refurbishment

With an ageing population and only 7% of housing stock in England offering even the most basic accessibility features , there is a growing need for housing associations to offer flexible accommodation. An area that is the most challenging for those with mobility issues is the bathroom. Here Stuart Reynolds, Head of Product and Marketing at AKW, shows how housing associations can have the best of both worlds – contemporary, long-lasting bathrooms for day-to-day use and then, when needed cost-effective transitioning to accessible wet rooms.

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.

When it comes to bathroom installations, sourcing quality products that are also cost-effective and contemporary is the key to long-lasting success. Here Stuart Reynolds, Head of Product and Marketing at AKW, discusses why AKW is launching the Beautiful Bathrooms Collection this month and the benefits it offers Housing Associations and tenants alike.

Awareness of the potential health problems caused by lead in the water supply, particularly in infants and children is growing.  Houses built before 1970 would have been constructed with lead water supply pipes and if still in place can be causing developmental harm to young occupants.
Although the use of lead in plumbing has been banned in the UK for more than 50 years, there are still many properties where a risk of lead contamination of water is a risk.  In some areas of the UK up to a third of these older properties are still receiving their water through these original lead pipes.[1]

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.