ccording to the latest construction industry data, 60% of projects were delivered to clients late in the year to December 2015. The UK Industry Performance Report, compiled by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; Constructing Excellence; Glenigan; and the CITB, also reported that project delays in UK construction worsened in the same period with only 40% of projects overall delivered on time. On budget completions also failed to improve – slightly more than two thirds (69%) of overall projects were delivered on cost or better.
Against this backdrop, it’s clear that MMC, which offers faster lead times and cost savings, provides an effective way forward for the design and construction of buildings in the UK. Indeed, insistence on selecting front-end optimal build solutions is a part of the preconstruction strategy for contractors, providing a change to what the construction industry had traditionally accepted as the norm and delivering efficiencies, driving out waste and most importantly, adding value for all involved in the supply chain, especially end-users.
In MMC, systems are delivered to site pre-assembled and pre-tested with guaranteed built-in quality and reduced installation times. The approach allows contractors to undertake smart engineering and coordination at the front end of a project, avoiding the problems often associated with building fitted together components on a construction site, leaving behind a legacy of a quality installation that can be easily maintained throughout its whole life cycle.
Companies like ISO-CHEMIE, which provides a wide variety of tape solutions for the high performance sealing of windows, doors, construction joint gaps and facades, are actively working with other building product suppliers and house-builders to develop integrated solutions that meet the demands of off-site construction using MMC and deliver even more added value to the supply chain.
These products can be used both in the factory to assist and form an integral part of the MMC component and/or on site while jointing the components together. They are used in all forms of MMC: from timber (in all its varieties) through to lightweight steel and concrete to even volumetric and pod constructions. The use of modern sealing technology has many advantages for the construction industry and fills a number of the failing gaps recently highlighted by various reports and studies.
Like a lot of MMC techniques, the use of tapes for sealing and assembling construction joints increases the speed of construction. The various studies looking at introducing the ‘lean’ principals to construction highlighted problems with traditional wet sealants, as they slow down the process and cannot be used in adverse weather conditions. This is not the case with many sealing tapes that can be applied even in wet conditions and can create an instant seal allowing the flow of work to continue without any time delays.
In addition, they also meet the requirements highlighted in the Zero Carbon Hub study that looked at why buildings performed less well at the ‘as-built’ stage compared to the ‘as-designed’ one. They advised you should only use materials which supplied an ‘as-built’ performance guarantee, which most preformed sealing tapes do due to their fixed size and tested performance.
Furthermore, improving speed and offering the options of both factory and/or ‘at site’ applications, products offered by suppliers, such as ISO-CHEMIE, meet high demanding quality specifications, generally well above those necessary to comply with the minimum Building Regulations throughout the UK. They also take their environmental responsibility very seriously. Examples of which are the Passivhaus Institute (PHI) certificates awarded to a number of the products, the various EN BS DIN standards, BBA and even EMICode certificates as well as a full Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).
For more information on how to achieve advanced solutions on any construction joint in relation to weathertight, airtight thermal bridging, acoustic reduction, differential movement or vapour control in your MMC process, ISO-CHEMIE has a national team of technical advisers, as well as a CPD programme, to help.
