mix of Whelen and Federal.

[EWS Rules]

No, all of Whelen Control Stations are DTMF, only standard indicators are on the control board, "Whelen is priced about the same as everybody else" Sorry to say Whelen prices very much more... Two Tone is way outdated.. Lot of systems are beaning hacked into with Two Tone, Have changed a number of them.

[EWS Rules]

If you want two tone with Whelen.. You pay more for that board to...

[holler]

A subaudible fixes a lot of your hacking problems, unless somebody has decoding software. I don't care if it's outdated, it still works damn good.

Whelen is still priced about the same as everyone else. We've worked with both Whelen and Federal on repair parts and the prices are about the same for comparable sirens.

[uncommonsense]

Whelens are competitively priced. 30k for a 2910 (saw that on St. Louis' bid sheets, which I posted here years ago)...a 129 db omnidirectional siren...that's a pretty sweet deal. I saw a bid sheet for a Vortex awhile back where the unit was priced at 12k (granted, I admit that sounds low), but if right, that sounds quite reasonable.

Reading publicly available bid sheets gives me the impression $20-25k is about right, give or take, for a new electromechanical siren. And if you go by SafetyCom's pricing (god knows how outdated that is), that's about what you'd pay for a 4004.

Not to mention, in all of this, I'm sure you pay if you want to deviate from a company's proprietary activation systems anymore. Case in point: DTMF is listed as an "option," not as a order variance for the UltraVoice. Option = $$$.

So, anyway, I'd love to know more about your business credentials, EWS, especially since this is the first time I'm hearing about them. I wouldn't be out there questioning Holler...I mean, he is one of the most respected and honest siren installers/restorers/upkeepers on here and I'd trust his opinion and knowledge base far more than just about anyone else's.

[Brendan Ahern]

Even if the two tone decoder on the siren costs more, which may or may not, they would still save money on an encoder by using TTS. TTS is fine, as long as you don't need status monitoring or individual siren control.

As far as pricing, that varies by dealer. If the siren costs 25k to buy from Whelen, even without markup, there is still going to be charges for the installation labor, pole, and any incidentals ( conduit, disconnect, meter sockets, etc.). I remember seeing a bid online for a town in Missouri that went with Whelen. Federal bid 2001's even though the system was for sure going to be voice. 2 Whelen dealers bid, one was higher than the other, and an ASC dealer bid and an ATI dealer bid. They ruled out ATI and ASC because they wanted the sirens to be 129db and neither company offers that. That aside, ASC I believe was the best bid. ATI was a lot higher than any other bid, by several thousand dollars. So a lot of the pricing is based on what a dealer bids, taking labor, poles and incidentals into account. Not to mention the encoding system and if there is SCADA. Lots and lots of variables.