RA Dalton Success Stories

As with the nature of where most off mains properties are located there are often issues we can come across in regards to access, sometimes they are up farm tracks that are suitable for only farm vehicles and 4x4s and other times the access is so narrow is it debateable whether we would even get our vans in.

Earlier this year, in a rather chilly February our team of installation engineers were required to install a new package treatment plant where access was limited, thankfully our Vans and small 4 wheel vehicles were able to access the property.

In the first instance our contracts manager Ian Murray attended site to check the compliance of the existing septic tank however unfortunately as the tank directly discharged to a watercourse this was not compliant with the 2020 General Binding Rules. We therefore recommended that this was replaced with a package sewage treatment plant installed at the end of the garden with the inlet extended and diverted around the existing tank and new outfall to the stream.

Due to the inlet depth the best system to install was a Kingspan Klargester BioTec 1, 1.5m invert packager sewage treatment plant, Ian diligently checked the topographical survey and confirmed that this system would be suitable however it was highly likely that we would encounter solid rock and a breaker would be required.

Prior to our start on site we required a bit of work to be carried out by the customer/ other contractors, the installation location was surrounded by a garden wall which a section approx. 2.5m wide needed to be removed to allow for our machinery and tank to access.

Access limitations were always going to slow down our works as even routine elements of the installation took longer, for example even a 4 wheeler concrete wagon could not get close to the property and all the concrete needed to be tracked from the end of the lane up to the installation location, this in itself easily tripled the amount of time it took to carry this out.

When our contracts managers go to look at the job they don’t just look at surface value, attention is the details, we always try our upmost to be proactive and have contingencies in place. For the machinery to access over the flags and into the garden area we provided a road plate and a number of plywood sheets just to take pressure off when the 5 ton Excavator is tracking over.

When Ian first looked at the job there was a possibility of using a local car park for delivery of materials and storage of spoil for a grab wagon to collect however this was not possible and the length of time it would take to gain the correct permissions to do this was not worth it in the long run. Therefore as a backup we utilised 8 yard skips that were delivered on a small wagon, the tank was delivered on our own pickup and all materials were tracked in by dumper/ excavator.

Unfortunately the one thing we couldn’t plan against was the weather! A combination of snow, rain and more rain made the mud unavoidable and although all measures were made to keep the site as tidy as possible there was no way of leaving the site in anything other than a machine finish.