The Siren Board

I've always loved Whelen's sirens, but since I've been researching them on YouTube, I've found more and more failures of systems installed by this company, from speaker failures to straight-up battery explosions. Is the reason for the amount of these issues just because Whelen is an electronic-specific company or is there something relating to build quality?

For reference, here are some completely different failures of Whelen systems:
- Battery explosion, WPS-2810 (DJ2226)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-5r6_8ta9w
- Driver failure, Vortex-R4 (Cherry 1880)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKPXX37HbJA
- Driver failure (?), Vortex-R4 (Central Ohio Sirens)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BleYP57rjn8
- Tone Generator failure, WPS-2016 (WarningSirensofMichiana)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTUW55SxBNA
- Driver failure (?), WPS-2805 ( WarningSirensofMichiana)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcQl3NPWl2I

Most of it has to do with poor maintenance. Whelens usually last a long time if maintained properly.

Echo what Kasey said.

Your two Vortex “driver failures” are low battery cutoffs. The 2016 is a low battery situation as well.

See a trend here…

And besides a handful of examples means nothing relative to the tens of thousands of units installed over time.

Whelen is easily the top siren manufacturer for electronic sirens, and they're common and widespread for a good reason. Their electronic sirens are some of the best out there, which makes sense as they literally pioneered that section of the industry. They're far from unreliable, and only run into issues typically when they're not maintained properly, usually just low or dead batteries that need replacing. That's no fault of Whelen themselves, that's operator error. Their sirens are top notch quality with excellent reliability and performance, from what I've seen and heard.

Most of the examples linked above are older units that are not maintained regularly. It is important to note that the company typically does not install sirens, as that is handled by licensed companies who contract for them. Poorly maintained and installed systems by these dealers should not be representative of Whelen's quality.

Found another video of dead whelens


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS8Bkd11dh8

NOT MY VIDEO!

Thank y'all

Here's an absolute classic. Seems like both 3000s in Brighton were dying from low batteries at the same time. The main 3000 kept whining and making very weird pitch fluctuating noises rather than a 700hz alert tone. It seems that the Analog 864 refused to cut off on low batteries? You can also hear in the background the other unit whoop and cut out almost instantly after it activated.

Video belongs to Noah Doane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqEwDeiAHks

The low voltage cutoff is only a feature of the newer units. You can also find examples of ASC electronic sirens exhibiting sputtering with no cut-off as ASC sirens still, to my understanding, do not have a low voltage cut off feature (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWO6LjtyoH4).

With the Brighton siren, think about trying to play with a toy with a tone generator (i.e. a toy fire truck) with dying batteries. Exact same thing happens.

One thing that needs to be clear, returning to the original post, is that drivers are often incorrectly used as a catch all for a failure on electronic sirens. The drivers are the parts within the speaker array responsible for turning the amplified electrical signal into sound. Every single one is not going to fail at once. A blown driver, in the truest sense, just means the speaker mechanism itself has failed for a variety of reasons and that individual speaker (of which there are usually many in an electronic siren) won't output while the rest will. A complete unit failure (no output) is going to be (usually) a power failure (i.e. dead batteries) or a motherboard failure. A speaker would not output (but still itself be fine) should an amplifier fail but, again, all amps won't fail all at the same time. A total failure is more likely than not going to be power-related.

SirensOfAustralia wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 09, 2023 10:04 am

Here's an absolute classic. Seems like both 3000s in Brighton were dying from low batteries at the same time. The main 3000 kept whining and making very weird pitch fluctuating noises rather than a 700hz alert tone. It seems that the Analog 864 refused to cut off on low batteries? You can also hear in the background the other unit whoop and cut out almost instantly after it activated.

Video belongs to Noah Doane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqEwDeiAHks

I had to watch that more than once. It sounded like a dog howling lol.