The UK Construction Blog

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A geo-thermal energy system is to be pioneered as part of an eco-village project in the north-east of England.

In 2004 a granite rock “hotspot” was located under the site in county Durham, and the plan is to tap into it to generate renewable energy for homes and businesses in the planned Eastgate eco-village in Weardale.

Newcastle University is developing plans to create a huge central heating system deep below the village, with scientists and engineers wanting to drill a twin borehole system to continually cycle groundwater through rocks as deep as a kilometre underground.

Energy will be generated by passing the hot water through a heat exchange device. It is hoped that the prototype will be used as a model to tap other UK hot spots.

Project leader Professor Paul Younger said using a twin set of boreholes solved problems which had hindered other attempts to use deep-seated hot water, which is heated by naturally-occurring low-level radiation found in all rocks.

He said: “By re-injecting water using a second borehole we are able to maintain the natural water pressures in the rocks and allow pumping to continue for many decades to come.”

Some of the water will also be used for a natural hot water spa, thought to be the first in the UK since the Romans tapped the hot springs at Bath.

UK construction output will drop 2% in 2010 before making a shallow recovery over the next two years, according to the latest data from Experian.

The economic consultant’s Construction Forecasts report, released today, predicts that output will fall 1.9% this year, but rise 1.1% in 2011 and 2.4% in 2012.

The prediction is more optimistic than that produced by the Construction Products Association (CPA), which this week forecast a fall of 3.1% for 2010, followed by rises of 0.5% and 0.4% in 2011 and 2012.

Tony Williams, a construction analyst who helped compile the Experian forecast, and who runs consultancy firm Building Value, said the suggestion of a shallow recovery was not a good one for the industry.

He said: “For me, 1 or 2% either side of zero is pretty much flat and that’s sickening. We’re going to have worked for a decade to be back to where we were at 2002 levels. It’s pretty depressing. If it weren’t for the Olympics and infrastructure, imagine the situation we’d be in.”

Despite this assessment, Williams said there were encouraging flickers in the commercial market. “The buying and selling of real estate is going pretty well now and rents in the City have just risen, which is a good sign. It’s just going to be a long wait.”

The CPA forecast followed a 12% drop in construction output in 2009, the largest fall in a single year since records began in 1955.

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If you want to learn more about surveying equipment such as total stations, theodolites, dumpy / auto levels, laser levels and more then www.opticalsurveyingequipment.co.uk is a great resource to keep in your favourites. Topics range from how to use a dumpy level and what are Theodolites to laser level receivers explained and how to use a total station. This website is offered as a free guide to anyone interested in surveying equipment or the history of surveying.

Activity in Britain’s construction sector contracted for the 22nd month in a row in December as demand dried up.

The Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply (CIPS) said today that its purchasing managers’ index (PMI) rose to 47.1 last month, up from November’s reading of 47. A mark below 50 signifies contraction.

CIPS’s chief executive, said: “December was another disappointing month for the UK construction sector. Unlike other parts of the economy, it seems unable to escape the shackles of the recession, as it entered its 22nd successive month of decline.

“Purchasing managers painted a bleak picture as firms suffered from reduced client demand and falls in new business. As a result, contractors are competing aggressively to secure the relatively fewer new contract tenders there are in the market.”

Construction firms continued to shed jobs in December as work dried up. CIPS said many construction companies reported they were still restructuring their operations in line with lower workloads.

However, they added that there were some glimmers of hope as the residential sector showed a marked improvement in activity, with growth indicated for four consecutive months. “This suggests that the increase in house prices last year is beginning to have an effect on construction and encouraging new building,”

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Access your data online, from anywhere with our Cloud Computing Products which include solutions for storing your documents, managing your property portfolio and running construction projects online.

Clouds UK products enable you to share only the information that users need to see with our sophisticated and flexible permissions system. Users benefit by having a simple view of the data they need; businesses benefit from strong security without sacrificing the advantages of online information sharing.

Cloud Computing means that you use secure websites to store your documents and run your business processes, rather than buying expensive and complicated servers. It’s fast becoming the standard way for businesses to manage their data.

Access your data from anywhere

Data is available online through a website, so all you need in order to access it is a computer (or a BlackBerry, iPhone, or PDA) with an internet connection.

Cloud computing is increasingly being used by companies who want to increase home working, increase efficiency by making it easier to work out of the office, or even do away with offices and work entirely online.

Having identified staff as their most expensive commodity, Cloud Computing reduces staff downtime by allowing them to continue working whilst waiting in an airport lounge, railway station or hotel room — places that they had previously been unable to work from.

Save money compared to traditional IT

Companies using Cloud technology are able to budget for a known, fixed cost for their IT requirements — no more surprise upgrade bills or license renewals. Customers get to use the best quality equipment and software which is continually upgraded in the Cloud, all for a single fee.

No more calling out expensive technicians or consultants to upgrade ageing computers or install complex new systems.

Secure your data

Traditional computing is insecure – few employees know about security best practices, and will happily keep data on USB sticks, email, their laptops, on CD-ROMs in their briefcases, etc.

With Clouds UK, your data is held centrally on a secure server guarded by high-quality firewalls and administered by professionals.

What are the benefits of Cloud Computing for Small Businesses?

You’ve heard the buzz, your IT manager has muttered something about it, or maybe you’re wondering what it’s all about.

We’re talking about Cloud Computing.

More to the point, you might be wondering: “what’s in it for me?”

The idea behind Cloud Computing is that computer resources – either raw processing power and storage, or software to help you run your business – should be a commodity just like electricity, and as with the National Grid, end-users should have no concern as to how the system works, so long as they can plug into it.

We’re a long way from that ideal, but there are ways you can use Cloud Computing to save you money, time and worry today.

Using Cloud Computing in an SMB

A small business with one or two offices has little if any budget for servers to store their data on. They might store payroll information, inventories, sales reports, employee records, marketing brochures, procedural manuals, etc.

Keeping these on individual PCs is messy and unworkable, but the traditional solution – a central server – is expensive and complicated to install and maintain.

The new alternative is to subscribe to a Cloud service: the data is held online in a central location, and made available through a simple, friendly interface. The Cloud provider looks after the complicated stuff for you.

There are many Cloud services to suit a wide range of needs, from simple document storage to property portfolio management, human resources, accounting, scheduling, customer relationship management, and more.

Mobile CAD Surveying Ltd and Clouds UK provide a wide range of products for SMBs.

Better IT for less money

Economies of scale mean that a central Cloud Computing provider can invest in high-quality equipment, which it then rents out to customers for a fraction of the price that it would cost them to buy and install it themselves.

Access your data from anywhere

This is the killer feature of Cloud Computing. Your data is available online through a website, so all you need in order to access it is a computer (or a BlackBerry, iPhone, or PDA) with an internet connection.

Log on from a hotel room, an internet café, or from your home computer. Cloud Computing is ideal for facilitating home working, or even for companies that want to do away with a central office and work entirely online. It can also benefit employees on long-term sick leave, who can’t come into the office but are capable of working from home.

Rest easy – your data is secured by experts

Traditional computing is insecure – few employees know about security best practices, and will happily keep data on USB sticks, email, their laptops, on CD-ROMs in their briefcases, etc.

With Cloud Computing, your data is held centrally on a secure server guarded by high-quality firewalls and administered by professionals.

IT is complex, and you have better things to do

As an SMB, you probably don’t have the resources to build and maintain big, complex IT systems. Even running a single, small server can be time-consuming; could you afford to carry out the following checks every week?

• Check the disk space
• Investigate any errors in the event logs
• Download the latest patches and test them before installing, in case they interfere with any of your software
• Check for any intrusion or hacking attempts (this should be a continual monitoring process, and ideally you would set up an Intrusion Detection System to alert you – these are extremely complicated, so you’d end up paying an expert to configure it for you)

Can you afford to keep spare parts on-site for your server? Even something as simple as a fan breaking can take your server out of action for days until a replacement arrives. If you find an error in the logs, would you know how to troubleshoot it?

You don’t need to worry about any of that with Cloud Computing. You rent the computing power you need from a dedicated provider. They take care of the server for you, so no more worrying about whether Error ID#1382 is going to crash your server.

VPN isn’t good enough

If you’ve tried to use VPN, it’s likely you’ll have been disappointed by it. It’s slow, clunky, and prone to crashing your computer if you so much as dare to open a small Word document.

VPN is where you can connect from anywhere to the server in your office, and in theory work as if you were on the office network.

This isn’t entirely the fault of VPN as a technology; it’s more to do with BT, and the ancient telephone lines which simply can’t carry enough data to cope with VPN connections. Even the fastest ADSL connection can only carry a tiny amount of data compared to your internal network, and there’s nothing faster than ADSL on the market except for ultra-expensive fibre-optic connections, which start at around £10,000 per year.

Sharing data between offices is a nightmare

With traditional server computing, sharing data between offices is a nightmare. There are technologies that can synchronise data between servers in different locations, but due to slow internet connections there’s inevitably a long time lag between John saving a file to the server in HQ, and Jane being able to open it down in the branch office.

What if John and Jane both make changes to a file in different offices? Whose changes win? At best you end up with confusion, at worst corruption of your data.

You could rely on email to send files back and forth, but that quickly degenerates as people lose track of who has what, or work off an old version of a file on their desktop.

Cloud Computing keeps all your data in a central location. Everyone accesses the same website, and gets the latest version of every document. No more waiting for that document from John to synchronise, you get it as soon as he uploads it.

The development has been done

The Cloud Provider has already developed the software, and will be continually improving it over time. They will have incorporated feature requests from their other clients, and will have the resources to thoroughly test their software.

Developing software yourself is either extremely time-consuming or extremely expensive. You can outsource the development, but the programmers you hire probably won’t know much about your line of work, and so making sure they build what you want will take up a huge amount of your time.

And there will be bugs, which they’ll charge you to fix.

There’s no need to develop your own database, spreadsheet or software package to run your business. After all, why slog away fixing bugs in your own code, when you can simply lease someone else’s hard work, and make it work for you?

Upgrades are free and frequent

With traditional, packaged software that you install on your PC, you have to pay for upgrades: not just once, but for every PC you’ve installed the software on.

You could decide not to upgrade, but in many cases old versions of business software are incompatible with the latest computers – forcing you to either pay for the latest version, or keep a handful of ancient computers around the office to run your important software.

Cloud Computing does away with this. Because the software is web-based, everyone gets access to the latest version automatically, as soon as it’s released.

Mobile CAD Surveying Ltd and Clouds UK has an extra advantage here, as we don’t charge you for extra users – you can have as many people as you like using the site, all for a single fee.

No one was injured when the 12ft-deep hole appeared behind two blocks of flats in Brynmair Close, Aberaman in Rhondda Cynon Taf, in the Valleys.

Engineers are searching for the cause of the collapse, which saw the three flats nearest the hole evacuated. Residents are unlikely to be able to move back for two days.

Rhondda Cynon Taf Emergency Planning, Highways, land reclamation and structural engineers were all at the scene, according to a spokesman for RCT homes, which owns the flats but not the residential car park.

He said the hole was filled with water at the bottom but did not believe it was caused by frozen pipes or bad weather over the past few weeks.

Nigel Wheeler, service director for street care at Rhondda Cynon Taf Council, which owns the car park, said the hole had grown overnight and council staff were searching for its cause.

“Until we have established that, we are not in a position to make effective, safe repairs,” he said.