St Helier, Jersey
Eight doors, five floors
Where
St Helier, Jersey
Type
Commercial venue
The brief
A five-storey, single-tenancy office building was running on ageing third-party door hardware: no single place to manage it, no record of who had been through which door, and no straightforward way to issue or withdraw a credential.
What we created
A full Ubiquiti UniFi Access system covering all eight doors, ground floor to top. Every door has its own controller, every fob, card, PIN and phone is managed centrally, and once commissioned the whole system runs on the local network whether or not the building's internet is up.
A controller on every door, not one hub
The obvious design is a single centralised controller with everything wired back to it. This building got a dedicated door controller at each of the eight doors instead, and that was a deliberate call. It keeps each floor independent, so a fault at one door never takes another with it, and it kept the cable runs short and sensible in a building that was never laid out with this in mind.
Fire egress decides the door, not the software
Each door is configured fail-safe or fail-secure according to where it is and what it has to do in an evacuation, with break-glass units wired in for compliant emergency release. Access control in a commercial building is a life-safety question before it is a convenience one, and it gets specified in that order.
One place to say who goes where
Fobs, cards, PINs and mobile credentials are all handled through the same user profiles and access groups, so building management can grant a contractor two days on one floor, or withdraw a leaver's access everywhere, in a few seconds. Every entry is logged, which gives the building a complete audit trail it simply did not have before.
It keeps working when the internet does not
Once commissioned the system runs entirely on the building's local network. Day-to-day operation has no dependency on an internet connection, so a broadband fault is an inconvenience rather than eight doors that will not open. That is the same principle behind every Halo job: get the network layer right and everything above it stays uneventful.
What's in it
The parts that do the work.
- UniFi Access door controllers
- One per door, eight in total. Per-door architecture so each floor stands on its own.
- Readers and credentials
- Fobs, cards, PINs and mobile access, all issued and withdrawn from the same place.
- Break-glass emergency release
- Wired at each door to the correct fail-safe or fail-secure standard for its position and fire egress duty.
- Local network operation
- Commissioned to run on the building's own network, with no day-to-day dependency on an internet connection.
Start with a conversation.
Tell us what you'd like your home to do, or what simply isn't working. No obligation, ever.