Elevator recall and the fire alarm system: what Ontario actually requires

Last updated: September 2026

Quick answer

• Elevator recall is Phase 1 emergency recall operation. The fire alarm system closes a contact telling the elevator controller to send the cars to a landing where occupants can get out, and to keep them off the fire floor.
• Phase 2 is firefighters' in-car operation, worked by a key switch inside the car. No fire alarm output starts it.
• Two legal streams meet at the terminal block. The Building Code, O. Reg. 163/24, adopting the National Building Code of Canada 2020 with Ontario amendments, says which detectors must exist and what they cause. ASME A17.1-2019/CSA B44:19, adopted by TSSA under O. Reg. 209/01, says what the elevator does with the signal.
• The detector at the recall level is the odd one out. It sends the cars to the alternate level. A detector in any other lobby, the machine room or the shaft sends them to the designated level.
• The interconnection has to fail safe and show a fault. Canadian AHJ guidance is explicit that a break in the elevator signalling wires must drive the cars to their recall position, which is why the contacts are wired normally closed.
• Shunt trip is not recall. Where sprinklers sit in a machine room or hoistway, elevator power must be removed before water arrives. We could not verify that requirement from a free Canadian source, and we say so below.
• None of it is testable without the elevator contractor on site.

What recall is trying to do

Two things. First, get the car to a floor where people can walk out. An elevator that stops between floors, or parks on the fire floor and opens its doors, is a trap. Phase 1 drives every car non-stop to one known landing, opens the doors and takes the car out of normal service.

Second, keep the car away from the fire, which is why there are two possible destinations: a designated level where cars normally go, and an alternate level used when the fire is at the designated level itself. Once parked, firefighters take a car back under their own control with the in-car key switch. That is Phase 2, and it is deliberately manual.

Phase 1 is your side of the fence: initiating devices in the right places, and a supervised contact that changes state. You do not decide what the car does afterwards, and you cannot program it.

Which detector sends the car where

• A detector in the elevator lobby at the designated recall level is the only device that means "the normal parking spot is the problem". It sends the cars to the alternate level.
• A detector in any other lobby, in the machine room or control space, or in the hoistway means the fire is elsewhere. Those send the cars to the designated level.

The Ontario Building Code carries the first half directly. The article titled Elevator Emergency Return requires that, where elevators serving storeys above the first have an automatic emergency recall feature, smoke detectors be installed in the elevator lobbies on the recall level so that when they are actuated the elevators return directly to an alternate floor level. Those detectors must be designed as part of the building fire alarm system, and the alternate-level feature is not required where the floor area containing the recall level is sprinklered. The second half comes from the smoke detector article, which requires smoke detectors in elevator machine rooms and requires their actuation to recall the elevators served. A separate article requires fire detectors in an elevator or dumbwaiter shaft, connected to the fire alarm system.

A warning about article numbers. Ontario replaced its full-length Building Code on 1 January 2025. O. Reg. 332/12 was revoked, O. Reg. 163/24 now adopts the NBC 2020 text plus an Ontario amendment document, and several Subsection 3.2.4 articles renumbered. Almost every page you will find online still uses the old numbers.

We read the 332/12 numbers directly. The current column is corroborated from an Alberta STANDATA citing NBC 3.2.4.11.(1)(g) and 3.2.4.14.(1) and from a BC Building Code 2024 checklist, both built on the same NBC text Ontario adopted, not from the Ontario text itself, which is not published online in consolidated current form. Treat them as working references and confirm the wording with your AHJ before putting one on a drawing.

High buildings add a layer: manual emergency recall for all elevators serving storeys above the first, with key switches at the recall level lobby and at the central alarm and control facility, in-car emergency service switches, and secure key storage. In a high building that is not sprinklered, automatic recall is required as well, initiated either by smoke detectors in each elevator lobby or by the building fire alarm system.

Which detectors Canada actually requires

CSA B44 asks for more than the Building Code does. The elevator code requires smoke detectors at each floor served by the elevator, plus the machine room and control space, to initiate Phase 1, and does not condition that on sprinklering or on the building being a high building. The Building Code requires lobby detectors only at the recall level, and only where an automatic recall feature exists. The IAEI's Canadian column has flagged that gap in print more than once, treating the elevator code provisions as supplementary requirements that exceed the building code rather than conflict with it.

Both are law in Ontario, one through the Building Code Act and one through the Technical Standards and Safety Act, 2000, so a design providing only a recall-level lobby detector can satisfy the Building Code article and still fail the elevator inspection. The working answer on most Ontario jobs is a smoke detector in every elevator lobby, plus the machine room or control space, plus whatever the shaft needs. Other Canadian AHJs write the same conclusion down: the City of Vancouver's bulletin requires smoke detectors in each floor area in front of the elevators and in the machine rooms, and states plainly that manual stations are not permitted to initiate recall. Repeat that last one on your own jobs. A pull station is a person's opinion about where the fire is, and it tells the elevator nothing useful about which landing is safe.

Where there is no building fire alarm system at all, B44 does not force one to be installed. It requires a dedicated function panel, marked as an elevator recall control and supervisory control unit, that does nothing but recall, and Alberta's interpretation requires it to be labelled so nobody mistakes it for a fire alarm panel. Where a fire alarm system already exists, the recall detectors and wiring must be part of it, not a parallel system.

The governing documents

The Building Code names CAN/ULC-S524 and CAN/ULC-S537 by designation. It does not name CAN/ULC-S573, which reaches you one level down through S524. S573 was first published in December 2018 and covers installation of ancillary devices that interact with a fire alarm system, which is exactly what a recall interface is. Ontario also runs an adoption gap on the elevator side: TSSA amendment 295/22 adopts the 2019 harmonized edition, while ASME A17.1-2022/CSA B44:22 and a 2025 edition have been published since. Design to what Ontario adopted. More on the two-code split in how the Building Code and the Fire Code divide the work.

Shunt trip: read this part slowly

Recall protects people. This one protects equipment, and confusing the two is how equipment gets destroyed. Elevator controllers, drives and hoisting machines are electrical equipment sitting in a room or a shaft. If a sprinkler head in that space operates, water lands on live equipment, and water on a live traction machine can make the brake behave unpredictably while the car is moving with people in it. So where sprinklers are present, main line power has to be removed before the water arrives, not after.

The sequence:

1. A heat detector in the machine room or hoistway operates.
2. Through the fire alarm system, it energises a shunt trip coil in the elevator disconnect or upstream breaker.
3. Elevator power drops and the car stops where it is.
4. The sprinkler head then operates, and water lands on de-energised equipment.

The coordination problem lives entirely in steps 1 and 4. The heat detector must operate before the sprinkler head, reliably, every time. That means its temperature rating and response characteristics are chosen against the head's rating and location, and the two are mounted close enough to see the same heat. Get it backwards and you have the worst of both worlds: water on live gear, and a car that stopped for no reason before anyone reached it. Dropping power mid-travel also strands whoever is in the car between floors, which is accepted because a rained-on brake is worse, and is why the shunt trip heat detector should not double as an area detector or a recall initiating device.

What we could not verify. We found no free Canadian source that states the shunt trip requirement, sets out the detector to sprinkler coordination, or gives a rule number for it. The Canadian Electrical Code Section 38 rules on elevators, 38-051 through 38-055, cover disconnecting means only, and the published Canadian guides to Section 38 do not discuss shunt trip, sprinklers or fire alarm interfaces at all. The requirement to remove power before water is applied sits in ASME A17.1/CSA B44 Section 2.8, which is paywalled. We have deliberately printed no clause number, temperature rating or spacing, because the figures circulating online are American and we could not confirm they are the Canadian answer. If you are designing this, buy the standard or get it from the elevator consultant of record.

The interface: contacts, supervision and trouble

Physically it is a set of dry contacts. The fire alarm panel provides a relay per function, addressable or panel-mounted: designated level recall, alternate level recall, and separate contacts for machine room and shunt trip functions where those exist. The controller provides the terminals and the interpretation. Nothing crosses that boundary except contact state. What decides whether the installation is any good is what happens when the wire between them breaks.

Alberta's fire code joint interpretation on the elevator fire alarm interface is unusually direct: where smoke detectors with integral relays are used, a fault in the elevator signalling wires must cause the elevator to go to its recall position, and the system has to be configured with normally closed contacts so that a break in the wiring is immediately detected by the elevator going to its recall position. The same document says an unsupervised fire alarm system cannot support firefighters' emergency operation and must be replaced.

Two different things are going on there:

• Fail safe on the elevator side. The contact is held closed normally, so losing the wire looks like an alarm and the cars recall. The building loses elevator service, which is obvious and gets fixed.
• Trouble on the fire alarm side. The circuits feeding that relay are supervised by the panel in the ordinary way, so an open or a ground shows as a trouble. If the difference between a trouble and a supervisory is fuzzy, our guide on alarm, supervisory and trouble signals sets it out.

Both should be true. Get only the first and you have recalled elevators with no indication of why. Get only the second and you have a panel trouble and elevators that will happily keep running to a fire floor. Whether the interconnecting conductors themselves must be electrically supervised, as against the fail-safe contact arrangement doing that job, is an S573 and S524 question, and neither standard is free to read. State the intent on the drawings, confirm it with the AHJ, and get the mapping on paper: every one of these jobs should have a signed fire alarm matrix showing which device drives which output and which destination.

Who owns which side of the terminal block

The third row causes the arguments. It is a short run of wire nobody bids, and on a bad job it either never gets installed or gets installed by whoever is standing there. Write it into the scope, and get the elevator contractor's terminal designations in writing before you terminate anything: a contact landed on the wrong pair recalls the cars to the wrong floor and looks perfectly correct from your side.

Testing: verification, annual inspection, integrated testing

Verification, at handover. The Building Code requires fire alarm systems to be verified to CAN/ULC-S537. Every initiating device with a recall function is operated and the output confirmed to change state. Confirming the car actually moves to the correct landing is why the elevator contractor has to be there. The wider process is in what an S537 verification involves.

Annual inspection and testing. Ongoing testing sits under the Fire Code, which requires fire alarm systems to be inspected and tested to CAN/ULC-S536 and separately sets out who may do it. See verification versus annual inspection for the difference.

Integrated testing. Where the building falls under the Fire Code's integrated systems provisions, the fire alarm to elevator interaction is exactly the cross-system function CAN/ULC-S1001 exists to test, coordinated rather than done piecemeal. Who runs it is covered in integrated systems testing and who does it.

There is a parallel obligation you do not control. Firefighters' emergency operation is tested annually as part of the elevator's own periodic testing, by elevator personnel. Technical Safety BC's bulletin on that testing, BC guidance describing the harmonized code requirement, states that elevators with firefighters' emergency operation are subjected annually to Phase 1 recall by use of the key switch and a minimum of one-floor operation on Phase 2. Notice what that does not prove: the key switch bypasses your detectors, so an elevator can pass its annual test with a dead smoke detector in a lobby. That one is yours.

The four failures that keep repeating

1. Recall was never tested with the elevator contractor present. Somebody put a magnet on a detector, heard the relay click and signed the sheet. Nobody watched the car.
2. The wrong detector is mapped to the wrong level. Designated and alternate get swapped, usually because the drawing calls the ground floor the recall level and the controller was programmed to a different landing. It fails silently.
3. Shunt trip wired without coordination. A heat detector at whatever rating was in the van, placed for conduit convenience. Or, worse, shunt trip tied to general alarm, so any pull station in the building drops elevator power.
4. No way to prove the interface is supervised. No matrix, no record of what the interconnection does on an open circuit, no test result. Lift the wire during verification and write down what the panel did and what the car did.

What to confirm before you rely on this

• Article numbers in the current Ontario Building Code. Confirm the wording with the AHJ, or request the Ontario amendment document from the ministry.
• Anything attributed to CSA B44. It is paywalled. Every B44 requirement here is in our own words from Canadian regulator, AHJ and trade press summaries, and the clause numbers those sources cite come from earlier editions.
• The shunt trip requirement and its coordination. Not verifiable from any free Canadian source we could locate. Do not lift a temperature rating, a spacing or a clause number from an American page.
• Whether your building needs automatic recall at all. It turns on height classification and whether the building is sprinklered. That is a design question, not a field decision.
• Scope for the wire between the panel contact and the elevator controller. Read the spec. If it is not there, ask before you bid.

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