Although a 150-foot yacht is big, the spaces inside to do repair or replacement work are still very small. That’s exactly why the crew at Engineered Yacht Solutions in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, used Viega for a recent motor-yacht job, as well as many others.
EYS worked on the yacht, around 150 feet in length, removing all the aluminum bilge suction lines and replacing them with Viega SeaPress instead. The ability to press fittings, and to do it quickly, meant the small crew doing the work was done with the Viega portion in just a few days.
“There were some sections of bilge-suction piping that were compromised with holes and degraded material,” said Aksel King, Vice President of EYS. “The vessel was probably 10 years old, and the material we cut out was a 60-series-grade aluminum, which is not the best for seawater or for the way they’d constructed the boat. SeaPress is a big upgrade for the vessel, a better material, and it made the job easier to do, too.”
Because there was a tight time frame to get the repairs done, coupled with the fact that cold press technology is safer, particularly in tight quarters, EYS turned to Viega. Plus, King and EYS President Thomas McGowan both have a history of using Viega fittings long before they started the company together three years ago.
“If I’m working on piping on a boat, I’m concerned about putting a bunch of welding equipment inside a million-dollar motor yacht!” King said. “When you start striking an arc, it’s fire. You’re going to have to have a fire watch and have a marine chemist come and make sure the area is safe to work in. I don’t have to worry about that with Viega.
“And at the end of the day, sometimes you don’t even have the ability to weld inside of a boat because of the other work going on, or time restraints and physical location. We just go in and cut and press.”
On the recent vessel, 54mm SeaPress fittings were used for about 40 feet of pipe run. King said they used a variety of fittings, including tees and 45-degree elbows, and connected to the bilge suction manifold.
King and McGowan have been using Viega for about a decade. They were introduced to the company when the suppliers they had been working with for a local repair suggested Viega as an option. They started with ProPress and later added SeaPress to their repertoire. Much of the product they now install is SeaPress, or ProPress Stainless 316, occasionally utilizing ProPress Copper for chilled water.
With Viega’s recent launch of MegaPress CuNi, EYS now has more options to choose from, depending on the vessel they’re working on. Both CuNi and SeaPress are 90/10 copper nickel fittings; but SeaPress is for CTS tube, while CuNi is for IPS pipe.
“Being able to remove and reinstall pipe without having to do hot work, and 99 percent of the time in very tight quarters, is great,” King said. “We use a lot of Viega stainless steel and copper nickel fittings.”
Thankfully for EYS, many customers in Florida already know about Viega and its products, so they understand why it’s a good choice for their vessels. EYS does almost anything that pertains to repair, modification or upgrading on vessels, including plumbing, fiberglass work, stainless steel work, pipe bending, lathing, grinding, polishing and more. Their average vessel is about 150 feet, though some are as large as 250 or 300 feet in size.
“I like Viega products. They’re easy to use,” King said. “In all reality, the best way to sell it is to say that it’s simply the best option.”
