Lanes gets Duerr’s out of a jam

Lanes for Drains has helped jam manufacturer Duerr’s out of a sticky situation. The company had thought it was facing a 3-month shutdown to fix a damaged drain at its Manchester factory, but Lanes was able to reline the 150mm diameter process pipe in just 48 hours.

Duerr’s, which has been making jam since 1881, had discovered the damaged pipe when a manhole was moved to accommodate a new jar-cooling machine.

“The machine was installed during the Christmas shutdown. The trouble was, the pipe ran directly under it,” explains Roger Hinchcliffe, Duerr’s project engineer. “But with the limited time slot we had, we could not attempt to repair the pipe as well.”

Duerr’s was given differing advice by contractors about possible methods of repair and timescales, until Roger called in Lanes and another national contractor. In the end, only Lanes was prepared to take on the project.

Simon Bull, reline manager, explains:

“We looked at an existing survey and realised that the situation was quite bad. The clay pipe was so badly affected that the invert (bottom section) had disintegrated altogether and it was full of debris. But we were confident that we could tackle the problem — and that we could do it in just one weekend shutdown.”

Duerr’s needed to get the work done as soon as possible, before the factory’s peak production period began, so Simon had to juggle his resources to make a reline crew available for the following weekend.

The camera and jetting teams went in to Duerr’s factory at 3am on the Saturday morning. Says Simon: “We started with a CCTV survey, but the camera would not move forwards through the pipe because of the build up of debris under its wheels. Instead it had to be pulled backwards to show the full extent of the damage.

“Then it took a marathon 5-hours to remove all the silt and fragments before the pipe was fit for relining,” he adds.

The reline crew then worked through to the following morning to install a felt liner impregnated with a special vinylester resin — Derakane — chosen especially for its high resistance to chemicals and heat.

Once the liner had been cured in place, using water heated to temperature and left in situ for the required length of time, the cutting crew opened up the manhole access points and a final survey revealed the new look pipeline which was clean, round and smooth — a complete contrast to the broken and silted up drain of the earlier survey.

For Roger at Duerr’s, the weekend had its nailbiting moments: “If anything had gone wrong and we had had to excavate, the implications for our production would have been unthinkable, so we only breathed again once the reline had been declared a success.

“We need not have worried because Lanes did exactly what they said they would, when they said they would do it. The operations guys were very professional and efficient and, because of the company’s size and resources, even when there was a problem with a piece of equipment, replacement kit was mobilised immediately so that everything was completed in time for production to start up again on Monday morning.

“I was very impressed,” he concludes.

Thanks to Lanes, Duerr’s now has a ‘new’ process pipe to complement its new machine. And, on the back of that successful reline, the company has asked Lanes to carry out a full clean and survey of the site’s drainage system.

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