The Emergency Challenge
Aquatech services were called by North London collegiate school with a major problem affecting both heating & hot water services.
North London Collegiate School has one large boiler house, which provides heating & hot water services to the main school and Old house.
Newer buildings have their own separate systems, working with older installations often gives us our biggest challenges.
As Aquatech have been employed as a contractor to this school for over 25 years and have maintained all their systems on a cyclical preventative maintenance scheme, it’s not that often we have things like this to deal with.
But in this instance, the main system causing concern serves over 450 radiators and 2 large hot water generators including the main kitchens. And these need to be kept running continuously, all year to provide lunches for the pupils and staff. Unless we could fix this quickly, this would be ‘service affecting’.
The Solution
The main boiler plant room is connected to the school with an under ground pipework system which in some areas dates back to the1930’s.
Carefully carrying out a pressure test to the system revealed a leak ‘somewhere’.
Knowing there is a leak, can be very different to finding out where exactly it is!
As it turns out, this was very challenging on such a large system, and this was where we needed to use both our sound equipment and a pipe friendly CCTV camera to locate the leak, which we did, to within 200mm of the affected area.
Work until it’s finished
This was a time critical issue with the school kitchen and possibly the school having to close. In the event, we worked through the night with a JCB carefully excavating the area and confirming the leak was on some old rusty pipework, as you can see from the pictures.
The materials were sourced and fetched first thing the next daybreak, and the leak was successfully repaired, refilled, vented & recomissioned.
Aquatech reinstated the ground and made good to all affected areas, and the school continued to operate unaffected.
How long did it take?
In this instance, we started work one day, worked through the night and were finished by the end of the following day.
