Underground Heating & District Heating
Since we teamed up with Treco on the prestigious Tracey Farm development we have found ourselves becoming one of the market leading installers of underground heating pipe in the UK.
Until this large scale development, most district heating installations in the UK were relatively modest projects linking small groups of houses or school buildings to a central biomass boiler. As a result the pipe installation work usually fell to the on site contractor or ground worker. The Tracey Farm project broke the mould, with 40 cabins spaced around a generous 93 Acre estate drawing heat from a central energy hub containing four wood pellet boilers.
The heated water is fed around the site with over 3okm of underground insulated pipe, with flow and returns in an insulated core encapsulated in a flexible hard shell – the Rehau Rauvitherm pre-insulated pipe system.
The unprecedented demand for such a high volume of underground pipework on a single site stretched the limits of most of the contractors who had been comfortable on short pipe runs but lacked the experience and expertise to install, test and commission several kilometres of pipeline. Pipefix were already on site installing the potable water infrastructure on site, and the Project Manager was so impressed with our company that he asked us to train a couple of teams up to install heating pipes too. This type of work is well within the technical capacity of Pipefix, and mainly involved our teams learning how to use the particular specialised tooling for jointing pre-insulated pipes.
We are now at the planning stage of two more large scale installations and hope to bring you more news of this in our next update.
“Pipefix have been an absolute pleasure to work with on this project. The professional approach of everyone I dealt with from the guys on site to the team in the office was fantastic. We will definitely be working with you again.”
Daniel Messenger – Treco Project Manager
External Links:
Treco Green Heat: http://www.treco.co.uk/
Rehau Rauvitherm UK Site: http://www.rehau.com/gb-en/building-technology/renewable-energy/biomass-biogas/rauvitherm-pre-insulated-pipe
Soho Farm Website: http://www.sohofarmhouse.com/
