“I’ll never go back to threading pipe if I don’t have to!”
That’s what Preston Turk, Project Manager for LD Mechanical in Montrose, Colorado, said after using Viega MegaPress on a recent job.
LD Mechanical was brought in to work on a MUD (Mixed Use Development) project in the mountain town of Telluride, Colorado. With both commercial and residential spaces, the building contains a large mechanical room with two boilers and three large tanks for radiant heating. The contractors used “a ton of Viega product” in construction.
Pressing was a first for LD Mechanical. Turk said they started to look at large-diameter jobs they were working on and what others in the market were doing and decided to check out Viega for this project.
“The biggest push for this was labor,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of boiler rooms throughout the area, a lot in welded steel, and welders are expensive. There’s hardly a labor force out there, and we have trouble finding more guys. When we looked at press, we wondered how many man-hours we could save.
“The sheer speed of cutting, minimal prep time, and then you press it – versus welding or soldering – it just didn’t even compare. It allows us to keep the manpower to a minimum and maximize the production. [Viega’s competitors] tried to get us to use their products, but Viega just felt better to me.”
The MUD project has about 5,000 feet of copper pipe, so Turk said several thousand ProPress fittings were used to connect it all. He called the mechanical room “nine sizes too small to begin with,” which also made pressing appealing because it can be done in tight quarters.
There is an underground parking garage for the building, and then a private art school uses a portion of the building. The other space is condos, which have in-floor radiant heat run with copper tubing and Viega fittings.
The main lines in the building are 4” in size, then branch down to 2½”, 2” and 1½” pipes.
MegaPressG fittings on carbon steel pipe supply the ranges and other gas needs in the condos. It was MegaPress that really sold Turk on pressing.
“You prep the pipe, press and walk away. Threaded pipe is not that easy – we fight leaks and defective parts – and the pipe is soft,” he said. “It’s nice to put together a system and walk away from it and know it’s good.”
