Refurb and maintenance

Orbit Housing’s Fordham House in Stratford-upon-Avon aims to raise the bar for rented accommodation. Although initially a social housing provider, Orbit now refers to itself as a “developing housing association”, and Fordham House was designed for private rental by key workers in the town.

The Pendock Profiles range of specialist casings and pipe & fire sprinkler boxing has been a common feature in social housing for well over 30 years and is used on countless heating system refurbishments, boiler upgrades and fire-sprinkler installations by most UK social landlords.

In any property, whether it’s a new build or a refurbishment project, there will inevitably be exposed pipework that needs covering for reasons of safety and aesthetics, or as a deterrent from tampering, accidental damage and vandalism, particularly for exterior pipework.

For housing associations and local authorities dealing with older housing stock that requires heating system upgrades, fire sprinkler system retro-fits and regular maintenance, as part of the property management regime, large quantities of exposed pipework can present a number of challenges.

When evaluating opportunities to cut costs in social housing refurbishment or retro-fit fire sprinkler installation in high rise blocks as part of a fire safety framework agreement, pipe boxing probably wouldn’t feature highly, yet Pendock products are helping HAs and LAs save money and time on site.

The Pendock Profiles range of specialist casings and pipe & fire sprinkler boxing has been a common feature in social housing for well over 30 years and have been used on heating system refurbishments, boiler upgrades and fire-sprinkler installations by most UK social landlords on countless projects.

In June 2017, a fire claimed 72 lives at Grenfell Tower in Kensington. Eleven months later, Dame Judith Hackitt, who was commissioned to determine the cause of the disaster, released a report featuring eight key recommendations to limit the chances of similar catastrophes occurring in the future.

Those recommendations require building managers to keep digital building records, from the design and conceptualisation phase through its life cycle. With the boom years of High Rise Residential Buildings (HRRB) development between 1953 and 1972, and with 6544 buildings erected in the half-century following the end of World War 2, nearly all of the remaining 270 HRRBs were built in a pre-digital age.

Easy to fit decorative boxings from UK Boxings have been used for more than 20 years by UK housing associations, local authorities and social housing contractors to hide pipework for fire sprinklers, heating systems and below boilers to save time and money on-site.

With HA and local authority landlords implementing major fire protection upgrade programmes, including the ongoing retro-fitting of fire sprinkler systems, for many contractors Encasement’s Versa pipe boxing is proving to be the ideal solution for concealing sprinkler pipework.