Nurajack Nuragrid Webinar

[Shane Clarke] Kia ora, tēnā koutou katoa. My name is Shane Clarke and I'm the General Manager here at Nuralite and welcome to webinar number 42. Now this webinar is set for around 30 minutes. Towards the end we'll have time for a bit of a Q&A session so feel free to use that Q&A button at the bottom of the screen there and put your questions in. Don't be too sad if we don't get to your questions, sometimes we get quite a few but what we'll do is we'll populate a transcript that comes out with this recording to everyone who's registered today. This webinar is set for five NZIA CPD points just like all the previous 41 webinars which are available on our education page on the Nuralite website. Anyway today's topic is about the Nurajack Safety Grid System. We're going to talk about the history of raised pedestal systems, we're going to talk about some of the issues that the industry faces with this type of system, and then last but not least we're going to introduce the new Nurajack Safety Grid System and talk about the features and benefits of that. Why I think today's topic is important to you as a designer or specifier is that I think primarily it's around safety. I think the consequences of failure of getting something not quite right with a raised pedestal system would be more than minor. Another reason to tune in today is to talk about things like how we can protect the waterproofing membranes. So this is hopefully an important topic for you today. A bit about us if you don't know already - Nuralite/Nurajack has been promoting this raised pedestal system for nearly 20 years now. So it's not our first rodeo, we've got a few balconies and trafficable surfaces under our belt. Luckily for you I've got some other people on the panel with me today - I've got Lewis Olding who's the Nurajack General Manager, and we'll also have the opportunity to introduce our very own Sam Cam who's relatively new to Nurajack. If there's one key message that you take away today if you forget everything else it's probably just this: Nurajack has a solution for complex pedestrian surfaces. That's probably the key message to take away today. Before we start we'll try and make this as interactive as possible - we're going to run a poll, we'll pop that up now. Feel free to participate and we'll show you the results. Quite keen to know who's in the room and what do you prefer - how do you prefer to make your membrane deck trafficable? [Poll results shown] Excellent we've got a few pedestal system fans here Lewis - good news. Awesome. All right Lewis it's been probably over about 12 months since you and I did a webinar together, it's been a while between drinks. Good opportunity to tell us what's new? Lewis Olding: Yeah well I mean it's been a busy 12 months or so. We've actually launched into Australia which has taken up a lot of our energy and time. And also with the development of the Nuraspike for timber decks that we worked very hard on during COVID and launched that. Well that's now been picked up by one of our suppliers in Italy so we're now exporting that over to Europe for worldwide distribution. So that's been a really intense bit of work in the last 12-18 months. What it's enabled us to do is also bring on Sam Cam as our commercial account manager. Sam I'll let you introduce yourself if you like. Sam Meares: Hi, I'm a tiler, I've been tiling for my adult life so 20 plus years - won't get the details exactly on that - but 12 of those I've been doing pedestal tiling using the Nurajack system which has been a good aspect of my business. Then just last year Lewis approached and asked whether I'd be interested to come on board. Since May I've been the commercial accounts manager here at Nurajack. Part of that has been product development so it's been interesting being able to inject some of the things I would like to see in the industry. This plastic grid system we're talking about today has been a big part of what we've been working on and it's been very interesting. Shane Clarke: Yeah it's been great having someone with that practical experience testing our systems really. So it's nice to know it actually works in the real world. All right we're going to touch on our first topic - before we go forwards and tell you what's happening in the future we're going to go backwards and tell you what happened in the history. Let's go to our first slide and Lewis can you tell us about the history - how did we get to here? Lewis Olding: If we go to the next slide we really have to go back to the 90s. As many in the audience will know, the leaky building syndrome - they estimate that 30% of all leaky buildings start with a leak in the membrane deck. The reason for that is that a lot of shortcuts were taken where people were gluing directly to exterior membranes - glues were incompatible with membranes or that caused re-emulsification because of trapped moisture or differential movement between the timber substrate and the tile that's glued to the top would literally tear at the membrane. In 2005 E2/AS1 was released with the update that it required a pedestal in between the membrane and the tile deck to create a raised removable surface. About that same time we were already promoting Nurajack - Nuralite was already promoting Nurajack at the time. Going forward a little bit further - in 2011 Auckland City Council and a number of other councils around New Zealand made it non-negotiable - they said they would not accept alternative solutions to pedestal systems. We really saw this influx or this real growth in the pedestal market here in New Zealand. That's resulted in a fair lot of pedestals as you all will know around the place. The majority of apartment buildings that have been built in the cities have pedestal systems on their membrane decks. They're all raised and removable so the membrane can be inspected at any time. It's a really good system for that. It's also the most cost-effective way - a 20mm tile on a pedestal is the most cost-effective system for a typical residential balcony. In fact I think we've installed over a million square meters of pedestals for tiles. Further to that Shane, once people started using the pedestals to create timber decks or tile decks they started seeing the benefits of being able to then use them to create level entries over existing concrete or over other surfaces. That's where the development of the Nuraspike happened. We sell probably half of our product into those sorts of projects around the country for timber decks. We supply now through PlaceMakers, Bunnings, Carters, Tile Space, Mitre 10 and other tile stores around the country as well for the domestic market. Shane Clarke: Excellent thanks that sort of touches on the history and why we do what we do and why these things are even invented in the first place. Sam you've been a commercial/residential tiler for 20 years - don't look too bad for 21. First question I've got - what formal qualifications are required to be a commercial tiler these days? Sam Meares: Well it's interesting - there is qualification for tiling but when it comes to pedestal tiling there is no qualification I suppose you could say. Even in the industry they're usually not enforced. Most tilers you see installing pedestals - there's not necessarily formal training that's provided so you do see quite a range of quality when it comes to installations. Another issue I guess that we see in the market is that we do see a range of quality when it comes to the type of pavers that are used. There's no actual standard that is required or rating that is required when it comes to the strength of the pavers. It's fairly widely accepted that a 20mm porcelain can be considered a structural tile. We also see natural stone obviously being installed that might be 40mm thick and then there's concrete solutions that might be 50mm thick. But within the industry it's actually over to the supplier of the paver to say that it is a structural tile and not necessarily provide a rating. So we see a range of problems that result - there's a few missing parts when it comes to the regulation. They've got very tight regulations around things like slip coefficients but not so much around the strength of the tile. Shane Clarke: That's correct yeah. In a residential situation it's probably less of an issue but commercial situation it can cause some challenges. If we go to the next slide I think it illustrates the consequences of failure of a tile. That's an interesting photo - what happened there do you know? Sam Meares: Allegedly it broke. I think someone was on it with a skateboard is that right? We asked Shane to test this tile to destruction and he certainly did that. It takes a lot of effort to break a 600x600 by 20mm tile but Shane was wearing some hard soled shoes really went for it with his heel and it broke. That's to be expected - things have a break point right. But I think Shane you were even surprised that it happened. Shane Clarke: Yes I was. This is one of the challenges that we sometimes face in a commercial environment where things aren't specified maybe to the level that they need for the amount of traffic going over that deck area. Some consideration needs to be given as to what sort of traffic is being put over it. We've had situations where people later will drive a scissor lift over a floated tile deck and it's like well have you considered the point loading. The actual Nurajack itself can withstand 1000 kg each but the tile - a typical 20mm tile is maybe 400-500 kg per square cm which is a lot for a residential deck but in a commercial situation it might be something that needs to be considered as to what the paver strength is. We've got a couple of examples around the country over the years that I've just tucked away in my mind. We had a school in central Auckland where skateboarders would come in and do their tricks and that sort of thing and break tiles. So on a Monday morning when the teachers and children arrived they'd have holes in their podium deck that they'd have to address. We had a church here in Auckland with quite a large podium area and whenever they did a community event, not every time but now and again, people would move big heavy items across and the tiles were oversold by the original supplier - they were actually only 12mm thick and they were breaking all the time causing a 300mm gap to appear in the floor. There's a public space in the South Island when it launched - this is a picture on the right hand side here - it was a stone that was supplied and it had invisible fissures through it. When they launched all of a sudden a number of the stone pavers started breaking with thousands of people walking over it. Then we had another school up here in Auckland where people would break in over the weekend and they found they could vandalize by lifting the pavers, breaking them, lifting them off and then throwing them off the balconies because the pavers weren't secured. So there are some challenges there that the industry does face around paver selection but also how to have the right product in the right place. Shane Clarke: Excellent there some good illustrations here of what can go wrong if it's not done right. Particularly with the stone pavers there if they're a natural product - no one stone paver is going to be equal to the next, probably even within the same batch would that be fair? Sam Meares: Yeah and often times because stone is cut out of a rock - as you cut through you start getting a repetition of the fissures and so might get a truckload of stone on site but then every 16th stone has a fissure through it. Those are challenges. Shane Clarke: There's one other area before we move on that can be a challenge and that's wind uplift. We're purposely going to talk about that later in the webinar but that is something that needs to be considered too. There's been a lot of talk in the industry about wind uplift here in New Zealand but we'll cover that off a little bit later. We're going to next talk about the safety grid system but before that we've got another poll to run. I just want to know what people's experiences are around getting pushback with wind uplift resistance with floated decking services. Cool to share the scoreboard there? Okay good to know. Obviously we've experienced it a little bit because that's where the questions come from. If we just flip to presenter mode I think Sam's just going to show us a piece of the Nurajack Safety Grid System to give it some scale and just describe what we're looking at here Sam. Sam Meares: Yeah so this is our grid. It's not as easy to see perhaps but it's quite rigid. It has a dovetail system so they lock together very quickly and easily. It's a 500 by 500 panel and it's 40mm thick. The grid itself has multiple locations that lock into the head - you can see the corner there and there's one right in the center. So in general the jacks are supporting just the corners of the grid but in certain circumstances where a higher rating is required there are other locations where we can add pedestals and adjust them. Shane Clarke: What's the safety grid made from? Sam Meares: It's a polypropylene and like all our products there's high component of recycled material - with this it's 80% recycled polypropylene. Shane Clarke: How hard is it to install tiles on Nurajack? Is it a similar process to install the safety grid? Sam Meares: That is a good question and was actually quite nice to discover - it's a very simple installation process. In fact anyone with experience in installing tiles directly to pedestals would very quickly pick up the process. In fact we would describe it as faster and easier to install the square plastic grid than it is to install tiles. All the other features of the Nurajack are still available such as the ability to adjust the jack from above the grid and the self-leveling head. Those things like the self-leveling head protect the membrane because you've got no chance of the jack riding up and point loading the membrane. Shane Clarke: We've talked about the history of the raised pedestal systems, how we got there, we've touched on a few of the issues the industry faces, and we've shown what the safety grid looks like. Now we're going to actually introduce the safety grid system and explain how all the components go together. What are we looking at in this picture here? Lewis Olding: I can answer that initially. Obviously that's our grid there and the pedestal underneath that it sits on and interlocks onto. Then you've got a range of surfaces you can put on top - anything from a structural paver, grass is a really awesome option that can be used for. We are seeing natural stone that's not structural being stored over the top of it and it seems that the combined strength of the stone glued to the grid is adequate. Something also that has been cool - you see the bottom there a smaller format tile. So it might be that a structural tile that's smaller in size needs to be used to match something that's existing but the amount of pedestals that are required may not even be possible because the tile's too small. The grid works as a cheaper option to provide a platform to put that smaller format tile over. So there's a few of the areas that can be used. We've got a project actually with some brick tile paving that needs to be floated. If you were to put jacks everywhere it would blow the cost of the project out. But by putting safety grid down they can lay that brick tile in a herringbone pattern and glue it in place so that it's actually got some solid footfall. It's a great solution. Shane Clarke: We've got an action shot in the next slide Sam of an in-progress installation. Sam Meares: Yeah this was a residential home in a nice area in East Auckland. The owner didn't like the idea of tiles over pedestals as many don't - it doesn't sound right, they might have concerns about the fact that the tiles are simply floating. So he asked for a fixed solution and we could offer that. This is a structural tile you see put down here however he opted for it to be glued on top of our grid. What was quite neat is we went through the process of training the tilers to use it - they installed the whole grid everywhere, started laying the tiles, and when the owner walked on that end result before it was glued down he was happy with that finish. The end result of structural tiles over the grid system in this scenario is a very firm good end result. For peace of mind he knows it's got full support underneath as well as there's always the option of gluing it down if that was still required. Shane Clarke: It actually changes the tactile feel of the tile underneath is that correct? Sam Meares: Yeah it did. If you notice this is a very large format tile so it provided a good solution - you can put support everywhere under any format. There is actually one extra feature of this job - if you look on the left there in the photo you can see it's a level entry but the ranch slider had no aluminum at the base of it to contain the tiles. So for the whole project there was no glue down needed except that one location - we were able to provide containment there which wouldn't have been achieved with a normal floating system. A good perk you could say of using the safety grid. Shane Clarke: Let's flip on to our next slide - this is a project in the North Shore of Auckland. You'd see they had existing tiles glued to a concrete substrate running to drainage and their daughter ran out of the house, slipped over on the tiles, cut her head and ended up in Starship hospital. So the father just said look we need to do something about this and they were considering ripping the whole area out. He stumbled across our product - we only just really had launched the safety grid at that time - so he installed it all himself. It's a DIY project actually - installed the safety grid himself then overlaid it with a turf. Because it's raised that means sometimes turf gets extremely hot underfoot but because it's raised and it's on a plastic grid rather than an aluminum or other surface it doesn't heat up so it stays cooler. That means it's more comfortable to walk on. His daughter goes out there now and has a basketball hoop and plays netball on it. They could have run tiles in there as well and mixed and match that surface. He's actually thinking maybe going back and doing that at some point when I spoke to him about it. But a really good use of that system and it saved so much money because he didn't have to remove everything to be able to have lawn. It's actually a level entry lawn surface which is pretty cool. Sam Meares: The next case study is really neat - this is a nice resort that wanted to have the same indoor outdoor feel. They wanted this limestone but it's non-structural so we were able to offer the safety grid and glue the limestone to it. A few advantages of using the grid here - if you think about this this is largely a French lay area which would require a lot of pedestals. They were able to save cost by using the grid. Also the strength of the grid enabled them to use that product. We did some testing for them just to ensure that it would be a good result. Lewis was able to jump up and down on the tiles that we laid on the grid and do a good solid test I would say. From observation after 30 seconds there was no breakages. We did keep going and push it until they broke and what was interesting is even though there was now a crack in the tile you could hardly see it and it wasn't dangerous. That's something you can achieve with the plastic grid system is that extra safety aspect. In some situations you could not afford to have a broken tile - if you think a rooftop bar maybe a fire exit then a solution like this really reduces that risk. Shane Clarke: So we really see a couple of things here - you can choose a unique surface now, you can do French lay pattern which is really unique and we've never really done that on pedestals before. Then if it's a commercial space for dining or even a party or wedding event there's no chance if a tile was to break - if someone dropped a bottle of wine and smashed the paver it's safe. You don't have to worry about blocking off the area, the staff don't have to deal with it, it's safe. So it really ticks all those boxes for this customer. I love that concept of testing the failure - very obvious then isn't it. Next slide shows another example talking more about containment. With floated systems you need to be able to contain the movement and this is something really important to understand as a specifier. If you do not contain the tiles because they're generally not glued down to anything they will walk apart unless they are contained. We use tile spacing spacers or we have a new product called a tile spacing clip that's adjustable. The building code E2/AS1 requires a 12mm gap around the perimeter but there's certain situations like this one illustrated where they weren't allowed to brace off the toughened glass. Sam Meares: That's right and it was something that needed to be addressed perhaps after the fact. By adding simply two rows of grid here and gluing down the perimeter tiles we were able to provide the containment needed. In a couple of situations there was also a cantilever issue on this job where the pedestals weren't able to support the tiles right to the edge. By gluing down the tiles onto the grid it then provided enough cantilever that this was no longer an issue. A good example really of some problems that it can solve even in retrospect. When you think about an emergency egress area you might have a large membrane area heading into a building but you don't want to necessarily add the cost of having the safety grid across the whole area. You need to have the safety grid in the emergency exit egress area - we can bridge on and off the safety grid very easily by using the jacks to support the safety grid and then using the jacks to support the edge of the tile. It's totally fine. In this instance we did glue the tile down to the safety grid but you don't need to have that support - you can loose lay over that safety grid as well which will save a little bit of cost because you don't have to pay for the glue and the labor for the glue. All those options are open. Shane Clarke: Lastly we'll quickly touch on the windproof aspect. I've had a question come up that's kind of in line with what we've seen in the poll about wind uplift - is wind uplift really a thing or is it a bit of an urban myth? In my opinion and I've been heavily involved in floated tile systems for around 16 years now - I only know of four projects that have ever had a wind uplift issue. So it's actually not a major issue for New Zealand. There's definitely issues in hurricane alley and certain places around the globe that experience hurricane force winds but for a typical residential or apartment style deck the way we design them behind balustrades and things they normally don't experience that issue. As I said before we've got over a million square meters of 20mm tiles on Nurajacks and we've only had three issues ourselves and one other competitor has had an issue too. The issues in every case haven't related to just a high wind zone actually - they related to the design of the building. For example one project in Wellington that had this issue was a nine-story building with balconies on the ninth story and balconies on the ground floor. Where do you think the wind uplift issue would be? You'd think it be at the top where it's going to get the most fast wind speed but it wasn't - it was actually on the ground floor. Theoretically the wind was coming down the building and waterfalling at the building and causing the tile uplift. That was overcome simply with our Nurajack Deck windproof system. When we were developing the safety grid and we started playing around with the glues and working with our suppliers, we started doing our testing and saw some incredible results. Sam do you recall what we achieved when we went to Opus to get these tested? Sam Meares: Our initial intention was just to confirm that AR glue could stick to polypropylene - notoriously can't because of the nature of the grid. We were able to get grip into the holes and when we tested with a direct pull test the kPa rating was well above 11 for some of those products. So we're quite confident to provide a kPa rating of 11 for wind uplift if you're gluing down to the grid. Essentially what that means is because you've just joined the entire surface of tiles to the grid it makes the real wind uplift rating the combined weight of that deck which is obviously going to be high. Then even more so if engineers or architects see the need you can put down edge brackets that would contain the deck itself. Quite a cool end result that we weren't expecting from gluing tiles to the grid. Shane Clarke: So whether it's an urban myth or not we can solve it with safety grid and we can solve it with a product that's light too which is often a consideration in areas that people are worried about wind uplift - there might be weight constraints. So it's a good strong light solution basically. I'm conscious of people's time and there are a couple of questions that have come in. One common theme that's coming through Lewis - in your first section you talked about the history and we've talked about how we can't glue tiles anymore than you've come back with a system where we're gluing tiles. Can you clarify the raised removable part of that system? Lewis Olding: After 13 years of telling people that you can't glue down I'm now telling people to glue down - that's not necessarily the case. When we do glue tiles to the safety grid they are removable and we can do it with a cheese wire or a razor wire that plumbers use quite regularly where we cut the glue under the tile and then remove the tile. However if you've got a large podium area you can easily because it's a dovetail jointed system identify areas even cut the tiles in those areas with a lifting eye or something so you can actually access important things like your outlets for inspection. It's just about thinking ahead where you want to have that access regularly. Then if a tile was to break we can actually detail and remove that tile and then reglue to the existing grid very easily. Shane Clarke: Are we able to say what type of glue? There's lots of questions around the type of glue - is it something we have or do we know the type of glue we use? Lewis Olding: We worked really closely with one of our suppliers - they did extensive testing and we've done extensive testing. It is a polyurethane type but it's modified. It is readily available too - we tested about three or four different types of glues. It comes in a 600ml cartridge which is gun applied and relatively simple to apply depending on the application is how much glue you use. If it doesn't really require adhesion for wind uplift you can use a little bit less glue. If you're worried about the structural integrity of the tile or paver you might want to use more glue. It all depends and we can certainly give suggestions around that. Shane Clarke: This sounds like a commercial tiler question - the safety grid comes in 500x500 squares but tiles come in 600x600. How do you work that out? Sam Meares: Essentially the way you want to think about it is you're just creating a raised flat platform. Commonly it is a 600x600 that goes on top but you can get support anywhere on that platform. So really it's just a new substrate that you can work with and you can lay any size format tile on top of that. It's not really an issue so to speak. To be honest it's more the pedestals that are providing the support so if there was an issue for example more weight was going to be placed on those tiles then you can just simply add more pedestals coming up to centers of 250 even smaller if needed. Shane Clarke: Another question here - how low can we go with the safety grid? I guess to ask that question again how low without the safety grid? Lewis Olding: Our smallest pedestal that's adjustable screw adjustable is our Start that can go down to 8mm. So you've got your 40mm grid and your 8mm pedestal as the starting point then whatever paver you have on top of that. If it was a 20mm tile that's going to be around about 70mm I think. You can always bridge off that if you need to go lower in a renovation type scenario but the tile would have to be structural to go down lower than that. Shane Clarke: We are pushing for time and there's still plenty of questions to answer which we'll come back to in the transcript. That was the Nurajack Safety Grid System - hopefully we've outlined the history where we come from why we even do this, highlighted a few of the issues we see around the barrier to enter the market to become a commercial tiler, the type of tiles and stones that get used, and hopefully introduced the solution to most of those issues. I'm just going to run a quick final poll - if you're working on a project at the moment and you'd like a follow-up feel free to put your details in there. We'll know who you are and one of the team will reach out to you. While that's populating I want to let you know about an announcement - hopefully you've subscribed to the Nuralite emails. We've got our own exciting event coming up over the next few days - we're holding the Building Science Summit in New Zealand which is worth 60 NZ CPD points. Nuralite together with some of our friends in the industry are bringing out some industry experts from New Zealand, the States and Canada. They're going to share practical insights and their experience in advanced building envelope solutions. Keep an eye out for that - there's three locations with live events in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. Look forward to seeing you there. That's been us - that's been our webinar on the Nurajack Safety Grid System. Thanks very much for joining me on the panel gentlemen. Lewis & Sam: Thank you, been a privilege. Shane Clarke: Thanks very much to the audience for watching and we'll see you on the next one. Thank you everybody. Kia ora.