The Keating, located within a historic building in downtown San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, is the first hotel designed by legendary Italian car-design company Pininfarina, best known for creating the sexy look of Ferraris and Maseratis.

Just as the owner of an elite high performance vehicle would spare no expense to insure and protect such indulgence, an essential component to protecting Keating guests and the reported $16 million renovation is one of the industry’s most dependable fire/life-safety systems.

Once among San Diego’s most prestigious office buildings, the 1890 Romanesque Revival structure remains one of the oldest in the city. In 2006, the unreinforced masonry building underwent structural renovation and transformed into its current super-chic boutique incarnation.

Beyond its entrance doorway are four stories and 35 luxury rooms (starting at $320 nightly) with high ceilings, exposed brick walls and tall, oversized windows. A subterranean level houses a restaurant and an exclusive lounge open only to hotel clients, invited guests and members willing to foot a $2,500 annual fee.

Among the renovation’s biggest construction hurdles was seismic retrofitting work that entailed tying a support system to the walls and the structure, according to Danny Vladic, a project manager with San Diego-based Landmark Hospitality Contracting. “As with any historic retrofit, safety for the public is a primary consideration as the architectural integrity of the building is preserved,” Vladic says.

The Keating officially opened its doors to the traveling masses and well-heeled club-goers about six months ago. Vladic’s safety for the public is a primary consideration is also a theme that resonates loudly when considering the venue’s fire/life-safety solution. The responsibility in the design and installation of the hotel’s digital addressable system was awarded to Systems Specialists of Alpine, Calif.

‘Ninja Service Man’ Not Ready to Give Up the Business He Loves

Cesar Nillaga, proprietor of Systems Specialists, might otherwise be an unexpected candidate to be involved in the high-profile, sumptuous Keating. With a four-man team, he has operated his business mostly under the radar for 15 years, while spending the past 32 years as a low-voltage authority to the peers and colleagues who know his work and dedication.

Nillaga is decidedly low-profile, steadfastly committed to remaining a “mom ‘n’ pop shop” and mightily proud to have maintained a thriving business by word of mouth. “We never got big and that’s how I keep the quality control with my company,” Nillaga says. “I hate advertisements. I hate paperwork. This is a home business that is designed around me.”

Nillaga eschews company logos and all means of marketing that otherwise are considered essential to the well-being of any commercial venture. His business thrives, he says, on other businesses not doing their work. “If you are having trouble or these other guys aren’t taking care of you, call me. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know who we are,” he says.

The fact Nillaga took on the job of designing and installing a fire/life-safety solution for The Keating came even as a surprise to him. “At this point, [the hotel] job was too big for me,” Nillaga says. “I am called the ninja service man; we go in, we go out. I really don’t need any more business, but because I love to do this, most of what we do is service.”

Nillaga was contacted by The Keating project’s electrical contractor and eventually persuaded to take on the work beginning in June 2006.

Nillaga knew going in his choice of fire alarm control panel (FACP) would be the Fire•Lite® Alarms by Honeywell MS-9200UDLS addressable system. He explains: “I put in systems that every other company can work on. This Fire•Lite system can be bought by anyone. If someone decides not to use me anymore, they can go to Joe Schmo and he can get information on this system. This is one of my selling points … if you decide to buy a proprietary system, you are stuck with whomever sold it to you.”

Addressable System Eases Installation, Is Cost-Effective

System Specialists’ small team of technicians, led by Kevin Criswell, began implementing Nillaga’s design onto essentially a blank slate; the entire building had been gutted of all former fire systems gear. The Fire•Lite FACP was installed into the basement electric room with an annunciator placed in the lobby above.

Nillaga was adamant about keeping all fire system equipment in one room. There would be no junction boxes, which may not have been the choice of a lot of other specifiers, he says, who could have opted to put a box in separate rooms on each floor.

“It would have saved me more if I would have put junction boxes in each storage closet and spidered out from there,” he says. “This is why I do things a certain way: I am mainly a service company. I look at service afterwards. I put all my equipment in one room, so that if we have to service it afterward, we’re not looking for junctions all over the place.”

Nillaga’s system design and installation was made significantly more straightforward due in large part because The Keating’s renovation called for a fully sprinklered structure installed by another subcontractor. This cut way back on the number of installed fire system devices, such as pull stations and smoke detectors.

“The way the codes are now in San Diego, if it is a fully sprinklered building, you don’t need all those smokes or pull stations because they want it to be all automatic,” Nillaga explains. In the five levels of The Keating, there are only two pull stations: one by front entry and one near the FACP. While panel-connected photoelectric smoke detectors were placed in a few ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act)-accessible rooms and other locations, smoke detection was not required in the building’s hallways.

“Basically, this fire alarm is made to monitor the fire sprinkler system, but it has to provide all of the strobes and bells and horns. That all had to stay. That is the fire alarm system itself,” Nillaga says. The system also includes a shunt trip relay on the elevator system, plus a monitor module on the restaurant’s hood suppression system (not installed by System Specialists).

Criswell praised the Fire•Lite addressable FACP for the ease in which devices are connected to its signaling line circuit (SLC).

Geared for small- to midsized applications like The Keating, the MS-9200UDLS single loop panel features a digital alarm communicator/transmitter on one circuit board. It offers a maximum of 198 addressable points on one SLC, in addition to built-in NAC (notification appliance circuits) synchronization. With Fire•Lite’s LiteSpeed™ SLC protocol, the FACP polls 10 devices simultaneously, allowing a fully loaded panel to report an incident and activate NACs in less than 10 seconds. LiteSpeed also permits devices to be wired using standard, unshielded wire with distances up to 10,000 feet per loop.

“If I had a conventional panel, I would have had to run separate circuits to each floor,” Criswell says. With the freedom to forego the installation of separate circuits, the cost of the system was reduced, in part, by not having to run bulky 4-inch conduit. “I was ab
le to run everything up on a 1-inch conduit instead,” Criswell says.

The crew ran twisted shielded pair up to all of the devices, Criswell says. “That is the nice part about this panel. You just use standard 18/2 shielded pair or twisted pair for the addressable circuit. We also ran 14/2 for our audio/visual notification circuits.”

Another main attraction to the addressable panel, not possible with a conventional system, is the ability to key tap the detectors, opposed to specifying them in separate zones.

“At any detector you can just spider out to another device. The supervision is compromised when you key tap a conventional circuit,” Nillaga says. “On addressable, the detectors themselves do the supervising, so you are not supervising the wire, you are supervising the detector. With this addressable system, everything is supervised all the way down the line.”

HVAC System, Hitches Common to Historical Buildings Delay Project

With state and local codes requiring HVAC shutdown, Nillaga was presented with a challenge when securing the building’s scores of dampers. Although his original preference was to deploy duct detectors, Nillaga opted instead for area protection coverage. “That was easier than putting duct detectors on every damper,” he says.

The design was further amended by going with a heavier gauge steel on the ducting in common areas. “We had to ask the fire marshal to approve the area detection even though it is in the code,” Nillaga says.

Despite the ease of the overall fire system installation, the job did take an inordinate amount of time to complete. Nilllaga’s crew worked into March finishing the project. “This one took too long,” Nillaga says. “I had bid 200 hours. And we went 400.”

The crew was beset by the kind of delays often inherent to work involving a venerable building such as The Keating, in order to preserve architectural and aesthetic integrity.

For example, the walls in the subterranean restaurant at The Keating preserve some of the structure’s original brick masonry. Fire devices would otherwise have been strictly placed on the walls per design – a certain distraction from the building’s Old World appeal. The contractor requested a resolution. So, in lieu of wall-mounted strobes, the crew instead placed strobes on the ceilings … which presented its own setback: metal ceiling tiles had to be cut in order to mount the devices properly. “All of this affects time,” Nillaga says.

And that’s fine with him when duty calls. “I think out of the box and then I present it to the inspectors,” he says of his meticulous nature to get the smallest installation details just right. “I look at the codes and see what the possibilities are. I treat it like it’s my place.”

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