Piece of Plaza - Tricky problem solved at Liverpool office complex

When leading property company, Bruntwood, acquired 100 Old Hall Street in the £39m Plaza Development in Liverpool, they called on the expertise of Solid State.

The refurbishment of the 15-storey building into luxurious office-space presented a real challenge as it was essential that the life safety equipment functioned throughout. This meant that the fire alarm system needed to be up-graded on a floor-by-floor basis so the existing alarms remained in operation while the new one was installed. Things were complicated further by the fact that, as a phased evacuation system, all new works had to use voice evacuation to comply with current building regulations.

Solid State came to the rescue by offering a cost-effective solution using a series of AVAC voice alarm systems, installing one on each floor as part of a networked fire alarm system. This enabled standard sounder tones to be played through the voice alarm speakers until the whole building was converted to voice evacuation, offering an easy change to voice alarm messages. Using AVAC massively reduced cabling costs as the voice alarm units sit on the fire alarm loop on each floor thus eliminating the need for costly separate voice alarm wiring.

The Plaza’s life safety systems now provide a far more robust system for disaster recovery as the loss of a control panel only affects one floor or part of a floor instead of the whole building. Another cost-saving element of this project is that the entire site is now ‘open protocol’ which means no costly tied-in maintenance contracts for Bruntwood.