UPPR Webinar

01:20
Well, a very good morning to you all and a warm welcome to this webinar on modern underground package plant rooms. Thank you very much for joining us today. My name is Chris Lang, I’m the Product Manager at Dutypoint. we are based in Gloucester, which is where I’m sat talking

01:38
to you from now, and I’m really pleased that you’ve come to join us. This is a very exciting topic that I’m very pleased to have a chance to discuss with you. Just a few housekeeping notes: we do have a chat facility available, you should see that on your screen. If you’d

01:57
like to ask a question at any point, please feel free to use that. I can see your questions as they come through, and I’ll do my best to kind of answer them as we go through, and we’ll have a kind of dedicated portion of time at the end where we’ll be able to sort of do a bit of a

02:12
Q&A if you’d like to stick around for that. But please sit back and relax for now, and I hope you find this topic really interesting and helpful. Just to give you a summary of what we’re going to go through, we’re going to briefly start off by discussing

02:30
why we might want to install a plant room underground. Some of those reasons might be obvious and not particularly new to you, but some of them you may not have thought of before. We’re going to look at some of the problems associated with putting a plant room underground, and

02:47
a particular concern, really, is placing potable water storage underground. We’re going to look at some of the issues associated with that in addition to some of the general issues with putting plant rooms underground, and then we’re going to talk about a really exciting new approach to underground

03:06
plant rooms that we’ve been working on for some time now, and we’re really pleased that it is now out in the market and available to talk about and actually use. We’re going to look at some case studies of this new approach, so it’s going to be hopefully very interesting and useful. Just a little bit

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about us as a company, if you’re not too aware of us we’ve been going since 1976 in various guises, and really our mission is to set the bar for innovation in fluid technology. We work a lot in the construction industry, but also with water companies, authorities

03:41
and with the industry as well, and really we aim to solve complex challenges by working with the industries we work with, and focus on creating really great solutions for our customers, and I think what we’re going to talk about today is a real prime example of that. As I

04:02
mentioned before, our HQ is in Gloucester in the UK. We’ve also got offices in London and Loughborough. Really, we focus on the UK market and Europe too for a bit as well, but we’re starting to expand a bit more internationally as well, so if you joined us from overseas I’m really

04:20
glad that you joined us as well. So, here we go. Now, firstly, why do we want to build a plant room underground? You know, what is the point? This might be obvious, but let’s explore it just really briefly. I mean, the first obvious point is we put plant underground

04:37
because plant is not prime space. It’s not living accommodation, we’re not going to generate any revenue from that if we’re a developer. So, actually, we’d rather save the above ground prime space for things that generate revenue. There are quite a few examples in products we’ve

04:55
come across where a building, for instance, has been designed and it doesn’t actually have sufficient plant room space within the confines of the design to provide the space of plant that’s required. We’re going to look at an example of one of those later. Another point which is

05:14
actually becoming of increasing concern, because there are some new standards in in the UK and in the EU associated with the noise generated by pumps which are installed external to our building, so this is particularly relevant here, and actually putting a plant room underground

05:32
has many benefits but can also reduce noise as another consideration. It will also allow you to maintain a more consistent temperature. Now, that’s particularly important when we’re talking about possible water, because one of the big issues with possible water is ensuring its

05:50
temperature is maintained above frost level, but also below 23℃ where Legionella can start to grow, and actually in an environment where temperatures can change a lot, and we’re acutely aware of us in the UK particularly in the past month where we’ve had sort of 20℃ variations

06:06
from one day to another, actually underground systems can lead to more constant temperatures. So, hopefully that’s about a good starting point for us to think about why we’re going to look into an underground plant room. Now, one of the problems associated with underground,

06:22
I’m sure many of you will be familiar with many of these, for one insulation can be expensive and time-consuming. You’ve got to spend time making an excavation, you’ve got to perform lots of entries into that excavation to do the work. There’s lots of time spent on doing

06:42
things like concrete shuttering, lots of specialist equipment, specialist personnel, which all adds to you know high costs. Groundwater is another issue. Now, you can see quite a nice illustration of the issues that groundwater can cause with underground tanks, namely tank floatation. Here, you’ve

07:01
got an example, it looks like a fuel tank has floated to the surface. Now, groundwater is something that we’re all aware of, but not everyone always takes full account of it. It can change as well, so we need to we need to be very aware of groundwater issues and all the potential

07:19
problems that that can cause. Water ingress is also a common problem. Now, thinking about the possible water argument, if you put in a possible water tank without a sufficient barrier you can get groundwater seepage into the possible water tank, particularly over time. Now, that could

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particularly be an issue if you’re anywhere near something like a landfill site or, you know, anywhere that gradually over the years causes contamination to the groundwater. You know, what else is in the area as well, could there be a sewage treatment work in the area that

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might be discharging something that is not safe? Another issue with installing plant rooms underground is allowing safe access. Now, if you’ve got tanks stored in a room underground there’s actually a risk of drowning because if that if that storage tank were to be compromised, were to

08:15
break somehow, the it would discharge, potentially along with the mains water supply, it would start to discharge into that underground area and then actually if you’ve got people in there there’s a risk of drowning, so that’s it’s a very important risk that shouldn’t be ignored.

08:28
You’ve got issues with air quality, again, if you’re sending maintenance operatives down into an underground plant room area, often particularly in the UK that comes under regulations associated with working in confined spaces, and that’s not an

08:46
insurmountable problem because there are people with special training to deal with that situation, but what it does do is it adds to cost, and when you’ve got situations where you’ve maybe got a maintenance issue on-site that has caused the possible water supply to a to

09:05
a property to be cut off or to be deactivated temporarily, you need to have maintenance operatives readily available who can then go and work on that installation. You can’t necessarily wait hours for operatives with special trading to arrive. All of these issues

09:28
over time, if we consider a thirty-year life span, the added cost of maintaining a unit that falls onto confined space regulation there’s going to be pretty significant, and no call out charges and all the costs associated with confined spaces, specialist equipment, that’s all that’s

09:49
going to add to the cost. So, none of these problems are insurmountable but they all add additional cost to putting plant rooms underground, particularly when we’re using possible water, and the time-consuming issue of constructing concrete shuttering rounds

10:06
and underground installation on-site is also pretty expensive and time-consuming, and underground plant rooms often have access that looks a bit like this. Basically a small access hatch with a ladder and someone with a harness and winch arrangement with special training, with a second person

10:26
sort of looking after them has to go down and it just adds a significant amount of extra cost doing this. Now, all these problems together got us thinking that there must be a better way. We looked at the existing solutions in the industry, we got to hear

10:41
about a lot of the issues that contractors and and consultants were dealing with on site, and we’ve heard of issues of underground plant rooms being installed and they aren’t actually strong enough to withstand the pressures that are exerted

10:59
on them underground, and we’ve heard about issues of groundwater ingress into possible water storage tanks, which obviously is of great concern. We’ve heard of maintenance costs spiraling way out of control beyond what was originally estimated, and we’ve even

11:16
heard of situations where a tank has had to essentially be condemned underground and basically filled up with concrete because it just hasn’t been working properly, it’s been unsafe, and totally unsatisfactory. So, it got us thinking that there must be a better way. Now,

11:34
having considered all these issues, the advantages with placing plants rooms underground but weighing up with all those problems, we think we developed a new approach that actually allows develop that really does offer a meaningful reliable solution for developers to

11:54
locate a central plant agreement underground, and that can be under dead space such as car parks or driveways for instance. Now, the confined space issue’s a big one, and actually what we’ve come up with is a way to get around many of the challenges associated with confined

12:11
spaces regulations, and that in turn leads to a more straightforward maintenance process and lower overall lifetime cost of the system. We’ve come up with a solution that allows a much safer and faster installation by civils contractor, much less time spent on

12:33
the on-site construction. We’ve come up with a solution that puts most of the construction effort off-site, and then a unit which is pretty much ready to install and concrete is delivered to site. We’ve also come up with a way to make much more efficient use of concrete,

12:51
so the solution we devised allows you to know the exact volume of concrete which is required prior to the arrival of the unit on site. It’s a fully packaged solution from one single supplier (that’s us) so far fewer issues associated with dealing with multiple suppliers.

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There’s protection against many of the issues of maintenance operatives working in underground plant rooms. So, protection against drowning, protection against lack of oxygen for instance, and ease of escape, meaning that many of the issues associated with working in confined

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spaces just don’t apply. So this new approach I’m sure you’re all really keen to see what it looks like, so here is a render of an installed underground plant room. We call this the optimised underground package plan room, and this shows you an in-situ installation

13:48
of this underground. Now, a few features, I’ll go through one. If you look to the sides of each side of the plant room between the the steel, you’ll see a steel frame and the and the ground between that is some prefabricated PVC concrete shuttering,

14:08
which is fitted around the unit prior to it being delivered to site, which means basically what you’re receiving is a pre-shuttered underground plant room, so there’s no need to spend time on concrete shuttering. I’m just going to strip away the shuttering now so you can

14:25
see the internals a bit better. One of the things you can see clearly in this and this rendering is a full-size staircase. Now, if you remember earlier we looked at example of an underground plant room, which has a common feature of an access hatch with a ladder,

14:41
and it makes it much more difficult for a maintenance operative to escape in the event of a problem, which is why you have to have a sort of winch and harness arrangement. But by putting in a full sized staircase, you don’t need to have the winch and second man

14:59
arrangement. Someone working in there can just escape out very easily and the access hatch runs the full length of that staircase, so it’s a much wider opening, so it’s much safer to get in and out from. Now, another feature you’ll see here on the left-hand side it is a safety

15:16
warning light system. Now, this plant room, to call it a room, is almost to not do it justice. It is a system, and one of the design considerations that we’ve had to, the new approach to a design is not thinking about the plant room as an

15:35
enclosure but actually thinking about the plant room as a whole system in its own right, with a unified sort of control philosophy that covers all the different aspects including the safety features for maintenance operatives. So, there’s a warning system for flooding so

15:52
if there’s any water detected in the plant room where it shouldn’t be, there’ll be a warning light displayed to anyone who tries to enter. There’s air monitoring, there’s temperature monitoring, which all inform what the safety light system displays. It will display a light if it’s safe

16:10
to enter, it will display a different light if there’s a flood risk, if there’s an air temperature risk or anything like that. Another feature you can see is the raised floor. Now, the floor is a steel grate which means that any water that emanated from that tank that you can see

16:27
on the right hand side, if that tank was compromised anyhow the water wouldn’t flow onto the floor and there be a potential risk of drowning, it actually goes underneath the floor into the bund area and that bund area is equal to or greater than the

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capacity of the water storage tank, which means that in the unlikely event that that was compromised somehow and all the water emptied itself out into the plant room, it wouldn’t touch the floor level they’ll all go under the floor, and there are a couple of some pumps underneath the floor

16:58
though if you know if any water gets in there or pump it out, and the sump pumps are linked to the to some motorised inlet valves, which if those pumps basically detect any water where there shouldn’t be water, so if the tanks overflowing or has been compromised the inlet valves from the

17:16
mains water supply automatically get shut off. Now, you might say ‘what happens if there’s loss of power?’ Well, all those valves and the safety systems are all low voltage and they all have battery backup, so even if there was a loss of power, there’d still be

17:34
backup power for all those safety systems to work properly. So, just going to look at it from the other side now this is a possible water booster set system. So, there’s a storage tank on the left hand side as you’re looking at it now and a three pump variable speed cold

17:54
water booster set is all controlled by the unified control panel which is on the right hand side and you can see the back of it there. You can also see the cable ducts and the pipe connections at the top just above the booster set. The entire package is

18:12
all there. Now, just a word about the control panel as well using our new Dutypoint smart control panel system with a touchscreen HMI, which controls every feature of the plant room including the safety mechanisms plus the booster set, the inverters for the booster set, are

18:27
mounted inside that control panel, and what that allows us also to do is a full remote management system, so anything that can be controlled from the HMI touch screen control panel can be controlled basically from anywhere in the world in theory, and the the system has a

18:45
SIM card and a modem which allows it to be connected, and that also means that to monitor the system day to day if there’s no need to actually enter the plant room anyway. It can be just all monitored remotely. Now, over a period of, you know, thirty years perhaps, you can see

19:01
how that would decrease the maintenance cost significantly, because a lot of the work you can actually complete remotely. I’m just going to show you one final view there with the concrete shuttering back in place, and actually in the bottom right there you can

19:24
see the two pumps and hopefully illustrates the underfloor area quite nicely. Just at this point do feel free to ask any questions at any point, and you can use the chat facility and I will see the questions as they come up and I’ll do my best to

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answer them. This next image here shows a photograph of complete unit as it leaves the factory. You can see the PVC shuttering all the way around and the pipework connections and cable ducts that come with it and then we’re back to a complete unit

20:06
installed into the ground. You can see the access and panel that goes along the length of the unit as well. Now, so far we’ve looked at a few renders, but I’m sure you’re dying to hear about an actual installation that has happened. So, I’ve got one. I’ve got the

20:27
first case study here for you now, which was a luxury holiday park in Norfolk in the east of England, which we worked on fairly recently. Now, the particular project within this holiday park was a new shower block for a camping area. Now, shower blocks do have quite a high

20:46
peak water demand and they need a lot of water storage, so there was a specification from a consultant that required six thousand litres of storage just to service this shower block because there’s quite a high peak demand and a high water usage/high water storage requirements as a result and

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this is a luxury holiday park, so the quality of the showers was quite high and the flow rate demand from each hour was high. But, the the building was designed, really, without enough plant room space to satisfy this requirement and their

21:23
various options were explored like fitting into the roof space but there wasn’t enough space in the roof area. So, the only other option was an external enclosure, but due to being a really nice rural holiday park, the client didn’t want to have

21:40
any sort of plant room structures externally that would spoil the landscape. Really, the idea for them was an underground plant room that was to be retrofitted after the completion of the building, but there were a

22:01
number of issues associated with the maintenance of this system. So, some of the existing solutions on the market were explored, many of which were ruled out because they couldn’t be worked on by the on-site maintenance team. Now if you know Norfolk, there are areas,

22:17
some very remote and this client couldn’t have a situation where they were waiting hours for properly trained maintenance operatives to come from off-site to work on a unit that was supplying water to be showers. They need their

22:32
on-site team to be able to work this, and they were very keen that the safety element was such that the people without specific confined space training could work on their equipment. So, hopefully

22:52
you can see why our unit was then selected. Just to go through some of the steps, this is the unit being loaded onto the truck at our factory, which is in Gloucester, and just gives you an idea of the scale of it as well, and is then

23:15
transported on this low loaded truck to the site in Norfolk. You can see it having gone into the excavation here, and then the finished product. We’re going to have a little look inside as well. So, this is the interior of the unit’s

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three images, starting from left to right, and then the camera sort of pans around so you can see three different views. So, the control panel on the far left and on that left-hand image you can see where the sump pumps discharge into. You can see the mechanical air ventilation

23:59
which is at the top of the image in the ceiling area, and then in the centre image you can obviously see the pump set, and then round to the right you can see how easily accessible this unit is with that full-size staircase. So again, this unit has the touchscreen HMI

24:20
Dutypoint smart control panel system with the built-in SIM card so it can be operated from anywhere in the world, so what that does is it means that only kind of specific electrical or mechanical tasks will actually require entry into this unit in any case, so

24:36
that could be sort of checking a pressure vessel pre charge, placing a mechanical seal on the pump or replacing electrical components. A lot of the day-to-day checks can be performed remotely, and the control power is a unified control panel, so it controls every

24:56
aspect of the system including the pump sets and all the safety systems. Everything has to work together to ensure that the system is fully operating and safe all at once and all the different components have to fully work together,

25:11
including the safety warning light system that I mentioned earlier. Now what I’d like to do actually is show you a slightly different installation, so we’re going to watch a video in a sec which is a time-lapse of an installation of one of these units actually on the site just

25:26
outside Oxford in the residential development, and the time-lapse actually shows you the excavation process, the installation of the unit, and the back filling, the concreting, just to give you an idea of the construction process. So, I will leave you to watch that for a moment and then I’ll come back and just round this off.

27:22
Right, well, I hope you found that interesting obviously there’s quite a lot of detail there so if you’d like someone to go through the process with you in more detail then do feel

27:33
free to get in touch and we can arrange a specific meeting. Now, just to really summarise what we discussed today, so, the problems associated with underground plant rooms, many of them to do with the restrictions of working in confined spaces for very good safety

27:51
reasons. So, what we’ve provided is a system that has mechanical ventilation, the safety warning light system, a full-size staircase to allow sort of safe entry and exit with the full length access door, the flood bunds to really prevents many of the risks associated

28:07
with flooding, and full component backup of the safety systems with a battery system that, among many of the features, it powers the safety warning light system, or the valves that shut off the mains inlet in the event of flooding, and the insulation

28:30
system, the pre shuttered unit with the pre installed shuttering really takes away a lot of the time spent on sites doing the concrete shuttering, and allows you to know the exact volume of concrete that you need to use prior to

28:47
the arrival of the unit on site, and then of course in this situation with a potablei water storage units, it’s protecting that potable water, so there being a clear air gap between the the walls of the plant room and particularly the contact with the grounds

29:05
so there’s a clear break between the two and also obviously a mechanism for removing any ground walls that did seep into the unit in that underfloor area. So really, the key message is this is a system which solves many of the safety issues, so safety of

29:27
maintenance operations, the confined spaces, and then many of the safety issues to do with the installation on site. So, far fewer entries to the excavation because of the pre-shuttering, so the installation

29:44
process is far, far safer for protection of the possible water. So, safety: it’s really the message is safety first when we’re putting units under ground. Now, that kind of brings me to the end of my presentation, please feel free to stick around if you’ve got any questions at all that you’d like me to

30:04
address. One question I did have was surrounding frost protection, and this wasn’t mentioned in the presentation, but yes, the unit does have frost protection because, obviously, frosting can occur underground, although it’s less likely to do so. But yeah, there’s a thermostat and

30:22
some electric heaters within the unit to prevent any frosting if that did occur, don’t think there are any other questions I haven’t kind of addressed as we’ve gone through, but if you do have any please do stick around. I’ll stay on the line for a

30:39
little while, but that really ends our presentation. I hope you found that useful, and I’d appreciate any feedback you might have as well, anything we could have we could have explained better. Please do get in touch with any projects that you might have, where

30:55
you’re even just considering an underground plant room, or if you’ve got a particular project you’d like to go through, our team would be very, very pleased to discuss that with you. You can find find our website at www.dutypoint.com, or drop us an email sales at sales@dutypoint.com,

31:14
which is monitored constantly throughout the day so our team will get back to you very quickly if you email any enquiries into that, or feel free to give our team a call, 01452 300592 is the number to call

31:31
with any questions at all. My name is Chris Lang, again, it has been my pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you very much for giving up a bit of your Friday to come and join us. But again, if you’d like to ask me any questions specifically please stick

31:48
around for a bit. But, that ends the main part of the presentation. So, thank you very much for joining us and wish you a very good rest of your Friday and a lovely weekend. Thank you.