We celebrated our 20th anniversary and shared an update on our newly appointed, Auckland-based Business Development Manager. If you missed it, you can catch up here AFAM 20th Birthday.

This edition wraps up our 2025 newsletter series. Don’t worry—we’ll be back with regular updates after the summer break. Before we sign off, we have a few updates to share and a couple of questions for you.

We’re open for business as usual until close of business on 24 December.

Our office will remain open throughout the holiday period, with a skeleton team in place from 24 December to 5 January.

As always, we have staff on call 24/7 for urgent matters. If your question is about fire alarm monitoring, we’ve got you covered. If it’s about how long to defrost a turkey, we may not be the right people to ask.

The fit-out of our Auckland office will take place during the week commencing 12 January.

Our new Business Development Manager will spend some time in Christchurch before being permanently based in Auckland from 26 January.

On behalf of everyone at AFAM, thank you for your support throughout the year. We hope you’re able to take a well-earned break and enjoy some quality time with friends and family over the holiday period.

We’ve enjoyed bringing these newsletters to you and hope you’ve found them valuable. We have plenty planned for 2026 and will continue to use these updates to keep you informed.

We’d love your feedback:

• Is there anything specific you’d like to see included?
• Are the newsletters too long, too short, or just right?

We’re also considering moving to a fortnightly schedule in 2026 instead of weekly. Let us know what you think.

We took a closer look at some of the features and benefits we’re building into our next-generation CTU. If you missed it, you can catch up here Next Generation CTU.

This week’s update is a little shorter than usual. Like us, you’re probably flat out as everyone works to wrap things up before the Summer Break, so we’ll keep things brief.

Today, 12 December 2025, marks AFAM’s 20th birthday. A quick look at the Companies Office will show that AFAM was officially incorporated on 12 December 2005—so happy birthday to us!

A lot has changed since those early days. We’ve grown to become New Zealand’s fastest growing Fire Alarm Monitoring company. Today we operate the length and breadth of New Zealand and provide Fire Alarm Monitoring services to some of the largest companies and organisations here and protect some of the countries most valuable buildings. 

What hasn’t changed is how we treat our customers. Whether you’re a multinational with a large portfolio or a single-building owner, you receive the same level of care, respect, and service.

Our commitment to innovation hasn’t changed either. If you’ve been following this series, you’ll know we’re always working to improve what we do and to introduce new services and products—often at no extra cost to our customers.

Happy 20th Birthday, AFAM. We’re excited for what the next decade will bring.

A few weeks ago, we announced our plan to establish an Auckland office and appoint a Business Development Manager to support the Northern Region.

The response to the BDM role was outstanding. We met some excellent candidates and are pleased to say we’ve appointed someone who we believe will be a fantastic addition to our team and a strong advocate for customers in the region. We can’t share their name just yet, but we’ll introduce them early next year.

We’ve also secured premises in Penrose, where we’ll hold a small number of monitoring units and spares. We expect the office to be fully operational in early February.

​We’ll be wrapping up this weekly series, which we launched in September to run through until Christmas. Next week, we’ll tie up a few loose ends and share our plans for the year ahead.

We took a closer look at our monitoring system—how it works, why it works the way it does, and we dispelled a few common myths along the way. If you missed it, you can catch up here AFAM Monitoring System.

A couple of weeks ago we shared that we’ve begun developing a next-generation version of our CTU monitoring device. This week, we’re excited to give you a deeper look at what’s underway.

Earlier this year, we quietly kicked off a ground-up redesign of our CTU hardware. Our current CTU has served the industry for more than a decade, evolving through multiple updates and still outperforming alternatives.

However, there are new features and services we want to deliver that the current design simply can’t support. This redesign lays the foundation for those capabilities—both for today and for the future.

​Be rest assured though, everything that the current CTU provides such as in panel installation and native IoT Detector Level information capture will be carried forward. We're not going to remove any existing functionality, we're going to add to it.

Right now, we manufacture two CTU variants, chosen based on whether the device will be installed inside a panel or not.

The new CTU will be built as a single common platform, with an optional secondary board (added during manufacturing) to meet specific installation requirements. This gives us far more flexibility, makes future feature expansion easier, and even opens the door to potential use in new markets here and overseas.

​The next-generation CTU includes built-in Bluetooth. One major use will be enabling authorised users to connect via the AFAM AlarmTech App for diagnostics and commissioning while on-site.

This will mean guided commissioning prompts, clear indications of what’s correct or incorrect, and far less reliance on manuals, prior knowledge, or interpreting LEDs on the unit.

This new CTU isn’t just faster—it’s dramatically faster.

• The processor is roughly 100× faster
• It includes over 100× more storage

​
This leap in capability allows far more processing to happen directly on the device, which will be crucial for the new services we’re planning.

As with the current CTU, the new device will include four versatile inputs. (If you missed our article on how those inputs work, you can read it here: CTU Additional Inputs)

The next-gen CTU will also feature two outputs, allowing the device not just to monitor equipment but to activate it when required.

We’ve designed the new CTU around a modern, commercial-grade battery management system. Battery management technology has advanced significantly since our current model was introduced, and this upgrade will improve charging, monitoring, and overall battery lifespan.

We’re still in the prototyping phase. While we’d love to release it this year, that won’t be possible. Hardware development takes time, and our best estimate is that the CTU will be ready sometime early to mid next year.

There’s plenty we haven’t revealed yet—and we’d love your input.

​If there’s something you’d like the new CTU to be capable of, let us know. We may already be working on it, or it might be something we can still build in. We can’t promise every idea will make it, but we’re listening.

​We’ve got some news to share—and a few interesting updates you won’t want to miss.