Working in an office is something that many of us do, and it is becoming more common for companies to encourage their workforce back into the office, spending less time working from home.
This is a positive move to those businesses with large facilities, however it can also bring a set of challenges!
Just the same as your home, commercial buildings require regular maintenance to ensure things are working correctly.
While there is usually a team of people who take care of this on behalf of the company, it is worth considering why it is so important to have this in place where you work.
DALROD Bath & Swindon work with a number of large commercial and Facilities Management companies in their local area, and they actively promote pre-planned maintenance programmes for drainage (more about this in a minute).
When a call came through the website about a five storey office building that was having some difficulties with some blockages, they knew pretty quickly what might be causing the problem.
Visiting site to analyse the size and cause of a drainage problem is something that DALROD do as a matter of course, once the team arrived it was obvious from the beginning that the building had not received any regular maintenance for a long while.
Locating the cause of a reported blockage can be quite a simple task if good information is passed from the facilities / building management team, which it was. The problem for this building was something that is a common cause of blocked pipes. It was uric scale.
Let’s talk scale!
This common problem is often found in urinals and is caused when urine and flushing water are combined. Over a period of time urine deposits that remain within the toilet or urinal can form uric crystals, these can cause very bad smells and also when they get inside the pipes, a hard scale is formed.
The scale just continues to build up over time and requires special tools to remove it effectively. This is precisely what happened here, there was an excess of scale in the 2 inch pipe leading away from the urinals.
The DALROD Bath & Swindon are experienced enough to know that if there was a problem occurring in one part of the building then it was likely to replicate across other floors.
So, the decision was made to recommend a proactive descale for the whole building. Quite a large amount of work, but this was deemed necessary to prevent further issues. Whilst this was being considered by the building management team another floor also blocked up for the same reason (these things tend to happen!).
It was at this point a plan agreed for a full weekend of maintenance to be undertaken at the building.
Working throughout the weekend was the most flexible solution for the company as it meant that no employees were impacted by the works, something that DALROD pride themselves on.
The work included the following:
- All pipes from the urinals were cleaned through and flushed back to full diameter.
- Access was made into the building stack to assess the condition.
- A clean of the stacks was also undertaken.
- Where pipework had been poorly installed, uphill runs and reverse installed T pieces were found, these were also removed and replaced.
- Access points installed for future maintenance to avoid future occurrences.
Plan of action!
Finally, a formalised plan was developed to ensure this type of regular maintenance is undertaken. At DALROD we call this pre-planned maintenance. The benefits of this include:
- Completely bespoke and built around specific needs
- Strategically planned visits to prevent disruption and loss of revenue
- Prevention of emergency situations
- Preservation of property from unwanted damage
- Cost-effective solution for drain maintenance
- Regular professional cleaning of interceptors and grease traps and descaling
You cannot underestimate the importance of maintaining the inside of your building fabric as well as outside. This story is a great example of demonstrating how office environments drains are used a lot during the day and these need maintenance!
Get yours done before it’s too late………
If you would like to know more about what is involved in drain maintenance, or would like to discuss any drainage requirements with us, then please contact our friendly team at DALROD on 01225 984195.
