Mechanical & electrical building services contractor Briggs & Forrester Living has specified Polypipe’s plastic system for the Victoria Riverside development in Red Bank, Manchester – part of Far East Consortium’s (FEC) £4bn Victoria North scheme. Main contractor is CR Construction, a Chinese-owned company.
With the first phase complete, work on a second phase has now begun, and when completed will provide 611 flats and 23 townhouses and duplexes at the surrounding lower level. The development is due to be completed in January 2025.
Briggs & Forrester Living selected Polypipe Building Services as its drain supplier, specifying its fabricated Terrain Fuze high-density polyethylene (HDPE) soil and vent pipes and rainwater pipes.
Polypipe Building Services account director Robert Dunn said: “We’ve already made our first delivery and, as it is a city centre location and a constrained site, working out a feasible delivery schedule with Briggs & Forrester has been crucial. Because of the repetitive nature of the floor shapes prefabrication was a perfect solution for this project so installation can take place floor by floor and they are easy to hoist up all together.
“By providing everything fully fabricated measured, cut, assembled and pressure tested at our state-of-the-art facility, it also gives their installation team complete reassurance of the quality and performance of the drainage system while making it a faster, simpler, and safer process on-site.
“The sustainability aspect is another benefit of prefabrication as there’s no wastage and Polypipe Building Services take any offcuts from site when we deliver materials so we can recycle them into product again, together with recycling and reusing old pallets and any plastic packaging.”
Briggs & Forrester Living regional construction manager Philip Ashton said: “We are excited to be working on this project alongside the team at Polypipe Building Services as we are very familiar with their Terrain products, which offer us greater flexibility, as they have a bigger selection of various sizes than other manufacturers. We’ve got a good system in place with the Polypipe team. We try to standardise stack types which makes the design sign off at the beginning of the project a much quicker process.
“A lot of other drainage manufacturers no longer offer the option of prefabrication, but at Polypipe Building Services the process of design and sign-off with their Advantage Team is good and they’re always available if we need to work something through with them.
“This site has a very small footprint meaning deliveries must be ‘just in time’ which we operate through our local merchant. This means we only have delivered to site what we need at that time which is essential and works very well. The materials are palletised to suit a floor of drainage, and this is a huge advantage when loading out.”
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