Thanks everyone. This is a rural fire district west of St. Louis (Wright City). This is the gated community that I talk about a lot. It is actually a village on its own, but in Missouri fire district supersede city limits. What that means is that the Wright City Fire Protection District covers more than just Wright City.

Anyway, the funny thing is there is no building codes out here. The county it is in has absolutely no building codes (and I have seen some freaky stuff). So if this guy isn't going by NEC, then what is he going by? OR Is he simply imposing his own codes?

I hadn't though about the locked transformer thing. We normally just use the transformers that can screw into the outlet so they can't be unplugged without unscrewing it.

It seems to me that a hardwired transformer is a good idea but the bigger problem is wether the inspector is going to be reasonable or play his power trip.

As for as building code, if the town doesn't have any building code of its own then all structures are supposed to be built per national building code. However if there is no local enforcement it's a bit of a moot point.

We've run into this in a few cities around here. Some cities let us hardwire the transformer, the others just would not let us do the low voltage smokes no matter what!! One inspector told me his reason for this. is that people may not always have the money to maintain the alarm system and then the smokes wouldn't be there when they were needed. The 110 volt are pretty much install and forget.
I don't agree but sometimes you can't fight City Hall.

I have heard variations of that comment about not maintaining them. When ever we do primary LV smokes, we also install an outside horn/strobe. I have a few customers who do not want monthly monitoring, so we set it up and run it as a local system. We just instruct the customer to contact us when the batteries need to be replaced. When it is explained to them that these smokes are installed for their safety, they contact us for battery replacement. Seems to be working for us. We replace about a dozen batteries or so a year for our non-monitored customers. We use 2 batteries on these types of jobs, 1 for the panel and 1 for the power supply that we use just for powering the smokes.

What I want to know is how many of you out there wire the smokes with 18/4 versus 22/4? We always use 18/4, but I see a number of jobs wired with 22/4 and I think those jobs are just problems waiting to happen.

Wire Nuts, it depends on how many smokes we do. We actually did 2 houses in this community for primary smokes and used 18/4. Normally we do secondary smoke (1 on each level) and just use 22/4 because the run is short (less than 100' in most cases). We have not had any issues.

Not to show my ignorance, but what type of problems do you think will occur?