Plant Room Strip Out Portsmouth

Plant room strip out in Portsmouth and across south east Hampshire

We hear from estates and facilities teams at health buildings, schools and colleges, offices in the centre and along the seafront, and firms on the industrial estates with their own boiler houses. Often the new plant is already ordered and nobody has yet worked out how the old units leave. Our crew breaks that plant up and trucks it away, off Portsea Island where that is the address, and sets the new units down when the M&E contractor is ready for them.

Enquiries come from Portsmouth, Cosham, Portchester, Fareham, Gosport, Havant and Waterlooville, out to Chichester and Petersfield. The built-up part of the city sits on Portsea Island, and only three roads carry a crane onto it, so the arrival hour is settled early. Send photos and we can give a desktop price the same working day. Night, weekend and shutdown work is fine.

What a strip out covers

Generators and switchgear, transformers, air handling units, chillers, boilers, calorifiers, pumps, tanks and pressurisation sets all come apart small enough to pass their route, and leave on our wagons with the redundant pipework. New units are set level. Connections and commissioning are the M&E contractor’s.

What comes out of a Portsmouth plant room

Plant	Where it sits	How it comes out
Transformers, standby generators and switchgear	Energy centres and switchrooms	Corner jacked and turned on rollers under a low gantry
Calorifiers and boilers	Boiler rooms below street level	Burner and casing away, shell parted at its sections
Chillers and dry coolers	Flat roofs and rooftop decks	One pick off the parapet, or reduced to coil blocks
Air handling units	Plant rooms and roof housings	Bolted panels released, fan and coil sections taken separately
Pumps, pressurisation sets, tanks and pipework	Pump rooms, risers and ceiling voids	Pipe cut cold at the joints, pumps lifted off their plinths

The unit we plan around is the one with least room to move, and it is rarely top of the weight schedule. Our plant room strip out service page has the detail.

Get In Touch

Please leave a few details and a member of our plant room strip out team will be in touch to discuss your requirements in more detail.

Where we work in and around Portsmouth

This work runs from the seafront basements out to the mainland estates.

Basement plant under Southsea and the city centre

Boilers and pressurisation sets come up out of basements beneath offices, shops and mixed use blocks, with the floors above still let. See our HVAC page.

Energy centres at Hilsea, Portchester and Havant

Boiler houses and compressor rooms behind the mainland engineering units take the production floor with them, so this plant changes inside a planned shutdown. See our industrial sector page.

Health buildings on the mainland side

Wards and clinics keep their heating and cooling throughout, so the new unit is proven first and the old one broken up after. The estates team fixes our hours. See our healthcare and pharma page.

Teaching buildings and college workshops

Boilers and air handling plant leave school, college and university buildings in the holidays, with the end date set by the day they reopen. See our education page.

Waterfront and city-centre schemes

On refurbishment and conversion work near the water, redundant plant is cleared and new units set on fresh bases around the main contractor. See our construction sector page.

Access and planning for a Portsmouth plant room strip out

Our survey answers these five before a price goes out:

Roof lift or carry-down. A roof lift buys a crane day and a closure. The internal route trades both for lift bookings, floor protection and far more crew hours.
Street space and the crossing the crane takes. Few buildings here have a yard, so the crane works off the highway. Loads bound for Portsea Island cross at Hilsea, the Eastern Road or the M275, and that goes in with the booking. Traffic management and road closure applications go to Portsmouth City Council, or Hampshire County Council beyond the city, and we make them.
What the route stands on. A loaded skate bears on a footprint the size of a brick. Terraces in Southsea and Old Portsmouth hide cellars and pavement vaults, so every slab to the wagon is checked.
Tenants and staff. The building manager agrees our hours, noise limits, a protected route and the goods lift before a date is fixed.
Where each unit breaks. Panel joints and flanges give the split points, and the heaviest piece left settles whether a crane is wanted.

Before anything is lifted

Nothing gets cut until other trades have signed off. Each Portsmouth system is first switched off at source by the M&E contractor, then drained and locked, and we get that in writing. The refrigerant is reclaimed by an F-gas certified engineer. If the asbestos survey done ahead of the refurbishment finds any, a licensed contractor removes it and issues the clearance.

We ask for those dates when we quote and put ours after them. If one slips, the crane and crew move with it, so we hold the booking until all three are confirmed.

Postcodes and areas we cover

We cover every PO postcode and the districts around the city:

Portsmouth: city centre, Old Portsmouth, Southsea, Fratton, Milton, Hilsea, Cosham and Paulsgrove
Around the harbour: Portchester, Fareham, Titchfield, Stubbington, Gosport and Lee-on-the-Solent
East: Waterlooville, Havant, Emsworth and Hayling Island
Wider area: Chichester, Wickham, Petersfield and the Isle of Wight

We strip out plant rooms right across the UK.

Why Portsmouth firms choose Synergy Lifting for plant room strip out

Staying open. Offices, shops, clinics and teaching blocks around Portsmouth keep working while their plant rooms are emptied.
Short windows with a hard end date. Holiday shutdowns and weekend possessions are ordinary work here, and we say at survey where a window is too tight.
Everything from us. We send the crane and the riggers, clear the old units on our wagons and set the new plant down.
Qualified and accredited. CPCS and NPORS operators, lifts planned to BS 7121, 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.

More than plant room strip out

Work that runs alongside a Portsmouth strip out:

How a plant room strip out works

List the plant, say which floor or roof holds it and photograph the way out.
Survey day follows the route from the plant room to the street, Southsea cellars and vaults included, and marks where each unit splits.
We issue the lift plan with a risk assessment and method statement, and fit our shifts round the isolations.
The plant is cut down and taken out along the protected route to the wagon.
We land the new plant, level it and hand it to the M&E contractor.

Common questions

Our building is on Portsea Island and the crane crosses a bridge. Does that move the date?

The crossing sets the hour, not the date. Which bridge and what time are picked when the lift is booked, and the crane is rigged before the streets fill.

The new air handling unit arrives before the old one is out. Where does it wait?

Somewhere agreed at survey: a roof deck, a yard corner or a car park bay under sheeting. The order the two change over in is fixed then.

Can the building stay open while the plant comes out?

Usually, yes. Most of this work happens in buildings that keep running, so the route is protected, the hours are agreed with the building manager, and the heavy moves go at night or over a weekend where that suits everyone. On a heating or cooling system the building cannot lose, the new plant goes in and is proven before the old plant comes out.

Who isolates and drains the plant before you start?

Your M&E contractor, with the isolation, drain down and lock-off signed off in writing before we cut anything. Refrigerant recovery belongs to an F-gas certified engineer and asbestos to a licensed contractor, so we plan our dates around both. We agree at quoting stage who is covering what.

Get a quote for a plant room strip out in Portsmouth

Phone: 023 9388 2296
Email: portsmouth@synergy-lifting.co.uk

Tell us about the plant and where it is, and whether anything new is going in. Photos of how it would leave the building help.

We also provide plant room strip out in Southampton, Bournemouth, Brighton and Reading. See all the plant room strip out locations.