Galvanised steel tanks in Birmingham

Why store above ground in a city

Below ground in Birmingham is crowded with services, foundations and old culverts, and digging out made ground can bring disposal costs of its own. A tank standing on a slab sidesteps most of that. It goes up in days, stays in view for inspection, and the panels unbolt if the site is ever reorganised.

Demand here is industrial and municipal rather than agricultural.

• Process and recycled water at manufacturing plants in Tyseley, Aston and the Tame valley
• Wash-down water at bus, waste and plant-hire depots
• Rainwater harvested from big distribution and warehouse roofs
• Irrigation for golf courses, sports grounds and nurseries on the city's edge

From slab to service

The slab or engineered pad is poured by your contractor, sized for the tank when full. Ahead of any steel arriving we level-check the pad and mark out the ring, because a bolted shell on an uneven pad won't sit true.

Galvanised sections are bolted course upon course until the shell reaches its designed height. Inside it hangs a fitted liner, and that liner, not the steel, keeps the water in, so nothing stored ever reaches a bolt hole. Inlets, outlets, overflows and level indication pass through the liner and are sealed there.

Last comes a fill in stages, with the tank checked under load before it goes into service.

Fitting into a working site

Most of these tanks go onto sites that stay open around us: yards with vehicle movements, factories running shifts, sports grounds with fixtures. Panels arrive palletised and the assembly area can be fenced off, so the rest of the site keeps working while the tank goes up.

Birmingham's older industrial estates in Hay Mills and Witton were laid out long before anyone planned for a tank, so access for a delivery lorry and a small telehandler is often the first thing we check on a site visit.

Harvesting from a big Birmingham roof

Warehouses along the M6 and in the Tame valley shed a great deal of clean water from their roofs. Piped into a lined steel tank, that water can serve vehicle washing, toilet flushing or landscape watering, so the site draws less from the mains. The plumbing engineer sets the uses and the treatment; we put up and commission the store.