The pipe business in the region continues to boom.
It is all too easy to take plumbing in a building for granted. Installing pipe work into a project can be costly, time consuming and extremely intricate and this makes it a subject developers can ignore at their peril.
The market is, like most in the Middle East, best described as booming. Pipeworks managing director Gary Brodie estimates that the pipe work market overall is worth US $1 billion (AED 367million) a year, of which US $250-300 million is MEP, the remainder being oil and gas. Brodie explains: "As long as your quality is right, as long as your technical knowledge is right, as long as the product you are supplying is right you can't fail [in this market], unless you are three times the price of everyone else." He adds that only Shanghai can match the area's thriving market for the sector.
However, despite the huge amount of money involved in the sector, it can still be overlooked as Supertrade manager Wilhelm Niederhauser reports: "The contractors and developers are low-cost driven. The buildings are all made [to look] flashy with brass door handles and marble, but what goes inside the walls nobody is concerned about it."
High-rise piping
Firms in this sector are constantly being posed with new challenges as buildings in the region get higher. The installation pipe work in a tall building is a bigger issue then may be first thought as the pipes must be thicker in order to cope with the pressure rating needed to transport water.
Brodie explains: "As these buildings have got taller there has been a requirement for higher pressure ratings. The taller the building is, the more pressure there will be in the system because of gravity, so the valves and the pipes have a certain thickness. And the pressure rating in these taller buildings is getting higher and higher and that's a challenge."
High-rise buildings also require a lot more valves in the plumbing. "In a typical building you would say for every ten floors there is US $100,000 worth of valves typically," Brodie states. "So the higher the building, the more expensive [the plumbing system is]."
He adds, however, that this is not a problem for the pipe work and valve industry itself. The expense incurred by the developers is going into pipe work companies' pockets and it is a problem left with the designers and contractors.
Because of the need for thicker pipes in high-rise buildings, the industry's trend towards the use of plastics over metal pipes has been restricted. "Plastics pipes are probably never going to take over the entire market from steel. When you talk about high rise buildings, you still need steel pipes. There are still some projects where steel is the only thing that can do the job, but who knows what technology could emerge," Tyco Water marketing manager Khalid Sqheir states.
"At the moment plastics has its own limitations when it comes to high-rise buildings, basically because of the high pressure ratings." However plastic piping is being used for huge projects such as the Palm Jumeirah sewerage collection system, which features a 40km sewer line of high density polyethylene pipes.
The general size of pipe work appears to be increasing in the region due to the boom in district cooling and the continuing flow of high-rise buildings being built.
Brodie reveals: "Typical piping inside the building, the bathroom, plumbing piping is always going to be the same, but because the buildings are taller its common sense. If you are trying to supply water to 50 people in an apartment building you don't need a big pipe. But if you are trying to supply to 500 apartments in a big building then you need a lot of water and bigger pipes."
Pipe work standards
Health considerations must be accounted for when choosing the material for pipes, especially when they carry drinking water to a home.
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