Collaboration
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This award recognises and celebrates examples of collaborative working that have delivered outstanding outcomes on single or multiple new-build, refurbishment, design or maintenance projects. It rewards the use of integrated processes that deliver outstanding measured building performance in terms of user satisfaction and comfort, energy and carbon, health and wellbeing, and whole-life value.
Winner: Echo Court – FairHeat
‘Collaboration is about disrupting the normal way of doing things and changing how things are behaving. FairHeat and the other contributing teams have shown the judges that they have found the true spirit of collaboration, with the client and with the contractor.’
The Echo Court heat network development project – a collaboration between independent heat specialist consultancy FairHeat, the Hill design and surveying group, and engineers from Imex – has been exceptional.
Building an efficient heat network for a residential scheme as large as Echo Court (116 new apartments) is no easy task, but FairHeat rose to the challenge with a truly collaborative approach that capitalised on the strengths of every party involved.
None of this could have been achieved without the high levels of team spirit and perseverance that have been demonstrated by all parties. FairHeat’s industry-leading practices and design processes, combined with Imex’s technical expertise and the rigorous goal-setting process put forward by Origin and the Hill Group, have led to a heat network that now operates within all nationwide performance and heat-loss requirements – a rare achievement in the UK.
All parties showed willingness to try new strategies and processes even while under significant time and budgetary pressures, and quality monitoring was rigorously maintained throughout the design and construction processes.
FairHeat established itself early on as the driving force behind the operation, using its own commissioning, monitoring and handover tools to track progress and provide feedback. And through remote monitoring, Origin Housing was able to maintain full control over how it wanted the scheme to perform.
This method of collaboration has been so successful that the Imex team has continued to use the methods introduced to it by FairHeat, even adopting the rigorous dwelling commission process into its own standard approach.
FairHeat has led a high-calibre building performance collaboration that has resulted in Echo Court residents saving around £160 per year at 2021 prices as well as reducing the scheme’s carbon emissions by 72 tonnes per year – an excellent achievement all around.