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Solving Challenges with Floated Decks

11 November 2020
Length:
30 Minutes

Learn how to design effective floated decks with Nurajack systems. Avoid common pitfalls and ensure long-term performance and durability.

Multi-story apartment complex featuring a waterproofed flat roof system, ensuring durability and compliance with building codes.

Featured Speakers

Shane Clarke

General Manager at Nuralite

Email: shane@nuralite.co.nz

LinkedIn Profile

Lewis Olding

General Manager at Nurajack 

Website

LinkedIn Profile

CPD points are given upon completion of the entire webinar.

Full Transcript

[Shane Clarke] All right, just while we're waiting for the room to populate, we have some up-and-coming webinars. We've got one on the 19th of November at 10.30, which will be discussing the principles of passive house design with the amazing Sian Taylor from Team Green Architects. And then the last webinar for the year will be on the 3rd of December, again at 10.30. It'll be a bit of a behind-the-scenes tour of Nuralite, so I'm just going to walk through the facility and show you guys around a bit. All right, looks like there's a few people joined, that's great. Kia ora, tēnā koutou. My name is Shane Clark, General Manager here at Nuralite. Welcome to webinar 13. Hopefully it's lucky for some of us. Today's webinar is around the product Nurajack and how we solve design challenges with floated decks. Now I'm very happy to be here with Lewis Olding, the Product Manager for Nurajack, and behind the scenes doing the magic, we've got Producer Jade, who'll be running all the wonderful things for us. Right, and for those of you who aren't aware, every time we run these webinars, we make a donation of $10 per attendee to a chosen charity, and we're pleased to announce today that our charity is Diabetes New Zealand. So thanks to all of you that have joined us this morning, you've already made the world a better place. I feel really good about it. All right, right, so what we're going to do is we recorded this, no we didn't, we practised this yesterday and we got it down to about 45-50 minutes, even after we eliminated all the dad jokes. So our first poll today, because we wanted to cover six topics, we're not going to be able to, so our first poll today is we're actually going to throw it out to you guys. We want this to be interactive, otherwise you'll be watching my head talk to you for half an hour. So please, we're going to throw up the first poll and out of the six topics, feel free to pick your favourites there. We're going to talk in detail to three of these points, so all means get interactive and fill in the poll, and also throughout the webinar, I do encourage you to fill in the Q&A forms and ask us any questions that come up. Hopefully towards the end there we'll have time for some questions. We're just watching that poll come in now. All right, who are our winners? [Lewis Olding] We've got drainage, edge detailing, and wind uplift. Perfect, all right, cool, excellent. [Shane Clarke] Thanks for that. I'm not sure that's going to go for the order of our presentation, but let's get into it. All right, I'm going to throw you over to Lewis Olding, like I said, product manager for Nuralite. He's been here for a fair while now doing this thing with Nurajacks. So over to you, Lewis. [Lewis Olding] Yeah, thank you, Shane. I've met many before, been doing this for about nine years for Nuralite, just focused on Nurajacks and providing the Nurajacks as a solution for floated decks. Many of you will be familiar with what a Nurajacks looks like. That's one there, and we see it has a self-levelling head, has a rubberised component on the head for tiles, or is available with a joist head for timber decks. It has a very large base. We can support 1,000 kgs of weight on the jack. It distributes that load over a membrane, guaranteed not to damage a sheet-based membrane. Screw adjustable, available in heights from 28 millimetres all the way up to 550 millimetres. If you'd like to know more about the basics of a Nurajack and the Nurajack system, we have two webinars that we've already done available on Nurajack.co.nz/webinars. We can chuck that link up in the chat function there so you guys can see that. So we're not really going to focus in on what the Nurajack, the different features of the Nurajack today. We're going to focus in on those topics. So the first topic was drainage, wasn't it? Yep. Okay, so I'll just flick through the drainage. [Shane Clarke] Sorry, Lewis, just before we kick into that, can we just touch on why we have a Nurajack? Despite an aesthetic advantage, how did it come about? Why do we have them? [Lewis Olding] So in 2006, E2AS1 came about and in that it said that tiles or timber decking needs to be raised and removable above a membrane deck. So that's where the pedestals had already been released by then, of course, but that's where pedestals started gaining a fair bit of traction in the market. So it has a couple of benefits. One, it keeps the the traffic surface above the membrane, so it limits any damage that could be caused to the membrane. It allows water to flow to outlets, and that's what we're going to discuss in a minute. And the reason for that is during the 90s and the great leaky home era that we had here in New Zealand, we saw a lot of the temperature differential between the building and the tile. The tile would heat up and expand and contract at a different rate to the building, causing movement and potential fracture of membrane. Apparently 30% of all leaky homes started with the leaks in the decks, and so you can see why the decision was made to mitigate those problems that they were having, and creating a raised removable traffic surface was really the way to do that. [Shane Clarke] Right. [Lewis Olding] I hope that answers your question. [Shane Clarke] Yeah, no, that's great. Now we run, obviously the first topic people have decided on was drainage, so what we've seen here in this technical drawing is a two-layer Nuralite torch applied system to a concrete balcony. We're using a clamp type outlet here, which I think this is a really important aspect of the build-up. It's a very important area that needs secure fixing, and the clamp type outlet provides this. And typically with a concrete deck we're seeing falls created in the concrete to sort of a central point. Yeah. And you've got your magical equipment above that. [Lewis Olding] So where we see using this sort of outlet is really beneficial, particularly in concrete structures rather than plywood structures. People are doing it definitely with plywood structure, but the ease of buildability in concrete, you can have everything falling to a central point, where if you were to do it on plywood structure, of course creating that plywood fall in multiple directions slows down the building process and the buildability. So we see this mostly on commercial projects with concrete construction. Now Shane, what about outlets with regards to this? Does this need to have an outlet? Sorry, an overflow? [Shane Clarke] Yeah, it's always a good idea to have an additional redundancy there for your water to escape, should this potential, you know, potential for this to block up. There's a couple of ways of doing this. We also have clamp type overflows, which are very similar construction to the detail you see here. Otherwise we can side exit through the likes of scuppers, etc. Things like that. [Lewis Olding] Cool. Well, I hope that covers off that okay. I've got a couple of other drawings here just showing more for a plywood structure, what we find is being probably an easier construction. Yeah, easier to build, that's for sure. [Shane Clarke] With a scupper to a rain head. [Lewis Olding] So do you want to take us through that, Shane? [Shane Clarke] Yeah, so part of the Nuralite system is we actually provide pre-manufactured scuppers out of aluminium or stainless, depending on your needs. And that ties in very nicely to the membrane system. And then again, we have the jacks floating the wear surface above the membrane. [Lewis Olding] So with regards to the installation of the scupper, is that done by the waterproofer or by the builder? What do they have to do? Do they have to check it out a little bit to be able to get it sitting down flush and that sort of thing? [Shane Clarke] Yeah, so it is a good idea to rebate the plywood timber substrate prior to the scupper going in. That way we've got obviously a downhill fall all the way out for the water. [Lewis Olding] Unimpeded. So we can picture in this scenario here, it's a linear fall going from maybe a door threshold out to this, the wall junction and then out through a scupper into the rain head here. Just a couple of things to note with regards to, and we'll touch on this when we go into edge detailing here. I can't highlight it sadly, but we have a 12 millimetre gap that's required around the perimeter of the tile. And that allows water to flow down the vertical surface, whether it be the cladding or what it might be there and allow water to flow directly onto the membrane unimpeded. So that 12 millimetre gap has to be maintained, whether it's with a tile or with a timber deck. And that's detailed on our drawings there. Another thing you'll note is that the base of the jack is actually cut down in our drawings. And it's also shown that it's cut down in real life too. On the base of the jack, we have some cut lines. Not sure if you'll be able to see them very clearly, but they run down here and that enables you to move the head of the jack right up against the edge of the wall and to minimise any cantilevering of the tile if people were to ever step on that very edge there. So it's good to show that in the drawing, so it's followed through by the installers when they're installing. We've got another drawing here showing a gutter, Shane. It's like an internal gutter situation. Yeah, that's it. So what are the benefits of having an internal gutter? Do we need it? [Shane Clarke] Yeah, I mean, we are seeing a lot more designs of late that are actually eliminating the gutter. The gutter's great, of course, because it gets rid of a large volume of water, but it is something that the builder has to construct and that to construct the correct falls into it. So we see less and less of them, but obviously they do have their place and obviously, you know, the change in playing into the internal gutter is not an issue if you've got the Nurajack solution over the top. [Lewis Olding] That's right. So a little trap that we sometimes come across with gutters and Nurajacks is that sometimes you'll see the gutters maybe 100mm in from the parapet. Then that leaves no room to be able to place a Nurajack. A Nurajack needs about 100mm to be able to sit there comfortably, to be honest. But sometimes we see like a 50mm gap and that means we can't move the head of the jack right across the edge of the parapet. That means you potentially get cantilevering of tiles. We get asked quite a bit, can we put Nurajacks into the gutters? This drawing here shows a gutter being about 300mm wide. We can again cut the bases of the jack down both sides of the jack to allow more water flow and we're very happy with that to allow water to flow past the Nurajack and that's certainly acceptable to be able to do that. There's another reason why we go for a wider gutter, Shane? [Shane Clarke] Yeah, so the 300mm has sort of become the industry standard for the minimum width of a gutter. It allows the installer, the actual physical space to instal the membrane and with big hands it becomes a bit of an issue when it's a bit smaller than 300mm. So that's sort of become the industry norm really. [Lewis Olding] Yeah, indeed. Well, let's have a look at one more scenario and that's when going into a drip edge. We've got a really good detail that we've been promoting for quite some time. Can we just digress a little bit into balustrades there, Shane? So are we seeing fuel top fixed balustrades? That was mentioned a lot in the past. [Shane Clarke] Yes, I mean back in the dim dark days when Lewis was talking about the change into the building code with leaky homes, what we didn't see a lot of then was top fixed balcony posts etc which were obviously problematic. So this particular detail here is a really elegant way to solve that potential issue with top fixing. Obviously we're side fixing, we're not even penetrating the membrane in this instance here. So this unifix bracket is quite elegant and also incorporates the gutter. [Lewis Olding] So if you follow the red line, that's our base sheet of membrane and the blue line is the top cap sheet. You see it goes down into just an aluminium angle which acts as a drip edge and then the water will flow into its gutter there. A couple of things to note, we've seen the bracket integrated into the bracket is basically a post for the balustrade, that's all provided by Unix. Something to note here though, you'll see there that we've got the selected handrail post, the toughened glass and see it extends down past the blue line of the membrane. We do that for two reasons. First and foremost to protect against wind uplift. We have the potential of, if you leave that exposed and the wind can get under the system and potentially uplift tiles. Also you need to be able to restrain the tile from wanting to walk off the deck. Remember it's a floated system, there's no glue or grout in the system so a tile could potentially walk off the deck. So we need to have a protection from that happening and so by running the glass right down to in line with the bottom of the membrane there, protects against those things. Some people go well how do we stop people looking up and under the deck and seeing the jacks there and I'd rather people see the jacks. I think they look amazing. I do too, but a simple solution is just to frost the glass here with a bit of frosting tape from a glass supplier. [Shane Clarke] In this instance here, where abouts does your your cleaning spacer sit? Does it sit against the glass or more against the post? [Lewis Olding] Some balustrade suppliers allow a tile cleaning spacer to reach against the to touch the glass. Others will require an aluminium angle to run along between the posts and you can then support that off the glass and to be honest it's probably the more elegant way to do that. We've got another one here there Shane. So this is another drip edge and it's better to actually look at the photo on the side of the hood. So we see here that this is a set of stairs leading up onto membrane deck and how do you restrain those tiles from wanting to walk off the deck again and yet still maintain buildability and those sorts of things? Well if we go back to our drawing here, again showing a drip edge and then affixing through the drip edge with a spacer to support that three or four millimetre aluminium steel just to stop again that tile from wanting to walk off the deck. So whenever you're designing with tiles in mind for floated tile decks, just keep in mind that they need to be restrained on all four edges so they won't walk away from each other and if you're struggling in that area don't hesitate to reach out to us and we'll walk you through some options. [Shane Clarke] Yeah so like as you mentioned the jack itself can support a thousand kilos downwards force but it needs constraining for lateral stability? [Lewis Olding] Yeah and just of the tiles on top, the jacks are very stable themselves just the tiles on top. Of course with a timber deck, less issue, more weight on a timber deck and the timber is holding it holds the whole system together and we can always affix the timber back through to the structure of the building if necessary. [Shane Clarke] You got a cladding tile spacer there? We do. Not much to see but this is what they look like. [Lewis Olding] Yeah so that's a 14 millimetre tile cladding spacer made of a silicon rubber that compresses down to 12 millimetres which is to the building code requirement. Also available in other sizes 5, 10 and 22 millimetres. Excellent. Okay so what was the name? It was drainage. [Shane Clarke] Edge detailing. [Lewis Olding] Well it leads quite nicely into edge detailing. Creating stairs, edge detailing. So again this is the tile cladding spacer. I'll zoom in on that again. So that's how the tile cladding spacer attaches to a tile. We also have a system for timber decks. It's called a cladding clip and what that does is it's screwed to the joists of the timber and it gives you again that 12 millimetre gap so that the deck won't move and block up that 12 millimetre gap. So that's also available. You need to look at that on our website on our brochure. So that's what we're talking about when we talk about a tile cladding spacer. It's a rubber grommet that's adhered to the tile. Two per each tile around the perimeter just to stop them from moving. And in this illustration here you'll see, I don't know if you can see it, but in the bottom left hand corner there's one there. Okay. But the reason why I'm showing that photo isn't for tile cladding spacers. No, no. So how do we get the jacks so close to the edge to provide that support? Well, so traditionally, as I already mentioned, we can cut the base of the jack down and that moves the head right over to the edge. Okay. And it's quite important to show that in your drawings if you can. But what we're showing here is where the biggest challenge that we face with floated tile systems in particular is when the decks aren't square, they're curved, or they have a bit of an unusual shape, or maybe because I've come around a corner and the building's not square, it's going off on an angle. What you end up getting is very small cut tiles. Now the smallest cut of tile that a Nurajack can support is around about 150 millimetres. Okay. And so if we're cutting tiles smaller than that, we have to come up with other solutions. So we've come across this from time to time, especially in larger projects where you've got multiple deck areas. And so the way we do that is in the next slide here. You can see this using an aluminium angle, which is affixed through to the upstand, whether it be a parapet or a wall, and whether it's concrete or timber, with a spacer, whether it be a neoprene spacer or something to allow water to flow past. Then there's an aluminium angle that supports that tile on that edge. That means we can support smaller cut tiles. We only need one jack in that area rather than trying to get all the jacks jiggled around that area. We can support tiles on curves very easily. And so we've got an example of this here. And this project here is not the most good looking of images, but you'll see in this image here we have a drainage point right up against the wall where you normally would put a jack to support a 600 by tile. Instead, we've installed using that technique of an aluminium angle, two aluminium angles. You'll notice there's some rubber shims put on top. That's just to stop any noise between the aluminium and the tile. And then you put the jacks as close as you can to that area. And then that supports the tile in that area. People can walk on that more and it won't cause any issues. So that's quite an important thing just to keep in mind if you've got decks that are of unusual shapes. [Shane Clarke] Right, so you've got a lot of flexibility there with the system. And you mentioned, I mean we're talking about the Nurajack, which is one product, but you've also mentioned many, many accessories. Obviously we carry all those, we've got all those pieces to make the product. [Lewis Olding] Nurajack is the largest supplier of pedestals in the New Zealand market with most specified as well. According to MasterSpec, we're at 64% of specifications as Nurajack. And we're really proud about that, but it comes with that we need to actually have the stock here for the project that comes out. And we have everything from acoustic pads, which we'll talk about in a future webinar about the acoustics, tile cladding spaces. We have the different heads that are available for the jacks and other things that we've worked out over time, like wedges to extend the ability to level. So five degree wedges and so forth, because the head of the jack can of course can self level for 5%, but then an additional wedge that gives us more levelling ability. [Shane Clarke] Lots of solutions there. All right, we're on to our last topic for this morning so far. Oh, we're flying. I know, we're doing great. This was voted, I'm not sure if you guys saw the poll results, but this was by far one of the highest voted for topics. So we've seen that through a lot of questions we get back through here at the Nuralite office. It's very topical. So we'll talk to you about our solutions for wind uplift. [Lewis Olding] Yeah, I think first and foremost, we need to acknowledge that it hasn't really been an issue here in New Zealand. From Nuralite's point of view, we've seen scenarios where people haven't protected from wind uplift under the tile through, as we've already talked about, from a balustrade point of view. And yes, of course, that's going to cause a bit of wind uplift there. But in a traditional style with a parapet, what we see on apartment buildings and that sort of thing in New Zealand, we haven't had a single issue of wind uplift in New Zealand with Nurajacks. However, offshore, there has been. And here's an illustration. This isn't New Zealand, I need to make that very clear. This was from Hurricane Katrina, so in New Orleans. And what we can see in this illustration here is we've seen the wind, this red arrow here has come along and along a rooftop paving type scenario. What's actually happening here is the wind actually comes along the building and travels up the building. And as it comes across this edge, the vortices start happening and that unsettles the pavers and then they start lifting. Now, this was a Category 5 hurricane that caused this. And what we do differently in New Zealand compared to the States, they use a lot of pavers for roof ballast or to protect from UV. And we don't tend to see that so much here in New Zealand. But interestingly, in this project here, the balconies weren't as affected, of course, as the rooftop because the balconies build up with pressure, so no extra wind can blow in through there and are less affected, of course, than what the rooftop would be. And so we're talking in extreme environments, extreme hurricane force winds where this can be an issue. And I suppose the question is, how do we come up with a solution? [Shane Clarke] Yeah, how do we solve this potential issue? I mean, in Auckland, in many cities, the buildings are getting bigger and they're getting taller. We're building more of them. So it goes without saying that at some point we're going to have to solve this potential issue. Yeah, that's right. [Lewis Olding] Well, let's have a look. I've got three solutions that we're going to really focus in on and to help us understand how we can achieve this. The first one is our windproof version one because it was the first system that was released probably about five or six years ago. So the Nurajacks are made in Italy by a company called Eterno Evica. We re-badged them as Nurajack here in New Zealand and we're the exclusive distributor for New Zealand and the can receive a self-tapping threaded screw, a stainless steel screw. And you can see that's what they've done here in this illustration using a washer and a screw to affix the tile down to the top of the jack. And that there, of course, creates a level plane of pavers. There's no need to glue the base of the jack down. Without glueing the base of the jack down, we can achieve a 2,166 newtons of upward force pressure. So that's equivalent of wind speeds of about 212, 220 kilometres an hour. Now, just to give that bit of perspective, we had a truck blow off the harbour bridge here in Auckland at 120 kilometres an hour. So the wind, the protection from wind uplift is huge and far above what we'd expect to receive here in New Zealand, especially in city environments and residential environments we were building residentially. [Shane Clarke] Yeah, so we're not suggesting we put jacks on the harbour bridge, but we do have a version one, which is a rather industrial patina to it. I call it tactile. [Lewis Olding] And this is actually at the Hilton Hotel here in Auckland. The wind engineer decided that there needs to be a bit more protection against wind uplift. Interestingly, just after this was installed, they had that tornado go through and took out the top end of the cloud building. We didn't lose a single tile in any of the buildings around there, especially not this building, which was a direct hit too. So as Shane's mentioned, quite a tactile look. And needless to say, that version one has been improved upon. So I'd like to show you version two. So version two is a clip system that clips the tile down to the top of the jack using these removable clips. You can see that the tile is actually milled 10mm above the base of the tile, and then it's held in place. We've got a little video, which I'm going to click through it because we're going to run out of time otherwise. We can see here that the tiles are milled, as I said, about 10mm above the base of the tile, and then these clips just simply slide into place. Now this system can achieve the same uplift protection as what the previous system. So about 2,166 Newtons, or wind speeds up to 220kmph. And we see here that once they're clipped in place, the whole system is protected. Locked together. Also around the perimeter, we have what's called an easy-stop skirting that protects the edges from wanting to uplift. And that also can act as a termination bar for our membrane. It's a very elegant way of doing it, and it looks good once it's installed. Importantly also, once you've got the system installed, it's still raised and removable. You can slide the clips backwards and forwards to be able to remove the tile as necessary. [Shane Clarke] Yep, and inspect and maintain and clean your drains like you should. [Lewis Olding] Absolutely, yeah. So that's really the windproof version 2. Right. And then finally, we have Altura. Many of you are familiar with Altura, the aluminium frame system. We work very closely with Altura, and they use a system of ours called a fixing plate. [Shane Clarke] Yeah, yeah, sure mate. So the Nuralite fixing plate is a little bit different to the last two versions you've seen. We're actually fixing, we're actually penetrating and fixing through to the structure now with this fixing plate. So the fixing plate is actually pre-manufactured in a factory, in controlled conditions. We're able to instal the membrane skirt and guarantee its waterproofness without having to, any of the effects that we have on site, wind and froth and all that kind of things. So this fixing plate is then fixed to the structure, which then provides, I guess, a stainless steel post, which you're free then to fix whatever you feel like fixing to. It could be a TV aerial, it could be a solar panel array, but in this case here, it is the Altura decking rail. Yeah, so how much uplift support does that individual fixing plate? We can achieve up to 5 kPa per fixing plate. So obviously if you need a higher rating, we just add more plates to the system. Yep, okay. [Lewis Olding] And so you can see here from what Altura are doing, they are putting their aluminium frame system, fixing it to the top of the fixing plate, that's the fixing plate lug there, and then of course having their timber tile or whatever solution on top of that. A very robust solution can also act as a rain screen over top of buildings and things like that. So there's plenty of other applications, and they incorporate the Nurajack as part of the system to be able to support any flexure of that choice. So a really good system, something that we're quite happy to be a part of. I think we're actually going to run out of time here, so I'm just going to run through these couple of projects. You've probably seen Grace Apartments. So Nurajacks are all over Grace Apartments on the balconies, some interesting curves that need to be detailed to. And then on the rooftop was Altura's frame system with the composite decking. And then here's an example of a stair detail, which we'll talk about at a future presentation because we're going to deal with stairs then. And then finally, this is the Heritage Hotel. Heritage Hotel had a leaking rooftop for many years. It's the old farmers building in Auckland here, of course. Nuralite was specified by the architect. We ran the membrane right in under the swimming pool, with a swimming pool sat on top, fibreglass swimming pool sat on top of the Nuralite membrane. Interestingly, extremely high wind zone, hasn't had a single issue with wind uplift, and it's just using a standard tiles on standard Nurajacks. So people are always impressed that they don't realise they're running on a 100 millimetre cavity when they're running and diving in the pool. So a couple of good projects. If you'd like to know more, don't hesitate to reach out to us. [Shane Clarke] Yeah, right. By my count, we've got a couple of minutes, so I'm going to throw some questions. We've had some really good questions come in from the floor, so flick through some more. Even if we don't get a chance to answer all your questions today, we'll send out this webinar, this recording, along with all the Q&A session as a Word document. One question here from an anonymous attendee. Do you have a fire rated jack? [Lewis Olding] We certainly do. It's called like windproof, it's now fireproof. But it is made of a different type of plastic, and it has a fire rating. I can't recall the fire rating off the top of my head, but I can send that detail through if you contact me. [Shane Clarke] Cool. One here. Can you use the Nurajack system on the warm roof, on the Nuralite warm roof? [Lewis Olding] Absolutely. So the warm roof, the insulated board that Nuralite uses, has a higher standard KPA ability, compressive ability, than what other insulated boards are. So we don't even need a cover board, we can just place the Nurajack, and each Nurajack can withstand, in that scenario, 600 kg per jack. [Shane Clarke] Good. A question here that comes back to when we were talking about the scupper detail. This is for me, I think. They're talking about the rebate of the scupper, so they're asking what depth we should rebate it. So we're looking for about a 3mm rebate. That'll allow the membrane to dress nicely over the flange that's welded to the scupper. One here. Can we use Nurajacks on an internal floating floor? [Lewis Olding] We have done, and it works really well, especially, we had a recent project in Sales Street, actually, where they took a six-storey building and made it eight storeys, but the rooftop, of course, had a pitch on it, and so they used Nurajacks and a plywood structure to create a floor, and they were actually really impressed with how stable it was. Once it all went down, it felt like just a solid floor, and so it should. So yeah, we've certainly done that on numerous projects. [Shane Clarke] Excellent. All right, well, we'll leave a couple other questions there. We'll come back to you in the word format. Now, so we just obviously talked about the Nurajacks today, how we keep them off the membrane, and the issues that that did create before we had them separated. Obviously, we've got all the technical analysis and the stock and the know-how to help you solve those design challenges. I think we've got another poll to send out. Hopefully, the instructions are in it. Just rate our presentation today. Should we keep doing these, or should we stick to our day job? Good to get your feedback on that. As I mentioned, we've got some up-and-coming webinars. One next week, the Principles of Passive House Design, and then the last one for the year will be a bit of a run around the Nuralite Warehouse, which will be interesting. And then the last poll before I leave you will be, would you like a follow-up? So actually, a couple of the questions that came in were quite specific around detailing. We'd be more than happy to get back to you. Obviously, it's specific to something that's quite unique, so that's probably your opportunity there. Myself, Lewis, all the team will be in touch, so feel free to fill in that form. All right. Thank you to my panellists, Lewis. Thank you, Producer Jade. Thanks for viewing today, and thanks for your donations, folks, to Diabetes New Zealand. It's been good to see you all, and we'll see you for webinar 14 next week. Thanks very much. [Lewis Olding] Thanks, guys.

FAQs

Why were Nurajacks introduced, and what problems do they solve?
Nurajacks were introduced following the E2AS1 code change in 2006, which required tiles or decking to be raised and removable above membrane decks. This mitigated issues seen during New Zealand’s leaky home era, where temperature differences caused materials to expand at different rates, leading to membrane fractures. Nurajacks help prevent damage by creating a ventilated, raised surface that allows for proper drainage.
How does the Nurajack system support proper drainage on balconies and decks?
Nurajack systems elevate tiles or timber decking above a waterproof membrane, allowing water to freely drain through gaps to outlets or scuppers. For concrete decks, clamp-type outlets are often used; on plywood structures, pre-formed aluminium or stainless steel scuppers are recommended. A 12mm gap around the perimeter of tiles also ensures water flows directly onto the membrane.
What edge detailing considerations are necessary when installing Nurajacks?
Installers should maintain a 12mm gap between tile edges and walls to ensure drainage. Tile cladding spacers or aluminium support angles are used for tile restraint and to handle small or curved cuts. The base of the jack can be trimmed to fit tight areas, and careful planning is needed where gutter placement may conflict with jack positioning.
How does Nurajack address wind uplift, especially in high-wind areas?
Though New Zealand hasn’t experienced wind uplift issues with Nurajacks, international cases (e.g. Hurricane Katrina) have shown potential risks. Nurajack offers windproof systems such as: - Version 1: Stainless steel screw fixation for each tile - Version 2: Clip-based locking system that allows tiles to remain removable - Altura system: Fixing plates anchored to structure, supporting aluminium frames—capable of resisting up to 5kPa of uplift force.
Can Nurajacks be used on warm roofs and internal floors?
Yes. The Nurajack system is compatible with Nuralite warm roofs due to the high compressive strength of the insulation board—no cover board is required, and jacks can handle up to 600kg. Nurajacks have also been successfully used on internal floating floors, particularly when levelling sloped surfaces like rooftop conversions.
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