In the hospitality industry, the last thing you want to do to a hotel full of guests is shut off the water. But when you have no choice, you want that inconvenience to be over as quickly as possible.
When you’re the contractor called in for this no-time-to-waste job, you’ve got to know that all your ducks are in a row so there are no surprises. This means everything from prefabricating piping runs to scouting ahead of time for anything additional that might be needed, and it includes knowing that the products you’re using are reliable.
That’s why GreenTeam in Florida uses ProPress when they’re called in to make quick repairs. Through the years, members of GreenTeam have become experts at doing overnight shutdowns for repairs. Owner James Terry and his team have it down to a science so that building owners and managers are happy, and customers are inconvenienced as little as possible.
GreenTeam recently did an overnight series of repairs on a hotel at the Miami Airport. Terry said, “It would not have been possible without our hard-working crews, amazing vendors and manufacturing partners like Viega LLC and RIDGID tools.”
This particular shutdown was an interesting one, because the hotel had five separate locations in the building that needed repairs. A team of six plumbers had nine hours to complete the job. The water was shut off at 9 p.m. and back on by 6 a.m.
“They’d probably seen these leaks for a while and budgeted for it, waited and waited, because from a hotel perspective, the last thing you want to do is shut off the water or the power!” Terry said. “And at the end of the day, people just want things done fast.
“So for us, having something consistent is important, and that’s ProPress. We need consistency on how long a job is going to take, so that we can eliminate the variables. When it comes to service plumbing, you’re not just opening up a ceiling. Sometimes you’re cutting floors and walls to do these repairs, so then someone needs to cut the concrete and reframe and re-drywall. There are so many moving parts. By creating this ‘invariable’ process with ProPress, it’s something we can control.”
A job like this hotel repair requires a lot of preplanning. Terry and his crew checked out the site multiple times in advance. Different locations needed different sized and type fittings. They prefabbed a bit of each station’s needs. That way when the time came to do the on-site work, the plumbers could take in the prefabricated section and get it in place with some additional fittings more quickly.
“When it comes to retrofit, prep is everything,” Terry said. “You’ve always got a bunch of critical infrastructure in a ceiling, with 900 different cables and pipes to everything. Again, more variables, so you don’t have a lot of room to move around and no room for error.”
There was a plumber and an assistant at each of the five repair locations in the hotel. There was also a manager who went from station to station to make sure everyone had what they needed. At one point, the crew had to make a quick run to Lehman Pipe and Supply for an additional part, but repairs went smoothly and the crew left the building as day was breaking.
“In these situations, failure is not an option. It’s just not,” Terry said. “We double-check on everything beforehand and stage things at our warehouse so we’re ready. These types of repairs have become a regular thing for us, so my crews have gotten really good at it.”
