Hochiki Europe protects residents and staff at Bulgarian beach resort hotel

Nessebar is a 3,000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage site. Originally a Thracian settlement, the city became a Greek colony around 6 BC, the remains of which can still be visited today. Its golden beaches link directly to the Black Sea, making it a prime location for tourists from around the globe and the ideal home for Hotel Bilyana Beach.

Established back in 2004, the 17,600 m² hotel recently underwent a complete renovation of the rooms and hotel facilities, including the installation of a new and innovative fire detection solution.

Bilyana Angelova, the general manager at SENTIDO Bilyana Beach, said: “The safety and security of our guests is always going to be our top priority, so when the renovation plan was in process, it was important that these areas were examined in depth. Deciding on our brand-new life safety detection system is a decision that has ensured our guests are provided with the ultimate level of safety.”

To ensure the installation was carried out to the highest specification, the team at the hotel brought in engineers from Laytel Ltd to oversee the project. They duly specified the ESP range from Hochiki Europe to fulfil the needs of the project.

New beginning

With effectively a blank canvas on which to work, Laytel Ltd was able to have free reign when choosing the ideal products for the job. Nikola Fotev, general manager at the business, commented: “We’ve gained many years of experience by designing life safety and security systems so we were confident in taking on a challenge of this size. Understanding the hotel’s primary aim of providing an all-encompassing, addressable life safety system, we felt that Hochiki’s ESP range was the clear choice. In total, our engineering team has installed over 500 ESP devices at the site containing a mixture of sensors, modules, manual Call Points, audio-visual alarms and sounders. We’re extremely happy with the end result and the level of protection offered.”

Hochiki’s ESP range of devices offers an “incomparable level of reliability” through a range of feature-rich, addressable products that are easy to install. All parts of the range are tested to the highest European and international standards to afford installers and end users peace of mind.

Fire safety

Due to the wide variety of facilities that are often available at hotels, from swimming pools through to restaurants, life safety systems need to be flexible enough to meet these complex needs. More importantly, with hundreds of people often in the building at any one time, the majority of whom are unfamiliar with their surroundings, this can lead to ineffective evacuations in the event of a fire. The adaptability, reliability and responsiveness of the ESP range helps to mitigate these problems.

Another key requirement for hotels is the need to eliminate false alarms. These incidents can not only hinder the reputation of the hotel and guests’ experience if they persist, but also prove to be dangerous when it comes to actioning a safe exit in the event of a real fire. The sensors within the ESP range have been designed with this in mind.

Hochiki’s intelligent sensor range consists of smoke, heat, multi (smoke and heat) and multi with CO sensors. By redesigning the smoke chamber and optics within the smoke and multi sensors, false alarm reduction has been integrated into each device, making it ideal for hotel facilities where false alarms can be costly and disruptive.

As a result of this technology, these sensors are far more reactive to their environments and therefore equally more responsive to multiple smoke types. Combined with the range’s Enhanced Systems Protocol (ESP), a platform that provides faultless communications between the panel and sensors, means the ESP sensor range delivers precision fire detection.