I have spent the past three days revisiting the contro room EPICS alarm handlers with the aim of making them more usable by reducing the occurance of false alarms.

I will document the changes in the CDS wiki and give operator training. 

Alarms which may or may not be valid depending upon the commissioning status can now be disabled via a new alarm manager MEDM screen (H1CDS_ALARM_MANAGER can be launched from the SITEMAP).

To prevent alarms from being disabled and forgotten about, at 8am every weekday morning a script will run which will re-enable all alarms. At that time the operator will be able to reconfigure the alarm handlers for that day's operation. When the operator is not on shift (evenings, weekends, holidays), we can mute the alarm machine's speaker if desired so as not to disturb other users in the control room. In silent mode the alarm handlers will continue to log alarms. The 8am script will also restore the speaker to the nominal volume.