Plant Room Strip Out Middlesbrough

Overview

Plant room strip out in Middlesbrough and across Teesside

On a mechanical and electrical replacement, the new boilers, chillers or air handling units are usually on order with a delivery date before anyone has looked hard at the old ones. Those still have to come out of a basement with a 900mm door, or off a roof with no crane standing position, while the building stays in use.

We remove the redundant plant, get it off site and set the replacement in position, working around the building rather than closing it. Most of our Teesside work of this kind is in occupied buildings: hospitals and health centres, schools and colleges, offices, retail units, and energy centres serving industrial sites.

What a strip out covers

We break the old plant down, rig it out by whatever route the building allows, load it and take it away, then position the replacement. We work to the M&E contractor’s programme and alongside their people. Pipework, electrical work and commissioning stay with the M&E contractor, and refrigerant goes to an F-gas certified engineer. Who covers each part is agreed at quoting stage.

What we do

What comes out of a Teesside plant room

Plant	Where it usually sits	How it comes out
Boilers and calorifiers	Basements and ground floor plant rooms	Sectioned where access demands it, skated to the lift or the door, craned from the loading point
Chillers and condensers	Roofs, podiums and external compounds	Craned off in one piece where there is a standing position, dismantled and taken through the building where there is not
Air handling units	Roof level and internal plant rooms	Split into sections at the panel joints and rebuilt or removed piece by piece
Pumps, pressurisation and tanks	Basements and risers	Jacked, skated and taken out through the existing opening
Generators and transformers	Energy centres and switchrooms	Low-headroom gantry and skates, often through a single doorway
Redundant pipework and steelwork	Throughout	Cold cut into handleable sections and removed with the plant

The method is set by the item with the worst route out, which is often not the heaviest. On most strip outs that means the chiller on the roof or the boiler in the basement.

Sectors

Where we work in and around Middlesbrough

Around Middlesbrough the plant room work comes from a mix of buildings, and each kind limits how we work in its own way.

Hospitals and healthcare

A hospital cannot go without heating or cooling, so keeping the service running comes before the programme. Usually the new plant is installed and running before we take the old plant out. The estates team sets our access routes, noise limits, infection control rules and working hours.

Schools, colleges and university buildings

This is nearly always holiday work, with a short window and an end date that cannot move. We plan the extraction to finish before the building reopens.

Offices, retail and mixed-use buildings

People are usually working on the floors above and below, the lifts and loading bay are shared, and the landlord has a say on out-of-hours work. Buildings in Middlehaven and the town centre are typical.

Industrial energy centres

Boiler houses and compressor rooms feed a production site, so when the plant room stops, production stops too. We do this work inside the site’s shutdown. See our industrial sector page.

Process and chemical sites

At Wilton, Billingham and Seal Sands we strip out utilities plant under the operator’s permit system, to a shutdown calendar fixed long in advance. See our chemicals sector page.

Food, drink and packaging

Refrigeration plant and process utilities sit inside a hygiene envelope, so the route out has to go around the areas we may not cross. See our food and beverages page.

Planning

Access and planning for a Middlesbrough plant room strip out

What we look at when planning how the plant gets out:

• Over the roof or through the building. These are the two routes and they price very differently. A crane position that reaches the roof plant, with a road closure if needed, is usually the cheaper answer even allowing for the crane. Through the building means lifts, stairwells, corridors, floor protection and a great deal more labour.
• Floor loading on the route. Skates and jacking put a heavy point load onto floors that were designed for people and furniture. Basements, service voids and suspended slabs on the route all get checked before anything moves.
• Working in an occupied building. Before a date is fixed we agree with the building manager when we can work, how loud we can be, which routes get protected, when we have the lift and who tells the tenants.
• Sectioning. Most large plant is designed to be split at panel or flange joints. Knowing where it comes apart, and what that does to the weight of the heaviest piece, decides whether a job needs a crane at all.
• Road closures and lay-down. A crane over a building usually needs part of a road or car park closed. The traffic management and road closure is ours to arrange, with Middlesbrough Council, or with Redcar and Cleveland or Stockton where the site falls in their area.
• Where the old plant goes. Removal and disposal, or recovery for resale where the plant has life left in it. Plant going for resale has to come apart more carefully, so decide early.

Preparation

What has to happen before we lift anything

Other trades have work to finish before we start. When one of these runs late or out of order, the job slips:

• Isolation and drain down. Your M&E contractor owns this: mechanical and electrical isolation with lock-off, and systems drained and vented. They confirm in writing that everything we will cut is dead and empty, and we cut once that sign-off is in our hands.
• Refrigerant recovery. Recovery is the job of an F-gas certified engineer, normally through your refrigeration contractor, and it is finished before we touch the system. We plan our dates around theirs.
• Asbestos. Plant rooms in older Teesside buildings are one of the likeliest places to find it, in pipe lagging, gaskets and flue insulation. A licensed contractor carries out the refurbishment and demolition survey and removes anything it finds, and the clearance certificates are issued before we go into that space.
• Permits. On industrial and process sites the move runs on the operator’s permit to work, including hot work permits for any cutting and confined space clearance where the plant room qualifies as one.
• The replacement’s delivery date. On most projects the new plant arrives before the old plant is fully out, so the plant room has to hold both for a period. If it will not fit both, the programme has to be built around that, so check it at the start.

Coverage

Postcodes and areas we cover

We cover every TS postcode. Plant room work comes from across the area rather than from industrial estates alone:

• Middlesbrough: town centre, Middlehaven, Riverside Park, Cargo Fleet, Skippers Lane and the hospital and college buildings across the town
• Redcar and Cleveland: Wilton, Lackenby, the South Tees site, Redcar town centre and the Guisborough area
• Stockton borough: Stockton town centre, Thornaby, Preston Farm, Teesside Industrial Estate and Eaglescliffe
• North of the river: Billingham, Seal Sands, Haverton Hill and Hartlepool
• Wider Tees Valley: Newton Aycliffe, Aycliffe Business Park, Darlington and the A1(M) corridor

We strip out plant rooms across the UK from the same depot. See all the areas we cover.

Why Synergy

Why Middlesbrough firms choose Synergy Lifting for plant room strip out

• Scope agreed at quoting stage. We remove the old plant and position the new. Pipework, electrical work and commissioning stay with your M&E contractor, refrigerant recovery with an F-gas certified engineer, and asbestos with a licensed contractor. We agree who covers each part before we quote.
• The crane and the internal move from one contractor. Roof plant craned off and basement plant skated out are planned as one sequence, with no second firm taking over between outside and inside.
• We work in live buildings. Hospitals, schools, offices and retail, around access windows, noise limits and the hours the building will accept, with the estates or facilities team involved in the plan from the start.
• Work inside a fixed window. Holiday shutdowns and weekend possessions where the end date does not move. The survey shows whether the window is long enough, and we tell you then.
• Qualified and accredited. CPCS and NPORS operators, lifts planned to BS 7121 by an appointed person, equipment inspected under LOLER and PUWER, SSIP approved, Constructionline Gold Member, certified to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, and members of the Construction Plant-hire Association.

Services

Related services

A strip out often needs some of these as well:

• Crane hire in Middlesbrough
• Lift and shift in Middlesbrough
• Machine movement in Middlesbrough
• Machine removal and disposal
• Machine delivery and installation
• Labour supply and site services
• Traffic management and road closures

Where a project is a like-for-like replacement, the delivery and installation of the new plant is usually the same visit as the removal of the old, which saves a mobilisation and a second road closure.

Process

How a plant room strip out works

1. 01

   Start by letting us know the plant being removed, its replacement, where the plant room is in the building and when the window is. Photographs of the plant room and of the route to the nearest loading point tell us more than a schedule of equipment.

2. 02

   At the survey we work out what sets the price: whether the plant goes over the roof or through the building, and how heavy the largest piece will be once it is sectioned.

3. 03

   We quote against that method, and we say what has to be done by others first, with the dates those need to land on.

4. 04

   The lift plan, method statement and risk assessment follow. Access, protection, out-of-hours working and any road closure are agreed with the building and the local authority.

5. 05

   When the isolations, drain down, refrigerant recovery and any asbestos clearance are signed off, the old plant is sectioned, rigged out and loaded. The replacement goes into position, and your M&E contractor’s people connect and commission it.

FAQs

Common questions