Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow
Chairman of £15m Cheshire-based flooring business Flowcrete, Dawn Gibbins is a woman brimming with ideas. Last year, she reached the final shortlist for the Patent Office-sponsored British Female Inventor of the Year Award for a floor that doesn’t cosset bugs but kills them. The system, Mondéco Seamless Anti-Microbial Terrazzo flooring, is treated with a chemical that permeates the moisture that collects on a floor’s surface and kills any bacteria and fungi that drink it. Develop or die
“To survive in business you need to be inventive,” says Gibbins. “Innovation is at the heart of the Flowcrete culture.” Gibbins set up Flowcrete with her father, a flooring consultant, in 1982. What set them off was a request by confectioner Mars for a sugar-resistant floor. “Terrible stuff, sugar,” she says. “It just eats concrete. But my father came up with the solution: resin.” Since then, the innovations have come thick and fast. Take the company’s PHS product. “In the mid-90s many hospital floors suffered severe degradation because the rough-and-ready process of manually shovelling the cement and sand mixture together left them starved of cement,” explains Gibbins. “Contractors repairing them would rip out several mills of the screed. It involved a huge amount of material management and was very disruptive. My father had the idea of scarifying the screed and applying a low-viscosity self-smoothing resin that penetrated the screed and then replacing the underlayment and vinyl. It’s a lot faster.” What construction managers get from Flowcrete products are programme benefits. “Up to 3,000m2 of our flowing, self-levelling flooring can be laid in a day,” explains Gibbins. “And if a construction manager realises time’s very tight on the flooring, we can supply it in formulations that dry in 21 days, three days, one day – even 10 hours.” At the Army Foundation College in Harrogate, Yorkshire, a new-build project, 50,000 square metres of Isocrete Gyvlon were laid in double-quick time. The anhydrite screed can be laid around 10 times faster than traditional sand and cement and can take foot traffic around 24 hours later. Solvent Ban
Believing that toxic chemicals contributed to the death of her father from cancer, Gibbins banned them from Flowcrete products. The company now produces all its flooring by environmentally friendly means. Solvents are shunned and materials recycled where possible. “But it’s not just the products, it’s how you apply them,” she says. Flowcrete flooring is pump-applied, so workers don’t increase their risk of back complaints by having to constantly bend down. At first new developments were driven by customers approaching the company for solutions to specific problems, with Flowcrete taking the resulting products to the bigger market. Nowadays the business is more about spotting a likely need and developing products to satisfy it. Proactive rather than reactive innovation. “British manufacturers are heading abroad so we’ve had to tweak what we’re doing,” says Gibbins. “We’ve taken hygienic seamless floors out of the factory and into retail centres and airports. We’ve made industrial flooring sexy for public places.” Enquiry number 201
There’s a kind of hush...
The imminent arrival of a revamped Part E of the Building Regulations will put an end to the charmed life of ‘deemed to comply’ building materials. The new Part E will mean builders can no longer rely on sound-proofing materials having been passed by a building inspector for a totally different structure somewhere else in England, perhaps years before. Instead, construction materials will have to be checked as fit for their purpose for the structure they are actually used in. Testing sound insulation in situ is the big change anticipated. Getting the flooring wrong – and flooring is fundamental to effective soundproofing - will be a very expensive mistake to make. Decibel multiplication
Historically, builders have used existing materials to achieve acoustic insulation: putting up, say, two layers of wallboard rather than one in the hope of achieving the required level. But it’s a noisier world now. People have moved on from having just a wireless in their home to concert-strength hifi with room-shaking amplifiers. Sound insulation likewise is moving on. Insulation supplier InstaCoustic started out trying to soundproof buildings by using its standard insulation materials – until it discovered they had virtually no sound absorption effect whatsoever. The company then spent five years researching and developing sound insulation construction materials. It came up with two systems – a floating floor for use on top of wooden floors and a cradle and batten system for concrete floors. Silence is golden
At Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, one of the oldest in the world, an Instacoustic cable and batten floor was laid in the upper and lower reading rooms. Together with the university’s surveyor office, project manager Paul Spaven of chartered building surveyor Tuffin Ferraby & Taylor, specified the Instacoustic system so all the desks in the reading rooms could be cabled up for IT and internet access. “It’s a working library, so we needed something that could be installed quickly and quietly and offered good sound insulation,” says Spaven. “Given the difficulties of access – you need to give two years’ notice to close the library, otherwise you have to work at night or on Sundays – we also wanted something that could be left for 30 years without our having to return to do any repair work.” The Bodleian is a 400-year-old listed building equipped with immensely heavy, four-metre-long, 200-year-old oak desks. A massive stained glass window had to be removed from each of the reading rooms and the desks craned out before the floor could be put down. It took 16 weeks to do the approximately 600m2 of each reading room. “We did the upper reading room in 2000 and to be honest we weren’t all that happy with it,” admits Spaven. “It wasn’t terribly noisy but there was a drumming sound when people walked on it. So when we did the lower reading room the next year we made some changes, increasing the thickness of the ply on top of the battens from 18mm to 22mm, placing the battens slightly closer to each other and putting an insulation quilt between them before laying the cork tiles we’d used in the upper room. It made a world of difference. We’re delighted with the results.” Float on
InstaCoustic’s floating floor is designed to sit on wooden floors. Made up of three layers which reduce headroom by about 3cm, the floating floor eschews the use of hard fixings, which are the main culprit in transmitting contact vibration, and leaves a gap at the skirting board which is filled by silicon sealant. The weight of the boards are enough to hold the floating floor in place. Much can go wrong at installation. The installer must check that the existing wooden floor is sound, and where there is a cavity wall that the floor beams do not extend into it. Otherwise the soundproofing will be shortcircuited. With noise pollution particularly prevalent in smaller, low-cost housing, InstaCoustic is not marketing floating floors as a luxury product for owners rich enough to pay for the sound of silence. Housing associations commonly build to a higher standard than social housing and put more emphasis on full-life costings. Starting off with regulation-meeting insulation is a lot cheaper than having to incorporate it subsequently. Enquiry number 202
Heat beneath your feet
Raised access flooring dominates commercial offices. But one new product puts a service in a raised access floor rather than under it. In conjunction with its IMEL heated underfloors division, Propaflor has launched the QED heating panel – a specially developed heating unit on the underside of a raised access floor panel. The panels are positioned according to a variety of factors: whether an area is on the sunny side of a building, the amount of glazing in the office, and whether it is open plan. All these factors will affect the number and positioning of the panels. The system overcomes the radiator-equipped office’s tendency to hot and cold spots, with workers next to the radiators sweltering while staff further away complain of being cold. QED is like having micro underfloor heaters dotted around the office, with more in colder zones. Heating can be delivered to where people are sitting rather than dissipating it in traffic areas where staff are warmer because they’re walking around. Constantlt monitored
The panels are plugged into a network of multi-circuit trunking, with heat output controlled according to the outside temperature and changes in the ambient office temperature. Office organisation is no longer affected by the position of radiators, because the QED panels are mobile: they can simply be unplugged from one location and plugged in again at another. “The system negates the cost of a boiler house and operational savings come from its greater responsiveness to heating needs,” says IMEL director Steven Smith. Enquiry number 203
Concrete overcoat
The shortage of greenfield sites and the gearing of the planning system towards urban regeneration make prestressed concrete flooring one of the most effective materials for building safely on contaminated ground. Because precast concrete can cope with long spans, fewer foundations are needed, which means that builders have less contaminated site spoil to remove. Out of the void
Toxic gases like radon and methane can be easily vented from the clear void below concrete floors, and the floor itself sheathed in polythene to stop gases entering the structure. Concrete’s high mass also gives it strong thermal insulation properties. Manufacturer Marshalls Flooring has even gone beyond the new Part L, with its Jetfloor Super product, which wraps expanded polystyrene blocks around concrete beams. Jetfloor Super has been available for the last 15 years with a U value of 0.45W/m2K. Adding more polystyrene and reshaping the blocks has allowed Marshalls to lower the U value to 0.2; the product is also available with a U value of 0.25 and 0.3 for upper floors. Housebuilder Bryant Homes specifies Jetfloor for all suspended concrete ground floor construction and has moved to Jetfloor Super to satisfy the new Part L requirement for ground floors to lose heat at no greater a rate than 0.25Wm2K. Thermal trade-off
The company standardised on Jetfloor in the mid-90s as a thermal trade-off when it moved away from condensing boilers to standard but less heat-efficient boilers. “It trebled the insulation value of our ground floors,” says Dave Poole, technical services manager at Bryant. “But it’s not just about insulation,” he adds. “Suspended concrete flooring particularly benefits construction on brownfield and contaminated sites. The subfloor void is an effective way of dispersing gases such as radon, methane and carbon dioxide.” Enquiry number 204
Not to be sneezed at
More children than adults have asthma, and schools are keen to ensure carpets ease the problem rather than exacerbate it. One non-allergenic product, Flotex, last year won the British Allergy Foundation’s seal of approval and the education sector has taken over from health as the biggest business of manufacturer Bonar. Straight for suction
Flotex’s 6mm-long fibres stand up straight, so a 20-second vacuum can remove 9.75 micrograms of allergens per square metre compared with 5.47 for traditional carpet. Flotex can also be extended into the sports hall with Flotex Sport. Different colours of Flotex Sport are pre-cut at the factory, allowing the contractor to cut the lines out of the main floor colour on site and insert the different colour. The lines are part of the floor rather than painted on, so they suffer less wear and tear. Pre-cut
“The lines are pre-cut, so installing it is quick and accurate,” says Steve Dixon, contracts manager of Aiken Flooring Contracts. “Laying Flotex Sport for a multipurpose hall can be a daunting prospect at the start of a job, but once you’ve worked out the right order for placing the different pieces and colours, it’s simple.” Special tools cut perfect holes for the inserts and the rubber-type backing makes Flotex easy to cut. “I’ve seen 20-year-old Flotex carpets that are still in good condition,” says Dixon. “It’s almost impossible to wear out. The pattern goes out of fashion before you can wear it out.” Bonar offers an unconditional 10-year wear and tear guarantee. Enquiry number 205
Prepare for purgatory
What’s under your floor is just as important as what’s on the surface. If the substrate isn’t contaminant-free, then whatever you cover it with will, sooner or later, break up. TRW Automotive Systems in the West Midlands discovered this the hard way. TRW makes car and aircraft engine valves for Rover, Rolls Royce, Ford and Scania among others. Its factory’s gangways and production areas suffer from continual impact, heat and vibration. Extremes
Take the extrusion forge, where any valve that drops on the floor lands at a temperature of 900° C. Graphite oil drips non-stop from the presses onto the forge floor, while a film of neat engineering oil covers the gangways in the grinding area. Forklift trucks and trolleys heavily laden with valves are constantly coming and going. The plant was built 25 years ago and flooring has been a recurring problem. The concrete floor was originally covered with tiles and the whole surface sealed. It was difficult to clean and the sealant deteriorated rapidly. Accidental slips were common. Failure
Over the years, a succession of contractors came in to repair the floor and lay various epoxy resin coverings, all of which failed. “The floor always looked great when they left, but it wasn’t long before it started breaking up again,” says plant services manager John Huskisson. Huskisson says meticulous preparation of the concrete substrate was the key to a permanent solution. Local contractor Flo-dek stripped off the tiles and sealant, burnt the oil spills out of the concrete, shot-blasted the burnt areas away and then acid-etched it to remove the dusty concrete surface. Polyurethane resin flooring from Altro was then laid in high-temperature areas such as the extrusion forge. “Nine years on, the integrity of the floor is excellent,” says Huskisson. “There’s some scoring caused by forklift trucks dragging beams along the floor – the sort of event no floor can survive. During the factory’s annual shutdown this summer, Flo-dek will be coming back in to repair that sort of minor damage and to smarten it up - plant conditions make it difficult to keep the floor spotless.” Accident rate
And the biggest benefits of the flooring for TRW? “It’s easy to keep clean and the number of accidents is well down,” says Huskisson. “At around £40 a square metre to lay, it’s expensive but it does its job brilliantly and is aesthetically pleasing. We’ve got green gangways with yellow lines, and pale grey in off-gangway areas. If I had my way, I’d do the entire plant out in it.” Enquiry number 206
Source
Construction Manager
Postscript
For more information on a product, go to www.construction-manager.co.uk/enquiries
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