Jones and Woolman UK has worked on a number of new-build data centre projects in the Slough area. Providing steel extensions, service entries through vertical cladding, and service-risers, we’ve worked closely with the likes of Kaicer and Laing O’Rourke to support Equinix, the company connecting leading businesses within the world’s most connected data centres around the world. Works follow on from a longstanding relationship with the likes of Kaicer through past projects under the Lakesmere name, primarily across projects in the energy and power sector.
Jones and Woolman UK’s selection is thanks to a track record of tackling challenging projects and working closely with Kaicer’s office, architects, and technical experts on projects such as these. Our longstanding expertise in performing under extreme conditions, such as in temperature-sensitive environments and where our prefabricated approach can make all the difference, makes the choice to use Jones and Woolman UK in technically demanding projects a simple one.
Avoiding delays with a forward-thinking planned approach
Delays caused during development projects are amongst the biggest contributors to spiralling labour costs and missing project deadlines. While technical expertise can help with handling abrupt project complications, the Jones and Woolman UK approach is always to pre-emptively overcome potential challenges and ensure the smooth completion of works. This becomes even more important in the case of works performed in tightly-knitted and compact environments, where it’s entirely possible for complications and delays to quickly escalate to a point of an absolute standstill on works.
In the particular case of data centres, it is commonplace for projects to face the complications of limited access to areas of work, such as challenging access to service entries. With a vast amount of work requiring access under walkways, behind pipework, and other areas of restricted access, the need to pre-plan and mitigate access challenges is paramount. Across all of the data centre projects, Jones and Woolman UK accomplishes this via early involvement in main client and contractor discussions, the sharing of technical advice, and ultimately more of a project partnership approach to services.
Neil Boylan, contracts director at Jones and Woolman UK explained: “At design, we’ll advise on how we’d like the cables, or service penetrations to come through the cladding. We’ll also advise on access and at what stage we need to be implementing our system for it to proceed before other services go in. We need to be in at that early stage, watching progress, and advising on when our products can be applied to avoid difficulties.”
Other challenges for the projects included the need to maintain a controlled atmosphere within the building due to the utilisation of computers and technology in the data centres. This required Jones and Woolman UK to ensure that the data centres could be kept at core temperatures to ensure the end-product would support the operations of the centre going forward.
For further information on Jones and Woolman UK’s services and how we can help with technically demanding projects, please get in touch with a member of our customer service team today.
