Can you really speed up and de-stress school refurbishment?

Are you looking forward to the school holidays, or dreading the thought of getting your refurbishment works completed before the students return? At such a stressful time for clients and contractors, can Offsite help ease the pain? Martin Goss, of specialist Offsite consultants Mtech, explains how.

Major refurbishment of any existing building is traditionally a labour intensive operation relying heavily on trade skills and copious amounts of manpower. When the timeframe is fixed, angst and complexity grows exponentially. This situation faces most school clients and constructors delivering significant infrastructure refurbishment during the summer holiday period.

There are many difficult and time consuming aspects of school building refurbishment, but areas such as toilets and cloakrooms, kitchens, plant rooms and laboratory facilities are particularly challenging. The intensity of electrical and mechanical services and the high performance finishes required typically demand a high concentration of labour hours, undertaken in relatively difficult, confined spaces.

However a number of enterprising Offsite manufacturers have developed some new factory pre-assembled solutions which make fast track refurbishment a reality, delivering the cost and quality certainty and time predictability essential to schools refurbishment.

Panellised walling systems

For cloakroom areas, panellised walling systems with sanitary fixtures and fittings pre-installed onto backboards or framing elements have been around for some time. This simple methodology has been refined by companies such as Swift Horsman – with their Podwall product – and Mivan of Northern Ireland, to provide wall panels complete not only with fixtures, fittings, surface finishes and features, but most notably with all the electrical and mechanical services; creating a one-piece pre-finished element ready to integrate into the refurbished building.

Under factory-controlled conditions, panels are assembled to meet the individual requirements of each project. All the services are fully tested prior to despatch, ready for on-site connection to adjacent panels and mains services.

Each panel can be transported to site in a wheeled stillage, delivering it right to the work face, if necessary using specialised lifting systems to place it in its final location. Individual panel sizes are tailored to suit the physical access constraints of the project and can be designed to fit through a standard doorway.

Future maintenance is always a key issue for these areas and the panel systems are specifically designed for this, incorporating patented secret clip-systems to provide access to service connections, maintenance points and even for de-construction if required for future refurbishment initiatives.

These fully-finished integrated panellised walling techniques have been proven in the commercial office sector, where they are widely used by developers to achieve rapid fit out of high rise office complexes. Ideal for cloakroom situations, there is no reason why the systems can't be extended and evolved to provide a fast-track fit-out solution for kitchens or laboratories as well.

Plant room modular skid units

A similar approach has been adopted by Armstrong Integrated Systems in Birmingham to produce a rapid solution for refurbishing existing boiler or plant rooms. These areas are notable for their constrained access and tortuously slow site fit-out.

To overcome these issues Armstrong has developed a modular 'skid' solution, building entire replacement plant rooms in the factory using a series of interlinked frames or 'skids' to house all the plant room equipment and pipework. The complete plant room is fully tested and commissioned in the factory and, apart from the final heat load test, is ready to roll. It's then broken back down into its individual skid units ready for transport to the school site.

Skid sizes are tailored to suit access conditions and simple pallet trucks are all that's needed to move them to their final resting place before easy hook up to the mains services.

Modular wiring systems

Another area where factory pre-assembly is delivering real advantages for refurbishment is the growing use of pre-terminated cabling systems for electrical services, from conventional power and lighting through to data, comms and security systems.

Each cable is labelled and terminated in the factory with plug 'n' play connectors; similar connectors are fitted to the room terminal units, distribution units etc. All the pre-wired units and cables are fully tested in the factory, so the site operation is a simple placement activity, typically using semi-skilled operatives.

This has the added benefit of relatively easy re-configuration, so teaching areas and classrooms can be remodelled, typically without loss of materials or components. When linked to modular walling systems, the flexibility to adapt and change the facility provides schools with a practical, powerful customisation opportunity.

So, Offsite as a stress buster?

School building refurbishment is likely to remain a difficult task; however there are clearly a number of factory-enabled techniques which remove some of the uncertainties in the fit-out process, whilst delivering superior factory quality and traceability. The on-going demand for schools refurbishment is only going to stimulate the supply chain to develop more comprehensive factory fit-out systems, further improving site performance... surely that must reduce everybody's stress levels!

DISCLAIMER: Neither Martin Goss nor Mtech Consult Ltd receives any remuneration or gain whatsoever for referencing manufacturers in editorial content; other suppliers may provide similar products and inclusion in no way implies Mtech recommendation of a product for any specific project.