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Coastal living is glorious but there’s no denying the elements can wreak absolute havoc on building materials! No one knows this more than the window-and-door experts at Packers, especially after doing battle with hundred-kilometre-an-hour winds at the five-star Brighton Dunes retirement living building on Adelaide’s seafront.
According to Packers director, Matthew Morrissey, the project presented two main challenges. Firstly, “Everything in retirement living is about having flush transitions,” he says, “so we had to come up with a drain system and the AWS FlowTHRU™ drains seemed to be the perfect product.” But there was a hitch. While all the building’s sliding windows and doors had to comply with a strict 600 water rating, the FlowTHRU™ had only been water-tested to 350. Matthew and his team approached AWS to see if they could come up with a solution. In response, AWS extruded a new, wider 70-millimetre seal, increased the drain outlet from 35 millimetres to 90 millimetres, and sent the lot to New Zealand where testing took place and the system received the official tick of approval. The windows and doors were then installed continuously around the exterior of the building.
“Less breaks in the window-and-door systems means less joints across the building which means less chance of water penetration, so the actual outer skin of the building on most levels is actually window,” explains Matthew, “We’ve used colour-backed glass externally so you can’t see the internal walls.”
The project incorporates massive awning sashes – 2.1 metres high by 1200mm wide - so that open windows won’t impact the look of the façade. “It’s about an 85-kilo awning sash because it’s double-glazed, so we had to use a dedicated head and seal. We even made a mock-up in our factory that sat there for about six months before the project was being built…just to make sure there was no twisting or breaking down of the sash joints themselves over that period. The result’s been really, really good. We’ve had two or three really big stormfronts come through and it’s been holding up to the conditions really well!”
Watch the case study here:
