More the better? Or can I declutter the alarms?

The “rules” for creating useful alarms are:

Only alarm conditions you care about:
“If you’re not going to respond, it shouldn’t be an alarm.” There are building operators who routinely ignore all room temperature alarms, assuming that if it’s bad enough the occupants will call to complain. While that’s not my approach, for those users it makes no sense to generate alarms when a room is too hot or too cold because that will only clutter the Alarm page and make them more likely to miss an important alarm.

Minimize Single Condition Alarms:
There are a few situations in a building, such as smoke in a return air duct, where a single condition warrants an alarm. Most HVAC situations aren’t that simple. One of the reasons many people ignore room temperature alarms is because they’re often based on a single condition, such as “Alarm if temperature > 27°C.” In general, we don’t care if a room is over 27°C on a weekend, when there’s nobody in the building. Even during the week, I’d want to know (a) Is the room occupied? (b) Has the HVAC been running long enough that the room should be cooler? (c) Is 27 °C well above setpoint? (d) Has the setpoint just been changed? And (e) has the room been this warm for a while, or is this just a transient condition? (Like when somebody opens a door during the summer and a gust of hot air hits the sensor.) Adding enabling conditions like this to your alarm logic eliminates many false alarms and lets you focus on situations that really do indicate a problem.

Block Cascading Alarms:
Sometimes a single mechanical failure can cause problems in many different parts of a building. For example, if a cooling coil goes bad in an AHU, every room supplied by that AHU is going to get hot. That could cause dozens or alarms, when the only alarm you really care about is the one that says the AHU is broken. A problem with a campus chiller plant can generate hundreds of “This room is too hot!” alarms across a campus. Hidden amidst those hundreds of alarms is the one alarm that tells you what you really need to know. Since you know in advance that a chiller problem will affect hundreds of rooms, you need to program your alarm logic to block all “hot room” alarms when there’s a problem with the chiller plant. Similar logic can prevent nuisance alarms when there’s a problem with a heating system, the fan in an AHU, or any other situation where one piece of equipment affects many rooms.