Pipe Freezing Melbourne

We do pipe freezing work in Melbourne and across Victoria. Liquid nitrogen forms an ice plug inside the live line, you get your isolation, and nothing is drained, vented or recommissioned afterwards.

Call 1800 468 827 with your pipe size, material and what’s in the line, and we’ll tell you whether it suits.

Do you cover Melbourne?

Melbourne is home. Our depot is at 2/33-39 Corporate Boulevard, Bayswater, so a metropolitan Melbourne job is a normal day for us rather than a mobilisation. Regional Victoria is a short trip.

We have clients in all states and territories of Australia as well as the Pacific Islands and New Zealand, and we regularly fly in and out to service them.

What is pipe freezing?

A non-intrusive way of isolating a live line. We apply liquid nitrogen to a section of pipe and draw the heat out of the product inside it until it freezes into a solid ice plug. Once the freeze is achieved the plug will hold against very high differential pressures.

There is more detail on how it works on the main pipe freezing page.

What can be frozen?

Carbon steel, Kunifer, stainless steel, aluminium alloys, ductile and cast iron, nickel alloy and copper based alloys, carrying water, acids, coolants, paints, alcohols, oils, liquid food product, various chemicals and sewage.

Common jobs are valve installations, pipe section replacement, equipment isolation, pipe branch terminations, pipe diversions and pipeline abandonment. A lot of the freezing work we do is on chilled water and heating hot water systems in commercial buildings, where the ring main cannot come down and there is no useful isolation valve near the work.

Is this the right method for your line?

Not always, and we would rather say so before anyone books a crew.

Where a mechanical isolation is practical, line stopping may suit better. Where you need a permanent isolation point rather than a temporary one, live valve insertion is the answer. If you need a new connection rather than an isolation, that is a hot tap. There is a comparison of all of them on which method do I need.

Approvals in Victoria

Victoria is also where our accreditation comes from. Australian Hot Taps was the first company accredited by the Office of Gas Safety, now Energy Safe Victoria, to hot tap and stop off live gas lines. That was 1998, and live gas work in Victoria still needs the regulator’s authorisation job by job.

Where the Melbourne freezing work has been

Freezing tends to win in an occupied building, because nothing goes on the pipe and nothing comes out of it. Melbourne is where most of that work has been, and hospitals are the clearest case: a valve cut into a live chilled water riser at somewhere like Peter Mac or Box Hill, where draining the circuit is not on the table.

In the CBD it is the same logic on a bigger main. At a tower like Melbourne Central, a heating hot water ring main serves dozens of tenancies, and the freeze buys the window to change a valve without any of them noticing.

Crown is on the client list as well, and a venue that never closes never hands you a quiet window for plant work. We have also frozen lines in Parliament of Victoria and the County Court. The broadcasters are on the client list too, Channel 7, Channel 9, Channel 10, the ABC and SBS, and a newsroom is another building where the answer to “can we shut it down on Tuesday” is no.

What helps us quote it

With freezing, what is in the line matters more than anything, because the contents have to actually freeze. The rest helps:

• Pipe size and material
• What is in the line, and at what pressure and temperature
• What you are trying to achieve, and your window
• How you get to the pipe, and where in Victoria the site is
• Any drawings or photos

Call 1800 468 827 or email [email protected]. If you are not sure whether this suits your line, just give us a call, we will ask a few questions and let you know.

Other live pipeline work in Victoria

We travel for the rest of it too: hot tapping, line stopping, pipe freezing, live valve insertion, live gas diversions, leak repair under pressure, thermowell installation and testing and purging. If a Melbourne job needs more than one, it is usually cheaper on one visit. See also where we work.

Pipe Freezing in Melbourne, at a glance