Support Pavers with Nuragrid

"[Shane Clarke] My name is Shane Clarke. I'm the General Manager here at Nuralite and welcome to webinar number 39. This webinar is qualifies for 5 NZIA today CPD points. So at the end of the webinar there is a bit of a survey there if you want those 5 CPD points. Today's webinar is a little bit different. We're actually live on site in Taranga at the Farmers building and specifically outside Picnicka restaurant. We're going to talk about floating pedestrian systems and how to keep them safe. Lucky for you, you can see I'm not the only person here today. Even other people on the panel. So I've got Lewis Olding, who's the General Manager of Nurajack. Morning, mate. And we've got Rob Hill who's the General Manager of Picnicka. And you also run several other restaurants and whatnot around the place. Is that right? Couple. So allegedly the T-bone steak here is pretty good from personal experience last night. It's fantastic. Yep. It's great. And you've got another deli down the road as well. Oh, we've got a deli on the way. We have the Clarence Restaurant and Hotel Willow Street and Alpena. Nice. Yeah. Excellent stuff. Both some excellent locations and great food. You're a brave man doing in this trade, but good on you. No, we thoroughly enjoyed your last night. It was great. All right, so look, like I mentioned, today's topic is about uh how we create safe and stable floating pedestrian surfaces. We're going to basically run this webinar as a problem solution type scenario. We're going to talk about this particular installation, this particular site, the issues that came up and then we're going to show you the solution. It's as simple as that. So, obviously being a restaurateur, having people come into your restaurant is an important thing for you. Probably the most important thing I'd say. You had a few issues with that at the start. Yeah, we've been ongoing issues I think with our old system couple of years. We constantly try to fix and maintain and replace tiles. So, how long has Picnicka been here? Three years. Three years last month. Right. Yeah. Nice. And so tell us a bit about the restaurant first and foremost. So what style is it? What do you offer? Yeah. So I kind of put this in the modern bistro kind of category, you know. So pretty casual. Good quality produce. A real focus at the moment on dry-aged meats and things like that. It's a woodfire grill, so everything is all proteins are cooked over wood. But just a casual kind of high energy modern restaurant. We certainly experienced that last night. Yeah. Excellent. And now tell us about the actual layout of the restaurant just so for those that maybe haven't been here before. Yeah. Where are we? Yeah. Where are we and what is the layout of the restaurant? What have you got? So, we've got probably a total of about 220 seats inside and out. So, currently on the what we call the terrace and there's about I think it's about 110 between where currently is seating all the way around down the Elizabeth Street side to the front. It also wraps around a little bit to side. So we've got about 110 seats out here and then the main and so it's part of Elizabeth's Towers or farmers building. Yeah. So Elizabeth Towers developed three years ago. And so in this building there's us and a couple of other tenants Farmers. And we've got some combination upstairs. Yeah. Great. So, just so ones maybe who haven't been here before, there's a basically a corridor which is over waterproof membrane um with floated tiles was installed that lead up to the restaurant and a wrap around and that's where we're sitting on that terrace right now. Maybe um you'll see when the walk through. Yeah, you'll see it when we do the walk through. Now, just let's just focus in on this outside area. I understand that there were some problems that started to develop. Can you talk us through some of that? Absolutely. So the system that went in originally kind of failed within months. And we ended up in a situation where kind of every week we're addressing one problem or another with it. So whether it was a wobbly tile or you know a complete failure of the jacks the tile would flip. So we had a couple of incidents. It was embarrassing because it kind of just kept on happening, you know, and it looked like we were doing nothing about the problem, but the reality was we, you know, everything you could. Yeah. We were doing our best. But, you know, it kind of got to a point. We had a couple of pretty serious issues and safety concerns with a lady fall. The system failed. She tripped over the tile that popped up. She fell into a table and broke her jaw and her ribs. Yeah. So, it was really it was really bad. But it was kind of for me it was just this ongoing problem and it was it reflected poorly on our brands and as operators and restaurants. And we almost got to a point where we just lived with it because we went for you know. I was talking to your staff earlier today and they were just saying how it was constant that they actually almost were starting to get a bit afraid to walk over the surface and because they didn't know what was going to happen. Yeah, totally. And I'd walk in some days and I'd see people walking out and I'd kind of cringe because I know they're going to hit a wobbly toilet. We got to a point where we had road cones around the problem areas and we were constantly working on it and fixing it and repairing it. But it just kept giving up. So I'll just cut in a little bit there - just what that system was it originally. So what it was a pedestal that wasn't a Nurajack. It was a competitor's pedestal. I won't name who it is. And what was happening is that pedestal wasn't locking in place. It was actually slowly as it got trafficked, it was slowly compressing. And that will cause the tiles to become unstable. And then as they were unstable, the pedestals would move. And also because the tiles were now only supported by one or two edges, they became weaker and so they would break. and that's what was causing the failures. So, it was a problem with the pedestal system in our opinion. And that they were collapsing over time and that was what was causing the issue. All right. So Lewis is going to give us a bit of an illustration of what what's happening down there. And that's before we do, we're going to run our first poll. I guess for people who are live in the audience, you can raise your hand or not, I guess. So the first poll is have you ever walked on a floated tile surface that was slightly unstable? Right. Lewis, you don't count. So, we got about a 65% positive response from the people online. So, now we had about 80-90% response here. So, it's definitely a thing, definitely an issue. You're not the only one. But we're here to solve it. We'll be watching Lewis walking down to give us an illustration of the tiles that he's going to lift. Now, while he's wandering down there, what we're talking about today in this webinar and why it's important to you as designers, we're talking about two particular clauses in the building code. One is E2, external moisture. This whole roof area is open to the elements. It's got open windows and doorways, etc. outside and there's building below. So, we got to keep the water out. So, that's E2. The other clause we're dealing with in the building code is D1, which is around access routes. So, we need to safeguard people's access to, from, and within the building. So as designers that's why it's important to you guys. So that's sort of an idea why we're sort of talking about what we're talking about today and what's important to you. Now Lewis, we'll throw to you hopefully and you can show us what you've what the current system is and what the solution is and talk us through that. Hoping you can hear me okay there, Shane. Is that okay? You sound perfect. Okay. So, just a bit of context. This is the entrance area leading into the restaurant. The restaurant is behind us and we've just chosen an area off to the side so it's not a hazard. I thought I'd break the area down and then rebuild it up for you. So, what's been installed on top of the system is a 20 mm porcelain tile. Okay, these are a standard porcelain tile available from uh good tile retailers. They have a brake strain of around about 500 kgs per uh square cm there or thereabouts. And so they're more than capable of being put on a good pedestal type system. So I'm just going to remove four of these And as I remove, you can see these ones aren't glued down or anything. They're just it's still a floated system. Still a raised and removable system. And if we just come in here, we can see what's going on here. So, we have our waterproofing membrane support on with the Nurajack supporting the Nuragrid. These are adjustable Nurajacks. We guarantee not to damage the membrane because there's a perfect connection between the membrane and the base of the jack. The jack is screw adjustable and what they do is you lay the jacks and then lay the grid so the grid is nice and firm and then once the grid goes down you can easily have tongue and grooves on the grid. And it just slots in place. That creates a subfloor. And so that means if a tile was to break, you still got the full support. It also strengthens the whole area so it remains stable over a long period of time or still fully adjustable with our adjustment keys to you can adjust the jacks if necessary. But once it's in place, it's solid, rock solid, and suitable long term. Then to reinstall the tiles, let's see if they can remember the order in which you've hooked them out. This is a workout, Shane. In between each tile is a mini spacer and a shim. And so the actual tile is still raised above the grid just ever so slightly. And that helps with acoustics because the tiles are structural. So those tiles are obviously not glued, Lewis, but some are. Is that correct? Yeah. The advantage of this system is that we can glue a tile. And I'm actually going to leave one of these off so that any in the audience here today can come and actually have a look at it if they wish. I've got a cone for that purpose. Safety first. So as I say, none of those are glued down, Shane. But I'd like to just take you to two areas where the contractor has chosen to glue the tile to the grid. And there's a couple of really important reasons for that. Now, with this system, because this was a uplift and relay, they've used the existing tiles, and that means that the tiles were already cut to the dimensions of the deck. And so, what the contractor did, he came in the evening, and they just lifted a section, cleared away the old pedestals, put down Nurajacks, and then put down the Nuragrid, laid that section, and then moved on to the next section the next night. What that means though is that around the perimeter the tiles already cut and you can't stretch tile, right? So he wasn't able to use our tile cladding clips or our tile cladding spaces which would normally go between the grid and the tile to brace it off the perimeter. Now why is that important? If you don't brace this perimeter tile, the whole system will become loose and all the tiles will start moving around. The ground the gaps between the tiles will vary in thickness and the whole system will become compromised. So what we've done here is around the perimeter, these tiles have actually been glued in place. Now just using a polyurethane glue in this instance. So if they were to break, you can remove them, peel the polyurethane glue off, and reapply. But what that means is that this tile here isn't going anywhere, and it actually constrains all the other tiles from movement. And so that keeps the system nice and solid. Um, and so that's quite a critical thing to do or advantage of the Nuragrid system. And we have one other area where gluing a PA is really beneficial. Now, for those that are familiar with Nurajacks, you'll know that the heads on top are about 105 mm in diameter. That means if you're supporting a tile that's up against another structure, you need a 105 mm for a whole head and then 50 mm for the other head to share the supporting the tile. Obviously, when you've got a tapered or a small cut tile, you can't do that. So with the Nuragrid, because the Nuragrid creates a full surface that the tiles are laid to, that means you can support these perimeter cut tiles really easily and adhering them in place. They won't move around. So that's another advantage of gluing to the Nuragrid system. Thanks Lewis. That sort of gave us an insight as to what the solution was and I hope for those viewing sort of got a bit of insight as to what was actually done on site. They were done in about 5 days. Done in a week. That's quite impressive for such a large area. I did help that all the tiles were already cut. They actually numbered off all the tiles and so they could put them back like a jigsaw. And it ended up being a really quick way of doing it and the end result is fantastic. So one thing I didn't mention at the start is this is actually the first part of a two-part series in this webinar. The next part of the webinar will be on the same topic, but it'll be a lot more of a technical deep dive. We'll actually be talking about drawing details, how we detail bits and pieces, particularly in conjunction with the membrane. We'll illustrate our revit files for the jacks. So that'll be a lot more of a technical dive on the system and the technical complaint. We'll also talk about non-structural tiles, how we can support non-structural pavers such as natural stone. We've got a couple of minutes left. We're going to go to the uh Q&A section. If we don't get through all the questions, which we probably won't, everyone who's registered for this webinar will be sent a link with a document that's got the full Q&A's all filled out. So the first question I've got here, it's probably for Lewis. What's the sort of maximum loading that the system would take? Yeah, it's a good question. So our Nurajacks withstand 1000 kg of load each and we have actually tested porcelain tile on top of the grid and then on top of four Nurajacks and by gluing the tile to the grid, we achieved I think it was well over 1000 kg of load before the tile broke. So I'm not sure if you remember back when I was presenting before I said that most tiles 20 mm porcelain tiles can withstand 500 kgs per square cm. So we're really confident with the standard Nuragrid system can handle spa pools, things like that, no problem. I think we can increase the loading if necessary. However, keep in mind what you're putting the jack on. If you're putting it on a membrane on insulation, then that's going to affect the loading that the system can handle. Someone’s asking, did they reuse the old tiles or they have to renew or do they have to lay new tiles? The existing tiles were used. So that with our system, we can go down to 8 mm in height. So the grid's 40 mm, 8 mm of a pedestal. you've still got plenty of height for the existing paper to be reused. Really cost-effective way of upgrading the system so it's more suitable for what it's being used for. Another one here, who installs this type of thing? So, it was the Tyler that reached out to us. Initially, the discussion was maybe put an aluminium frame system down here. But when they realised that wouldn't strengthen the tile, that's why they chose to go for the Nuragrid - also Tile Tech were involved. They're both two commercial tilers. How do you clean below the tiles and access drainage points and things like that? Good question. So you saw from this presentation how easy it is to remove the loose laid tiles. that can be removed just with a lifting tool and then by removing four you'll get access to the grid to be able to remove the grid and get under them. If you are gluing the tile down, there will be situations where you want to do that. We have a drawing and we'll discuss it maybe in the next webinar of how to create inspection hatches over top of drainage outlets and then maybe considering putting that the other end so that things can be washed down the membrane. So when E2S1 requires raised and removable, so we want to be able to still remove and gain access to the system, either through inspection hatches or through So if we're gluing the tile to the grid, how does that comply. Well, that's where the inspection hatches come in. So you have inspection hatches over the appropriate areas for maintenance. If there was ever a problem, you can definitely remove the whole system. Can the Nuragrid be cut to shape? Yes, it can. And it's important that you actually lay the grid right out to the perimeters of the deck so you get full coverage. And it's just cut with a saw or a skill saw or something like that on site. What is the grid made of? It's polypropylene. It's made from at least 80% recycled plastic and that's post-consumer recycled plastic. All Nurajacks are made from at least 80% post-consumer recycled plastic. So, that's where some of your milk bottles are going. Is it made in New Zealand? No, it's an Italian system made in a little place called Padua, which is in between Venice and Bologna. Great pasta in that area, by the way. Great truffle, coffee is excellent. We've been boarding for nearly 20 years. Excellent. All right. Well, I've just about had you all captured for 27 minutes. So, we'll just do a quick wrap up. So, today we spoke about a quick problem solution scenario using the Nuragrid as the solution. The problem was walking on a floated pedestrian surface that was unsafe and caused the restaurant a few issues. We've now been able to resolve that issue. The next part will be a lot more of a deep dive. We talk more technical about loadings and details and things like that. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for the wonderful meal last night and thank you to everyone who's here today. We really appreciate you coming out and joining us for this. And we're looking forward to having another coffee and croissant with you afterwards. All right, that's us. That's Nuralite. That's Nurajack. That's Picnicka. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks, guys. See you."