Pre-Construction Plans
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Pre-Construction Building plans
Understanding the layout of pipes and service cables is crucial when starting a building project in the UK. This knowledge helps prevent costly mistakes and delays that can arise from unanticipated damage to existing utilities.
Additionally, being aware of these utilities can lead to better planning and design decisions, making your project more efficient and less likely to run into complications further down the line. Overall, knowing where pipes and service cables run can save time and money, plus ensure a smoother building process.
Architects and pre-construction plans
Your Architect will draw up some great plans for the extension or renovation you would like. However, there will be some very important information missing. Plan and Elevation drawings, while usually showing manhole positions, rarely show drain runs or routes that your existing service pipes take.
The reason for this is that they are usually not laid in a direct A-to-B route, because all sorts of obstructions can prevent the simplest route from being possible.
Excavations and services
Before any digging or construction begins, it’s very sensible to carry out thorough surveys to identify the exact positions of water, gas, electricity, and telecommunications lines. Not only does this information guide the construction process, but it also ensures compliance with safety regulations, protecting workers and residents from potential hazards.
Build Doctor & pre-construction
Build Doctor can trace and track all existing services, marking them on the drawings before work begins. Builders will be delighted with this information because the delays caused by digging through a drain line, or breaking a water or gas pipe, can be huge.
The average saving for the homeowner, on having all existing services mapped out in advance, is over £1,500
There are two choices in avoiding this problem.
A clause can be inserted into the contract that the builder must take responsibility for locating services before commencement.
The builder will charge for this.
How do we locate underground services
Build Doctor will contact all relevant suppliers for location maps and carry out a separate on-site survey, to calculate the location of services and accuracy of any maps or plans supplied.
There are sometimes occasions where the service operative has used their own “initiative” to divert a service, possibly under a garden wall or to avoid large lumps of concrete hiding under a run of fencing posts. In situations like this, it is occasionally impossible to fully identify the accurate path of a service, and educated guesswork has to be employed.
While there is no absolute guaranteed solution to the problem of underground service location, our knowledge of service systems and the usual on-site practices allows for educated assumptions. These can be used to highlight to your builder any areas that need further investigation as groundworks commence to avoid costly damage.
