As described by Eastleigh Borough Council, the £25 million facility underpins the council’s commitment to promoting a healthy borough. It incorporates a high quality design in keeping with the parkland environment and has high environmental standards. The new building will boast many facilities that are larger than at present, including an eight-lane, 25-metre swimming pool, a larger, versatile learner pool, a 15-badminton court sports hall, a versatile, multi-station gym and a group spinning studio. Polyroof’s Technical Services and contractor Interserve grappled the challenges to find solutions on this vast project that involved insulating and waterproofing over 8,500m2 of flat roof areas.
The Design Process
Following stringent tendering processes, Eastleigh Borough Council appointed AHR as architects and Interserve as the main contractor for the new Fleming Park Leisure Centre project. The Roofline Group, one of the UK’s premier roofing and waterproofing specialists and a Polyroof approved installer, were appointed as the roofing contractor for the works.
Polyroof’s Technical Services worked closely with all parties from an early stage of the design process. From experience, this is the best way to ensure that the installation runs as smoothly as possible, with any potential issues being resolved before the works begin.
Polyroof’s technical services during the design stage included:
• Assisting with CAD production for a range of bespoke details.
• Thermal calculations to determine the amount of insulation required to achieve target U-Value of 0.14 W/m2K.
• Wind uplift calculations to demonstrate suitable resistance of the adhesively-bonded warm roof system to wind uplift.
• Full bespoke specification covering our full set of recommendations that was regularly updated as the design stage progressed.
Following decades of experience using Polyroof’s liquid systems to protect buildings throughout the district, including waterproofing the original Fleming Park Leisure Centre back in the early 1990’s, Eastleigh Council specified the Protec system for the project.
The key reasons why Eastleigh chose Protec are the same reasons that has seen it become one of the fastest growing cold-applied liquid roofing systems in both the new build and refurbishment markets.
A warm roof build-up that can be made waterproof at multiple stages:
For larger projects the Protec system can be made temporarily waterproof at two stages prior to the application of the full waterproofing system. The first stage is upon installation of the sealed, aluminium-faced vapour barrier.The second phase follows the reinforcing of the foil-faced insulation board joints with Protec resin and taping mat. This enables a much more controlled approach to the installation with a greatly reduced chance of rain causing disruption and damage during the works.
Highly flexible membrane:
Regardless of the size of the roof, Protec forms a homegenous membrane, without a single joint or seam and without the need for any expansion joints.
RapidCure technology for quick installation:
The application of Protec as a liquid, through to the curing process where a solid, tough membrane that can be walked over, takes only 30 – 60 minutes. This enables large sections of the roof to be fully completed in a short space of time.
The roof installation was carried out within a planned, phased approach that was synchronised to the wider construction schedule. For the warm roof areas, the first stage was to fill the troughs of the structural metal roof deck with acoustic insulation infills that will dampen external noise within the leisure centre. Next, the crowns of the deck were primed ready to receive the self-adhesive vapour barrier.
The use of a high-performance aluminium vapour barrier not only eliminates the risk of condensation within the roof, but also provides temporary waterproofing protection, which is extremely useful on larger works such as this.
The Polyroof RES Insulation boards, which comprised of a two layer system totalling 170mm to achieve a U-Value of 0.14 W/m2K, were bonded using high-performance PU adhesive to the vapour barrier. Following the wind uplift calculations it was determined that mechanical fixings were not required for this application – making for an extremely rapid installation. As you can probably imagine, fixing through 170mm of insulation into the crowns of the metal deck can be a tricky and time-consuming task.
A key advantage of using a tongue and groove insulation system is that the finished surface of the roof is smooth and level without any unsightly board steps that can also lead to standing water issues. The insulation board joints were sealed using Protec resin with Polymat Taping Mat 450 which, in addition to providing additional strength to the joints, also creates a temporarily waterproof layer.
For the inverted roof sections, Protec was applied directly to the primed concrete/screed surface. The membrane was inspected by Polyroof Technical Services, signed off and then covered with inverted roof components. An interesting fact when using Protec in inverted roof situations is its incredible durability performance – as tested by the BBA, Protec “can provide an effective barrier to the transmission of liquid water and water vapour for the design life of the roof in which it is incorporated”.
Monitoring and Completion
Throughout the duration of the contract, Polyroof Technical Services carried out regular site visits that were reported back to Interserve as part of Polyroof’s free-of-charge contract monitoring service. This enabled the client to keep up-to-date with the progress of the roof installation in detail and also provided peace of mind that the original specification was being closely followed and implemented.
Polyroof worked closely with the Roofline Group during the installation, enabling the challenges were identified and solved in an efficient and coordinated manner – saving the client time and money.
