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Schools Out, We're In

A natural extension to your on site facilities team

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Schools & Educational

SCHOOLS & EDUCATIONAL

With our many years of looking after commercial clients, working within schools and Educational settings has become one of our specialities.

We've established a reputation around Gloucestershire as the go to company for fixed Electrical Installation Testing, appliance PA Testing, IT and Network installation, as well as reactive general maintenance and repairs.

Our entire team is DBS Enhanced cleared, and trained and experienced in working around younger and vulnerable members of our community.

We are happy to present options to your school to ensure you are compliant, and split the cost of the electrical testing over 5 years, smoothing out the annual budgets, working with the onsite facility teams to ensure works are completed at times that are convenient and work for the school, its clubs, and other users of the facilities.

Today even more so, energy costs. We can undertake will surveys of lighting, heating and general electrical usage and offer proposals and solutions to actually save you money. Leaving funds in the pot to invest in other areas within the school.

Bournside School, Cheltenham

All Saints Academy, Cheltenham

Bournside School, Cheltenham

THE BRIEF

Bournside School and Sixth Form Centre is a comprehensive school for 11 to 18 year olds located in Cheltenham. Founded in 1972, it has grown to become one of the largest in Gloucestershire.

DC Group were approached by the facilities team at the school who were looking to take a fresh pro-active approach to their maintenance, schedule their electrical compliance testing over the coming years, and also look to undertake a full upgrade of all the lighting within the campus, to both offer ongoing cost savings, as well as reduce their carbon impact.

OUR SOLUTION

We worked with the school to do an entire campus review of all whole electrical installation. This included physically tracing out each distribution board, as well as frosenically reviewing old electrical certificate and reports. Any areas of concern were then easy to identify to ensure their continued compliance. We were then able to put in place a testing schedule over multiple years which ensured that continued pro-active planned maintenance was in place, rather than reactive when things failed. This helped the team budget for the coming years, greatly reducing the 'surprises' in costs as items had already been picked up and identified ahead of failure.

With their lighting, we mapped the whole set of buildings, looked at usage times, and lighting controls. We completed full usage calculations, and were able to show the estimated cost of running and maintaining the existing old lighting, vs. the cost savings of upgrading the modern LEDs with reduced running and maintenance costs.

Splitting the project in two, over two summers we upgraded every light fitting within the campus, delivering the projects on time and even under budgets, allowing for additional works to be undertaken elsewhere within the school. The resulting upgrade resulted in classrooms with improved light outputs and levels, with some fantastic feedback from staff and students alike.

All Saints Academy, Cheltenham

THE BRIEF

All Saints Academy is an Anglican Church Academy for 11 - 19 year olds, sponsored by the Diocese of Gloucester. The buildings are purpose built, and when the facilities team first approached us, were around 9 years old. While this meant that the majority of the facilities still remained state of the art, electrical items such as lighting were now approaching end of working life.

In particular, the feature strip lighting that runs through each of the main corridors on each floor was starting to fail, and the replacement parts were now obsolete. The existing fittings were all flush fitted into the ceiling grid, so swapping to a different style of fitting would have meant redoing the whole ceiling on each floor - at considerable cost on top of the lighting change.

OUR SOLUTION

We worked with the school to understand the issue and reached out to several of our trusted lighting partners for a solution. As well as feature lighting, we needed to incorporate the emergency lighting feature, as well as look for a lower energy option to help reduce their CO2 impact.

Taking a sample section of the lighting away, we custom 3D printed new inserts and diffusers, enabling us to manufacture a custom LED drive tray. This allowed us to leave the existing body of the light fitting in place, saving any ceiling works, but upgrade the internals of the fittings to LED in any colour the school wished. We then installed the custom 3D printed diffusers on top, to give a seamless finish. The result was fantastic, and the feature lighting restored to an even better level and look than when it had been first installed new. The project was delivered on time, and for a fraction of the original budgeted costs to replace everything.

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