Piping Services

Most of our work is on pipelines that have to stay in service. This page covers the conventional side of the job: the new pipework itself, the steel fabrication that goes with it, and the sizing and design work that comes before either. If you’re building or extending commercial or industrial pipework and you’d rather not split the work between two contractors, we can do that part as well.

Call 1800 468 827 with the pipe size, the material and what the line will carry, and we’ll tell you whether it’s work we’d take on.

Can you do the pipework as well as the live connection?

Yes, and it’s often the reason a mechanical services contractor rings us. The usual pattern is that we get brought in for the tie-in on the live main or the isolation, somebody else builds the new run, and the two visits have to be coordinated around each other. We can do both ends instead.

That means one contractor to induct and one set of drawings to work from, and the connection doesn’t sit waiting on another crew.

A recent job on Bribie Island Road in Caboolture was exactly that: we isolated a DN450 water main with two line stops, then lowered in the new spool pieces and made the tie-in ourselves, live, with the network never coming out of service. More on the isolation side is on the line stopping page.

Gas line sizing and gas reticulation

We size commercial and industrial gas lines, and we install specialist gas reticulation at high pressure, above ground and below it. There’s a long gas history behind it. Australian Hot Taps was established in 1996 and was the first company accredited by the Office of Gas Safety, now Energy Safe Victoria, in 1998 to hot tap and stop off live gas lines.

Sizing is worth a second opinion before the pipe gets ordered, particularly where an existing run is being extended and nobody is certain it’ll carry the extra load. Send us what’s on the line now and what you’re adding to it.

Where the new reticulation has to come off a main that can’t be turned off, we’d tap it live or run a live gas diversion around the work, so the reticulation and the connection are the same job rather than two.

Off site steel fabrication

We fabricate off site and deliver to site. Fabrication isn’t something we picked up on the side. We design and produce our own tapping saddles in copper, PVC, steel and bolted configurations, the fittings for thermowell and probe installation are custom designed and built to meet most Australian Standards, and the clamps and sealing products used for repairing leaks under pressure are made the same way.

So if your job needs a spool, a header or a bolted assembly made up, it can be built rather than bought in.

Pipeline welding and NDT wall thickness testing

Our welders are accredited for butt weld, fillet weld and socket weld, which are all transmission gas welding procedures. If your project needs the welding accredited to some other standard, we can arrange the further testing to get it there. Say which standard at the quoting stage, not once the pipe is in the ground.

We also do NDT of pipe wall thicknesses. On live work that’s an ultrasonic check before anything is welded or tapped. On existing pipework it’s how you find out whether a line has the wall left to be worked on at all, and if it’s too thin to weld on, we’ll tell you before it goes into your scope rather than after. Pressure testing and purging is a separate service, and it often runs with this one.

Design and construction of HVAC services

We design and construct HVAC services. The systems are the ones we already work on live: chilled water, heating hot water and condenser water in commercial buildings, where the ring main can’t come down for a tenancy fitout or a plant replacement.

Much of that pipework goes in awkward places. We’ve worked in shafts, ceiling spaces, under floors, on roofs, below ground and in tunnels, and access usually decides the method more than the pipe does. If a riser is involved and you’re weighing up a nitrogen freeze against a mechanical stop, that’s worth talking through before the drawings are finished.

What industries do you work in?

Commercial tenancies, hospitals, civil, sporting arenas, defence facilities, mine sites, steelworks, aluminium smelters, schools, universities, data centres and government installations. Heavy industry and institutional sites are most of it. We’re an industrial and commercial contractor. We don’t do domestic work.

Enquiries regarding other pipeline services will always be considered.

Who this work usually comes through

Rarely the asset owner. It comes through the mechanical services and plumbing contractors who hold the maintenance or the fitout, and over the years that has meant firms like A.G. Coombs, Haden and A.E. Smith on the mechanical side, and a long list of plumbing contractors on the other.

One of them, Airmaster, was on our client list more than a decade ago and rang us again last year. That is roughly how this business works: you do a tie-in for a contractor once, and they call you when the next impossible one turns up.

The end clients have been hospitals like the Royal Melbourne and the Royal Children’s, CBD towers including 101 Collins Street and the World Trade Centre, Etihad Stadium, James Cook University, the ABC and SBS, the Toyota and Ford plants, and Defence. If you are a contractor pricing a job with a live connection in it, that is the part we can take off your hands.

What helps us quote it

A rough sketch and a phone photo are enough to start. The rest fills in as we go:

• What the line has to carry, and at what pressure
• Sizes and lengths, plus a drawing or a marked up photo if one exists
• Whether the run is above ground, below ground, or in a shaft or ceiling space
• Whether it ties into something that has to stay in service
• Any standard the welding has to be accredited to
• Who the principal contractor is, and how we get site access

Call 1800 468 827 or email [email protected]. If you’re not sure whether the job is one we’d take on, just give us a call, we’ll ask a few questions and let you know.

Where we work

We operate from depots in Bayswater, Victoria and Currumbin Waters, Queensland, and we have clients in all states and territories of Australia as well as the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. We regularly fly in and out to service our clients.

Piping services sit alongside the live pipeline work the rest of the site is about. We also tap operating pipelines under pressure, stop the flow in a section, squash off lines other methods can’t hold, cut valves into live water mains and fix leaks without a shutdown. If your job needs more than one of them, say so when you ring and we’ll scope it as one visit.

Piping services we provide