After conducting a fix for a burst pipe on the hot water line at the Arts Centre Melbourne, it was assessed that the internal pipe corrosion was worse than expected. Arts Centre asked us to immediately conduct sampling to assess the remaining hot water lines throughout the building.
The Australian Ballet School were in-house with the Australian Opera to follow. They couldn’t have any interruptions to the supply of hot water during the day or night, or the Arts Centre ran the risk of damages costs due to having no amenities.
The Arts centre has a series of 6 clarifiers throughout the building, which work simultaneously to heat the water as it circulates the building. We weren’t sure if the system would hold up with one clarifier down for the samples to be taken until we conducted a midnight test.
We engaged and worked with a liquid nitrogen freezing company to strategically shut down the clarifiers at night. It takes the clarifiers approximately 1 day to cool down before we could freeze the lines, take the pipe sample, re-connect the pipe and move to the next unit.
All 6 samples were successfully taken from the clarifier system of copper pipe ranging from 32mm – 100mm without any interruption to the water supply during the 5 day period the samples were taken.
