Residential Care Home, Shipley, UK

Q1. Please describe the project.

The project is a residential care home consisting of 66 bedrooms, all bedrooms are provided with en-suites and communal areas include salon, café, and visitor spaces.

The project was completed following the requirements of HTM 04-01 and calculated based on BS EN 806-3.

Q2. How long did it take to design the project in H2X? How long would it have taken using traditional methods?

The project was designed on several occasions, the final iteration was completed within a 2-hour period. H2X allows you to draw and calculate both the hot and cold-water services within the same model, reducing production time.

Typically using other Hydraulic software, I believe this would have taken around 8 hours with workarounds based on the requirement of the project being calculated in accordance with BS EN 806.

Q3. Did H2X increase the quality of design and if so, how?

Because the software allows you to design efficiently, it allows you to complete hydraulic calculations at Stage 3 rather than just Stage 4. This removes the time associated with changes and long hand spreadsheet calculations.

H2X presents the pipework, sizing, flowrate etc.. in a format that can be issued directly to the drawing production team with only minor additional notes.

Q4. What do you like about using H2X in comparison to traditional methods?

In our opinion, H2X is better than other hydraulic software we have used previously. It is much more user-friendly, it is easier to draw pipework, update existing models, and more importantly, calculates the required design standard correctly. Alternative software fails to incorporate the flowrate requirements below 300 loading units.