In December of 2018, Sound Solutions was awarded the contract to upgrade the paging systems at both the Peace Arch and Royal Columbian hospitals. The existing paging system was aging, and it used the fire alarm speakers for paging purposes. To bring the systems up to current building and fire codes, the paging system needed to be separated, which involved installing over 400 speakers throughout each hospital, along with about 10,000 m of wiring.
The installation was challenging in that we were dealing with existing hospitals that were in operation 24/7, with areas like emergency and operating areas being busy at all times. The use of dust tents was required in key areas for infection control as well.
The system itself uses a QSC Core 110f digital signal processor to handle the incoming calls from the telephone switchboards, and each hospital was installed with 16 amplifier zones, up from the original 6 per hospital. Should a piece of equipment fail, or a speaker wire be cut by other tradesmen, a small section of speakers will be affected, as compared to an entire floor with the old system. Custom green colored speaker wire was used, to clearly identify the new speaker wiring from other wires above the Tbar ceiling.
QSC and TOA 4 channel amplifiers were used to drive the Bosch 0606 speakers throughout the hospital. Surface mount Prologue speakers were used in drywall areas, where there was no access to install flush mount speakers.
The installations took 5 months to complete, from January 2019 to June of 2019, and the switch-over from the existing sound system to the new one was seamless. We overlapped operation of the two systems for 2 weeks to ensure there were no glitches
Our techs had to get gowned up, and sealed in dust tents to work in critical care and surgery areas
Over 400 of the Bosch 0606 speakers were installed in each hospital, cloning the existing fire alarm speakers 1:1
Neatness counts! Wire bundling in the back of the rack at Peace Arch hospital
The original green series 1970s Altec Lansing amplifiers, running 24/7 with an incredible 335,000 hours of run time on them