When it comes to paging systems, auto service centers have specific requirements. It’s tough.
An impact drill can be 90 dBs or louder. A car engine can be much louder than that. Workers might be wearing earplugs or ear muffs to protect their hearing. At the same time, they still need to hear pages. How will they hear the pages or phone calls over the noise of the garage?
It can be grimy and oily and smoky with harsh chemicals and detergents. How will the paging speakers and equipment hold up to the difficult environment?
Let’s say you’re at a car dealership with a service center. Workers need to be in touch. How do you cover all that space?
In this blog, we give actionable advice on how to build the best IP paging system for car garages.
Compatibility
The most important question when shopping for IP Paging Speakers is compatibility: Will your speakers work with your IP paging system or IP phone system?
You can think of IP paging speakers like you would VoIP phones. They need a compatible system to connect to. The most widely used VoIP protocol is SIP. Most VoIP phone systems and IP paging speakers you’ll find are SIP endpoints. But that doesn’t mean that they’re all fully compatible with each other. Always check interoperability before purchase.
If you’d like to know more about SIP, check out our blog, “What Is a SIP Phone? An Easy to Understand Explainer.”
We’ve talked a lot about IP paging speakers. What about analog paging speakers? They’re still very common and less expensive in general than IP speakers.
If you have analog paging speakers that you want to integrate into an IP paging system, look for IP paging adapters like Algo 8305. They’re exactly what they sound like: adapters for connecting legacy analog paging systems to an IP system. You get to extend the lifetime of your existing paging speakers while taking advantage of the numerous benefits of VoIP paging.
If you’d like an introduction to paging systems, including analog paging systems and VoIP paging systems, check out our clear, detailed Paging Systems Buyer’s Guide.
VoIP Paging Solutions for Automotive Service Centers
We’re going to look at durability, specific types of speakers to look for, and how to make your phone better with paging equipment.
Here at IP Phone Warehouse, we carry paging solutions from the leading manufacturers:
- Algo Paging Equipment
- CyberData Paging Equipment
- Valcom Paging Equipment
- Viking Electronics Paging Equipment
IP Ratings and IK Ratings
If you want to know how durable a paging speaker is, look at its IP and IK rating. These are industry standards for electronic devices. For a device to meet a given IP rating, it is tested to meet the standard objectively.
IP ratings indicate how well a device withstands dust and water ingress. The rating will be given as “IP” then two numbers, like IP67. The first number (6, in the example) refers to resistance against “solid foreign objects” on a scale from 0 (no protection) to 6 (dust-tight). The second number (7, in the example) refers to water resistance on a scale from 0 (no protection) to 9 (protected against high pressure and temperature water jets).
IK ratings indicate how well a device withstands impacts. The rating is given as “IK” then two numbers, like IK08. Unlike IP ratings, however, IK ratings are to be understood as a single number on a scale from IK00 (no protection) to IK10 (protected against 20 joules of impact).
Thinking about durability ratings is especially important for outdoor work areas. If you have a fleet of semis and workers are in the yard, they need to hear pages. And outdoor paging speakers for car yards need to be durable enough to hold up when it’s raining or the wind is blowing.
You also might want to consider buying additional housing equipment to protect the speaker even more. For example, there are wire guards that protect speakers from larger debris.
More Speakers Can Be Better Than Louder Speakers
A quick tip: You might think about trying to get the loudest speaker you can to be able to hear over the noise of the garage. But sometimes, no matter how hard you pump up the volume, intelligible sound won’t reach workers who aren’t close by.
Using multiple speakers is a great idea for automotive repair centers. Setting up a paging system with multiple speakers means one will always be close to a worker.
For example, you might set up an Algo 8196 Speaker Horn to broadcast audio across the outdoor yard with additional Algo 1196 Satellite Speaker Horns to extend the reach of the audio.
Another way to improve intelligibility is to think about sound dispersion. Focusing sound dispersion can make easier for people to hear and understand pages.
Angled Wall Speakers
With auto garages, how sound is dispersed is vital to think about. In an office building, you can just put some speakers in a drop ceiling and be done with it. In an automotive workspace, you have to be more thoughtful.
If there are a lot of fumes and dust and smoke kicked up around the garage, having a ceiling-mounted speaker might not be the best idea, because all that gunk will go right up into the speaker. You’ll probably want to use a wall-mounted speaker.
More specifically, you’ll probably want an angled wall speaker. One thing that many people don’t think about is the angle at which a speaker is mounted can make a big difference in how audible a page can be. An angled speaker will project audio directly down to the work floor, which is more efficient than a speaker that projects audio perpendicular to the wall. In other words, you’ll need less power for more volume.
Paging equipment manufacturers make optional backboxes for mounting speakers. Look for angled backboxes to help mount the speaker at the most effective angle. Bonus: backboxes often provide additional protection for the speaker.
Speaker Horns
At larger locations like dealerships with service centers, there can be a lot of outdoor space that you need to cover. In this case, you need to look for a weatherproof speaker horn.
Speaker Horns are a type of paging speaker with a horn shape to direct audio. Having narrower sound dispersion means audio sounds louder per watt, rather than a standard speaker that spends wattage dispersing sound in a wider area.
With a speaker horn, you can easily direct sound to reach distant parts of the parking lot when you need to.
Loud Ringers and Strobes
It’s not only the paging system that can be hard to hear. When the shop-vacs are droning and the impact wrenches are cranking, it can be almost impossible to hear the phone ringing. But you need to hear that call and talk to your customers and get business.
Smaller car garages with only one or two people working at any time might not need to worry about a full paging system. But every business needs to hear phone calls.
There are two devices that you can connect to a phone that you should know about: Loud Ringers and Strobes.
- Loud ringer. The name tells the whole story: loud ringers are dedicated external speaker connected to a phone that play the ring much louder than a phone can. You can set the ringer to be audible over the noise of the car garage.
- Strobe. You might think of strobe lights only for concerts and dances, but they’re also devices that can be connected to a phone. When a call comes in, the strobe will flash. In other words, instead of an audio notification, you get a visual notification. Strobes are also a good solution for making your workspace more accessible for hearing-challenged individuals.
If you’d like to know more about loud ringers and strobes, we covered them in detail in our blog: Loud Ringers and Strobes for VoIP.
Wireless Phones
Finally, it’s one thing to hear the phone call coming in, but can you answer it? Can you keep it near you?
Consider a ruggedized wireless handset that you can keep near you. There are two types of wireless IP phones to know about: DECT and Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi phones use the wireless network to connect to the IP phone system. If you want to use a Wi-Fi phone, you need to have good Wi-Fi coverage everywhere, which might be a problem in larger spaces.
DECT handsets connect to a base station that connects to the IP system. DECT is a wireless communications protocol that has several benefits. In this case, the big one is that DECT has a really broad wireless range, so the handset doesn’t need to be as close to the base station as it would be with, for example, a Bluetooth device.
If you have a large space to cover, look for a wireless repeater. There are both Wi-Fi repeaters and DECT repeaters. A repeater is a device that isn’t an independent Wi-Fi router or DECT base station, but it repeats the signal to extend the wireless range. (If you’ve heard of mesh Wi-Fi, it’s the same idea.)
If you’d like to know more, check out our blog, “Wireless Handsets: DECT vs Wi-Fi.”
We said you should consider a ruggedized handset. When it comes to ruggedization, the same IP and IK durability ratings that we talked about in regards to paging speakers apply.