The Day Nursery setting has been designed to provide resilience to failures to ensure that staff can focus their time on the children and nursery operations. Any failures can be easily isolated either on-site or by remote access to ensure operations can continue until rectification can be arranged.
Internal
The building has been designed to allow isolation of individual facilities components to ensure operation continuity. Wherever feasible, potential individual single points of failure have been avoided.
- Provision of isolation shut off controls for both electrical and plumbing services allow individual zones to be shut off for repair without removing services from wider nursery facilities
- Access to major facility services are contained in areas outside of the main child care areas to enable safe working by external contractors
- Surface ducting with removable covers enables access to all services contained
- Thermostatic safety taps to all toilet basins
Management
Automatic controls allow pre and remote programming of facilities functions to allow staff to focus on childcare.
- The main areas include manual speed controls with automatic override by industrial quality self -calibrating measurement controllers if temperature, relative humidity or CO2 limits are exceeded
- CO2 measurement conforms to Department of Education advice, with automatic ventilation override point of 1,000ppm and display colour change to red if a level of 1,500ppm is exceeded
- Underfloor heating in all areas removes any hot surface risk.
- Separate manifolds with associated pump control valves and temperature controls for ground and 1st floors. Heating programmer and room thermostats enable setback temperature programming for out of hours temperature control
- All external lighting and internal ventilation are controlled by Wi-Fi connected fused isolators to enable continued safe operation of all other functions on the circuit
- Wi-Fi control enables local or remote off-site operation of on/off and time schedule programming using the Tuya Smart platform
Emergency Lighting
All areas of the nursery setting are equipped with emergency standby lighting that automatically operates in the case of loss of mains electricity supply. Operation will be maintained for a minimum of 3 hours of supply loss.
- Anti-panic prevention as all areas benefit from automatic operation of lights to provide reduced light levels rather than an unsafe complete failure of lighting
- Staff are able to adapt operation and maintain children’s well-being for up to 3 hours to achieve either a safe, controlled close down of the setting or operate a “stay put” procedure if the outage is expected to be temporary and normal operation can be resumed within 3 hours.
Fire Safety
The entire facility exceeds relevant fire safety requirements of:
- Building Bulleting 100: Design for fire safety in schools
- Approved Document B Vol 2 (Buildings other than dwellings)
These include:
- Fire resisting compartments with self-closing FD30 doors
- Controlled building collapse
- 1st Floor disabled refuge point with Emergency Voice Communications call point
- Call points in 1st floor main and staff areas for building evacuation communication
- Automatic fire detection, alarms and communications
External
The materials have been selected for long life with minimum maintenance:
Cladding
- Siberian larch planks 146mm x 21mm profiled for lap / channel fitting
- All panels fixed using stainless steel nails to prevent rust staining
- External cleaning by extendable wash brush with mains water pressure hose supply
- Sansin SDF Enviro Stain is designed for maximum UV resistance to ensure long term maintainability
- Vertical surfaces require maintenance every 3-6 years. Maintenance is necessary when the surface shows signs of wear, such as fading or erosion.
Rainwater
- All above ground rainwater systems use the commercial grade Alumasc extruded aluminium gutter system
- All gutter and down pipes are finished in RAL7016 polyester powder coated finish to remove the need for regular paint maintenance
- Gutter fittings are 125mm deep flow half round profile with SnapFix jointing and aluminium brackets fixed to the facia boards
- Down pipes are 76mm diameter using flush joint fittings
Paving
- Car park finished in Marshalls Tescina block paving with integral spacers to form a permeable drainage surface
- Blocks are commercial quality of 80mm depth and chamfer free edges to provide a smooth surface for pushchairs and wheelchairs.
- Pedestrian paths finished in Marshalls Textured Utility paving
- The paving comes with a lightly textured surface for added slip resistance
- The paved pedestrian areas are constructed on adjustable pillars to provide free space below the slabs. This method does not require any joint filling, so the surfaces naturally drain using the gap between the slabs
Drainage
The local association is that the area is a sandy free draining soil, but a solid sub-strata exists below that results in poor drainage properties. An attenuation tank has been buried below one side of the car park which is formed of plastic crates to form temporary storage of peak roof runoff rainfall water. The output of the attenuation tank is discharged at a constant rate into an existing cross site gully provision.
- Gravity filtration is provided to remove any material before the water reached the tank and is maintained through an access chamber in the car park paving
- Access is provided through a cover in the car park surface if pressure washing is required to clean the tank