Manufacturer
plant room installation
Armstrong Integrated Systems Ltd - Off-Site manufacture speeds the way for HBOS
Off-site manufactured plant rooms from Armstrong Integrated
Systems cut programme timescales to a minimum for the expansion
of two HBOS data centres. The company’s sites in Copley and
Pudsey, Yorkshire, were scheduled for expansion with the
construction of additional buildings to house employees and
equipment. Chilled water pumping plant rooms were needed to
manage the building services requirements of each site. The
decision to have these manufactured off-site brought numerous
benefits including shorter project timescales, reduced health
and safety risk, and greater efficiency of installation on the
roof of each newly-erected building.
Four plant rooms were manufactured in total by Armstrong
Integrated Systems for HBOS. The designs included 3600kW plate
heat exchangers, pumps, de-aerators, side-stream filters and
control equipment. Armstrong constructed the plant rooms in
their purpose-designed manufacturing facility in Halesowen. Each
plant room was supplied fully-assembled to site, housed in an
enclosure, and requiring only final connections.
The two plant rooms for the Copley site were combined within a
single enclosure with a dividing wall. Measuring 20 metres by 12
metres, the finished plant room had a total weight of 127.5
tonnes. In order to make it easy to transport to site, and to
crane onto the roof, it was designed in five modular sections,
each weighing up to 24 tonnes.
The two smaller plant rooms for the Pudsey site, each measuring
11 metres by 8 metres were constructed in separate enclosures.
The enclosures of all of the plant rooms were produced by
Armstrong in a corporate colour scheme to match the existing
buildings at the Copley and Pudsey sites.
As each plant room was to be positioned on the roof of a
newly-erected building, and work could therefore not commence
until the end of the construction phase, the building services
element of the project had a significant impact on how quickly
the building owners could occupy the data centres. Manufacturing
the plant rooms off-site enabled the construction of the plant
rooms to take place concurrently with the rest of the
construction project, over a sixteen week period, instead of at
the end of the building process. This essentially removed the
plant room part of the project from the critical path, and final
installation was achieved within days, instead of requiring a
number of weeks.
As the other buildings on site were occupied throughout the
expansion, off-site manufacture assisted greatly in reducing
health and safety risk. For HBOS workers, the attendance of
contractors on site for the installation was reduced from weeks
to just days. In addition, assembly work which would have
otherwise been carried out at height and outdoors, was managed
in the more easily controlled environment of a factory. Studies
have shown that the factory environment also facilitates higher
levels of finished quality for plant rooms and leads to shorter
timescales as there are not the constrictions of weather, access
and bottlenecks relating to other aspects of the build.
Armstrong Integrated Systems utilises the latest 3D computer
modelling technology when planning plant rooms, and this was
particularly beneficial in the HBOS project. A second expansion
phase is planned by the company in the future at the Copley and
Pudsey sites, and Armstrong was able to incorporate the
requirements of Phase 2 into the designs of Phase 1 in order
that the enclosures will be purpose-designed for fitting of the
new equipment when the time comes for further expansion.
Steve Cooper, managing director of Armstrong Integrated Systems
said, “In projects where occupied sites are being expanded,
there really is no better solution than off-site manufacture. In
the Copley and Pudsey project for HBOS, the positioning of the
plant room on the roof of a new building made off-site
construction an even more valuable construction technique.”
Email: Lhousepr@aol.com