MegaPress fittings saved the day for Holbrook Service in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When their crew was called to a bank in the city for work on an aging hot-and-chilled-water system, Janson Fish and Russell Piano, with Holbrook, ultimately chose Viega for the repairs.
They found tight quarters in the basement of the bank, with carbon steel pipe in sizes 2 1⁄2” and 3”. Bank owners wanted to reengineer the hot-and-chilled-water systems for an optimal energy upgrade and for modernization purposes. This included changing from one pump to two, replacing hot-and-chilled-water coils as well as a chiller, and adding more components that required an extensive redesign of the piping systems to make things more efficient.
Instead of threading or welding, Fish, Holbrook’s Division Manager for Colorado, and Piano, Service Manager for southern Colorado, gave Viega fittings a try.
“I had been reading about Viega, doing some research for this job. I went in originally bidding to thread or weld and subcontract some of the work out, but with Viega we could take it all in house. That increased our profitability and also made it much faster,” said Fish.
They used couplers, reducers, tees and flange fittings. Instead of having to redo whole sections of piping for design changes, the Holbrook crew used Viega fittings for a plug-and-play experience.
“Without Viega, you’d be looking at probably 80 hours instead of 20 to re-pipe a bank of chilled water coils,” Fish said. “If we’d done this another way, we would have needed a welder and a fire permit. We would have had to work late or early hours. This product really saved us a lot on labor!”
Piano added that because of all the piping systems that had to be manipulated, the ability to cut and press quickly with Viega was extra attractive.
“We looked at different options, threading or welding 3” pipe, but Viega was the way to go. It greatly reduced the manpower needed,” Piano said.
Work started in September and was a rush job with colder weather knocking at the door. Holbrook was able to get the heat on at least a week earlier than expected.
“We’ve discovered that we can expand and do so much more, thanks to Viega,” Fish said. “We’re bidding three more boiler replacements with MegaPress. We can offer solutions – emergency repairs and other fixes – to our customers now that we couldn’t so easily before.”
