Jonathan Twaites and Andy Clews, Senior Consultants and Authorising Engineers at Water Hygiene Centre discuss water safety improvements during project design and the guidance that comes with this.
Well, not getting it “right first time” due to poor planning can lead to increased risks resulting in expensive and ongoing costs. Conducted at the correct stages of a project design reviews can save you time, money and effort if rectified before they happen.
What is a Water Safety Project Design Review? All projects go through many stages; from concept design to technical design and stages of installation, commissioning and soft landings. Project design reviews will help you gain specialist advice at all stages of the process to highlight potential issues that can be resolved before they become a problem.
Jonathan Twaites at Water Hygiene Centre
The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 (CDM Regulations) identify duty holders as Clients or their representatives, Designers, principals designers, contractors, Contractors, and Workers. For any Construction Project, the Principal Designer and Principal Contractor are responsible for ensuring that others involved in a project have adequate skills/knowledge/experience to deem them competent to carry out the work they are appointed to complete.
Historically there may have been a design/project team that moved from project to project carrying out works in a broadly similar way. This type of operation does provide good consistency in design preference and appointed contractors, but it doesn’t factor highly enough or consider the reason for the new build/project and how the end-users will use the facility, neither does it guarantee co-ordination between different specifiers e.g. the Architect and Mechanical Design Engineer.
Also, do you know that practices developed in the 1970s / 1980s continue even though technical documents have been publicised to prevent such occurrences?
The appointment of a competent Authorised Person for Design, who can advise the client on design compliance of the water systems, including coordination between various professionals, will support compliance and control whilst giving reassurance to the Water Safety Group (WSG).
One of the best sources of guidance for this comes from a British Standard, BS8680 Water Quality – Water Safety Plans – Code of Practice, but what does the guidance say?
BS8680 Section 4.8 states: ‘During design, the responsibility for water safety rests alongside all design health and safety matters under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, resides with the principal designer. The Principal Designer is required to plan, manage, and coordinate the planning and design works; and the principal contractor is required to plan, manage, and coordinate the construction work.’
This leads to the Designers needing input from various experts in the fields included in the project.
Andy Clews at Water Hygiene Centre
Your water safety plan should include information on design control, setting out how your organisation plans to manage projects from small refurbishments to large new builds and this should also include refurbishment projects that have no planned modifications to the existing water systems An impact assessment should be carried out and if the project affects normal operation of the water system a water management plan can be created as part of a Design Review.
The Water Hygiene Centre’s collective of Authorising Engineers (AEWs) has noticed a sharp increase in requests for supporting clients with their new projects (big and small) in the form of a design review. These reviews provide valuable advice, guidance, and feedback on areas the designer may have missed before handing over to the principal contractor.
Some of the feedback our AEWs and their WSGs have been able to identify include:
