Armstrong Integrated Systems Ltd - Off-Site manufacture speeds the way for HBOS

Off-site manufactured plant rooms from Armstrong Integrated Systems cut programme timescales to a minimum for the expansion of two HBOS data centres. The company’s sites in Copley and Pudsey, Yorkshire, were scheduled for expansion with the construction of additional buildings to house employees and equipment. Chilled water pumping plant rooms were needed to manage the building services requirements of each site. The decision to have these manufactured off-site brought numerous benefits including shorter project timescales, reduced health and safety risk, and greater efficiency of installation on the roof of each newly-erected building.
Four plant rooms were manufactured in total by Armstrong Integrated Systems for HBOS. The designs included 3600kW plate heat exchangers, pumps, de-aerators, side-stream filters and control equipment. Armstrong constructed the plant rooms in their purpose-designed manufacturing facility in Halesowen. Each plant room was supplied fully-assembled to site, housed in an enclosure, and requiring only final connections.
The two plant rooms for the Copley site were combined within a single enclosure with a dividing wall. Measuring 20 metres by 12 metres, the finished plant room had a total weight of 127.5 tonnes. In order to make it easy to transport to site, and to crane onto the roof, it was designed in five modular sections, each weighing up to 24 tonnes.
The two smaller plant rooms for the Pudsey site, each measuring 11 metres by 8 metres were constructed in separate enclosures. The enclosures of all of the plant rooms were produced by Armstrong in a corporate colour scheme to match the existing buildings at the Copley and Pudsey sites.
As each plant room was to be positioned on the roof of a newly-erected building, and work could therefore not commence until the end of the construction phase, the building services element of the project had a significant impact on how quickly the building owners could occupy the data centres. Manufacturing the plant rooms off-site enabled the construction of the plant rooms to take place concurrently with the rest of the construction project, over a sixteen week period, instead of at the end of the building process. This essentially removed the plant room part of the project from the critical path, and final installation was achieved within days, instead of requiring a number of weeks.
As the other buildings on site were occupied throughout the expansion, off-site manufacture assisted greatly in reducing health and safety risk. For HBOS workers, the attendance of contractors on site for the installation was reduced from weeks to just days. In addition, assembly work which would have otherwise been carried out at height and outdoors, was managed in the more easily controlled environment of a factory. Studies have shown that the factory environment also facilitates higher levels of finished quality for plant rooms and leads to shorter timescales as there are not the constrictions of weather, access and bottlenecks relating to other aspects of the build.
Armstrong Integrated Systems utilises the latest 3D computer modelling technology when planning plant rooms, and this was particularly beneficial in the HBOS project. A second expansion phase is planned by the company in the future at the Copley and Pudsey sites, and Armstrong was able to incorporate the requirements of Phase 2 into the designs of Phase 1 in order that the enclosures will be purpose-designed for fitting of the new equipment when the time comes for further expansion.
Steve Cooper, managing director of Armstrong Integrated Systems said, “In projects where occupied sites are being expanded, there really is no better solution than off-site manufacture. In the Copley and Pudsey project for HBOS, the positioning of the plant room on the roof of a new building made off-site construction an even more valuable construction technique.”

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