Roof refurbishment with ingenious built-in safety feature at Coleg Cambria
At the Coleg Cambria, Wrexham’s higher education college in North Wales, Filon over-roofing was specified as part of Mitie Tilley’s refurbishment of the Engineering Centre of Excellence facility.
The existing asbestos cement roof to the building had been starting to fail and the resulting water ingress was causing damage to the roof structure and putting high value machinery inside the building at risk.
Filon’s lightweight GRP over-roofing sheets allowed the roof to be refurbished without stripping off the existing roof sheets, making the refurbishment process quicker and less disruptive.
During a project of this type, there is the inevitable necessity for operatives to access areas of fragile roof, so safety measures must be put in place to protect against injury or death in the event of a fall.
Common practice in large asbestos cement clad buildings is to fit safety netting inside the building for the duration of the work. However at the Coleg Cambria, internal ceilings prevented access to allow nets to be hung inside the building, so an alternative solution was devised in collaboration with Filon’s technical team.
Peter Brierley, Business Development Manager for Mitie Tilley, takes up the story:
“A bracket and bar spacer system was employed to create a slightly oversized void between the existing roof and the over roofing sheets, rather than Filon’s own Profix spacers which would normally be used.
This facilitated the use of sacrificial safety nets being fixed over the existing roof and being left in place within the roof build-up after installation”.
The relatively low cost of the safety netting, when compared with the potential cost of removing and re-fitting the ceilings, plus temporary re-siting of equipment inside the building, made ‘sacrificial’ netting the cost-effective solution.
The over-roof at Coleg Cambria used Filon’s OPDR30E sheet in a light grey colour and comprised approx 3400m2 of a 32/1000 trapezoidal profile.
Filon over-roofing sheets are avialable in a wide variety of profiles to match most popular profiles if required, or modern trapezoidal profiles can be used to enhance the aesthetics of older buildings.
Download Filon Over-roofing brochure from our BPindex profile or visit our website at www.filon.co.uk for more information.