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Freezing and enabling work – Royal Chelsea Hospital

The team at CH Systems is currently on contract at the Royal Chelsea Hospital  – one of our most prestigious projects to date. We won a tender that commissioned the following:

1.Freezing and Enabling work
2.Plant room installation and pipework
3.Below ground pipe gas pipework

The work includes the creation of two small boiler rooms (within existing plant rooms), which are required to supplement the existing heating system during periods of high load. As one might imagine, this is extremely important within the context of a hospital environment.

As part of the ‘enabling’ that had to be carried out prior to commencing work on the boilers, we had to cut into the existing primary pipework within the plant rooms in order to make our connections to the existing system. With a building of this size, draining down the pipework is not an option due to the length of downtime and inconvenience this might cause to hospital guests, so we froze the pipework in the West and East plant rooms (with the help of an expert Pipe Freezing Service) and used liquid nitrogen to stop the flow of water thus enabling work to take place with as little downtime possible.

Because we were under pressure to get the system up and running as soon as possible, we opted for a number of prefabricated sections of 3-inch and 4-inch pipework (on which our welders did an excellent job) that we joined to the existing system without issue. Not being able to thread pipework or weld anything into place, we used the Viega Megapress system, with support from Paul Burkett (this being our first instance of using the megapress), enabling us to press onto medium and heavy weight pipe thus dramatically speeding up the entire process.

We’re still in the midst of completing the project but check out the pics below to get an idea of the the work explained above…and watch this space for further project updates.