The Siren Board

championsiren wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 13, 2022 3:42 pm

It's an overall inefficient design.

This and everything after this sentence is spot-on. I'd love to have one as a conversation piece, but for modern emergency management agencies the P-50 is a non-starter. There was definitely a different strategy to designing sirens at the time. The current T-135 can do the same thing as a P-50 with 30 less horsepower and battery backup on a single-phase power source

championsiren wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 13, 2022 3:42 pm

making it prone to rotator failure (even though I've seen a very low amount of P-50s with rotator failures).

...what?

It seems like the P-50 (T-135AC) did very well in sales during it's final years of production, with many installations popping up in Texas and Illinois as late as 2005. It wouldn't surprise me that it would've continued to sell if most companies didn't drop AC-only sirens and push for battery backup. It's easy to argue it uses an inefficient design, but no other electric siren has been able to pass the 135db mark. I haven't heard one before, but considering how effective a P-15 horn is, I would expect a P-50 horn to work just as well.

Synther wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 14, 2022 8:28 am

championsiren wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 13, 2022 3:42 pm

making it prone to rotator failure (even though I've seen a very low amount of P-50s with rotator failures).

It seems like the P-50 (T-135AC) did very well in sales during its final years of production, with many installations popping up in Texas and Illinois as late as 2005. It wouldn't surprise me that it would've continued to sell if most companies didn't drop AC-only sirens and push for battery backup. It's easy to argue it uses an inefficient design, but no other electric siren has been able to pass the 135db mark.

I won't refute any of this. It did do exceptionally well in its last few years, but, power requirements. As I said, it's not cheap to get 3 phase power installed, and I'm not saying that AC-only sirens are bad, I'm saying that battery backup is far more reliable and AC-only sirens won't be able to operate if the power is out.
The T-135/P-50 is the loudest electromechanical siren in the world, but as I said, the T-135ACDC has gotten fairly close to that, at 132db@100ft.