| Hochiki showcases "Dont Gamble With Your Life Safety" at stand 3/C20 |
Hochiki Europe, the leading manufacturer of innovative life safety solutions, is urging visitors to this year’s IFSEC not to gamble with their life safety.
For almost 100 years Hochiki has designed and produced leading edge fire detection and emergency lighting products that have acquired global acceptance as the benchmark for integrity and long-term reliability. With this in mind, the company is promoting its “Don’t Gamble With Your Life Safety” message at IFSEC, which seeks to remind both installers and end users why Hochiki is the obvious and risk-free choice for their fire detection and emergency lighting needs.
Product reliability – out of the box
Protecting lives requires products that perform as expected - day in, day out. And, as Stuart Davies, Hochiki Europe’s marketing manager, points out, lifetime warranties are no substitute for a reliable life safety product: ‘Most fire detection equipment manufacturers work on the basis that a product’s lifetime equates to 10 years. However, when it comes to replacing a defective device, the value of the unit itself is minimal compared to the overall costs associated with such action. Factor in these additional expenses along with disruption to business, making sure that area is protected while the unit is not in operation and general inconvenience, and the length of the warranty pales into insignificance’ when compared to the total cost of ownership.
To assess its own track record, Hochiki carried out a survey of its own customers’ views regarding the quality and reliability of its products and the standard of its customer service. A staggering 96 per cent of those surveyed rated the company’s product quality as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ while nearly 90 per cent reported that its products met all their requirements. The company was also delighted to find out that 87 per cent rated the quality of its service as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’.
Time is money and for installers, minimising the time taken to install fire detection and emergency lighting systems is of paramount importance. Hochiki’s products are designed with ease of installation in mind and include features that help achieve this objective. This not only ensures that the end user gets the highest quality installation but makes sure that installers don’t gamble with the potential profit margins of a job.
On stand 3/C20 Hochiki is promoting Don’t Gamble With Your Life Safety using a one-armed bandit and visitors will be invited to try their luck. Those who match three symbols will be entered into a prize draw to win a state-of-the-art New iPad from Apple, while those who match two symbols will walk away with other great prizes.
Technical and sales representatives from Hochiki are on hand to demonstrate the features and benefits of the company’s cutting edge fire detection and emergency lighting solutions.
Intelligent Fire Detection
This includes the Enhanced Systems Protocol (ESP) range – an analogue addressable communications solution for intelligent fire detection and fully integrated systems, incorporating high performance sensors and a variety of input/output modules and ancillary devices. Also on display will be the CDX range that provides solutions for a wide variety of conventional fire detection applications.
Emergency Lighting
Other highlights include a live working demonstration of the unique FIREscape emergency lighting system. FIREscape is a highly cost effective and energy efficient solution that perfectly suits the requirements of modern buildings. It comprises an addressable emergency lighting control panel with battery back-up, and features self-contained LED luminaires and signage that are powered via low voltage cabling. The luminaires are also equipped with battery back-up, making sure they will function in every situation, while the units fit directly onto a standard Hochiki sensor base, making installation simple.
The LED technology that the system uses is both cost effective and environmentally friendly – in fact, it produces less than five per cent of the carbon emissions of fluorescent lighting. This makes it a green alternative to other systems and allows operating costs to be kept to a minimum.
Hochiki carried out a comparison of FIREscape compared to a traditional manual test system and identified all the costs associated with each on a 1,000 luminaire system used over a 10 year period. It factored in maintenance labour, battery replacement, testing labour, recycling costs, energy use and initial capital outlay and found that over this period of time using FIREscape could save a massive £186 534, with a CO2 reduction of over 29.5 tonnes.
Wireless Fire Detection
Visitors can also get an exclusive look at the new FIREwave wireless fire detection system. Third party approved, FIREwave is specifically designed for use in locations where minimum disturbance to the fabric of the building is important and it can be installed quickly and easily. Providing new levels of reliability and flexibility, its advanced wireless communication protocol delivers fully intelligent field device integration and allows analogue values, fire and fault information, device addresses and type codes to be transmitted directly to the system’s control panel.
Stuart Davies concluded, ‘Don’t Gamble With Your Life Safety urges customers to focus on the total cost of ownership of a product – including ease of installation and flexibility of use - and highlights why warranties don’t tell the whole story about reliability and performance. At this year’s show we are demonstrating how Hochiki Europe incorporates reliability and design excellence into everything it does.’