Ah, ’tis the season! As we look forward to all the festivities that the start of winter heralds – St. Andrew’s Day, holiday markets, Hogmanay, Burns Night – we dream of white Christmases and mulled wine and log fires and toasting the haggis! This time of year can indeed be a winter wonderland.
IF you’re prepared. That’s where we can help. Businesses have a responsibility to provide a safe environment for their customers and employees. This responsibility includes having a robust winter maintenance plan.
Our Ws of Winter provide an in-depth look into our Winter Resilience Programme and how it can assist your business with meeting your winter safety obligation. This will include our forecasting methodology, deicing materials and more information on the importance of a vigorous scheme.
The Ws of Winter
Who: We’re a bit interested in the weather here at Inex Works; it’s relevant to every service we provide. We don’t claim to be meteorologists, though; however, we rely on the very best ones we know. That’s the Met Office, of course. The Met Office is world-renowned for their forecasting and reporting services and their equipment and sensors are analysed far and wide.
We don’t use the Met Office forecast which you find on their website or that television channels use. This is because those forecasts are based on air-surface temperature (AST).
It’s road-surface temperature which determines if and when car parks, pavements and roads will become icy. Because of this specialised nature, we subscribe to the Met Office’s OpenSite service. With this, we receive a daily report which provides us with an hourly breakdown of both weather conditions and RST forecasts. Furthermore, the report is broken down by geographical regions so we can customise our winter service runs.
For a good explanation of RST vs AST, view the video below.
What: We’ve got the forecast sorted, so now what materials should we use? As with most service contractors, we use deicing salt. We use white salt as we find it to be cleaner and just as effective as its red counterpart. We don’t stop there, though.
Salt needs help before it starts to work as a deicer; it needs moisture and agitation when on its own. Additionally, salt is very light and can “bounce” very easily. Furthermore, salt is only effective to certain temperatures – generally minus five to minus seven degrees Celsius.
To assist in salt’s mission, we utilise a liquid de-icing enhancer. This provides the moisture salt needs which, in turn, assists salt in breaking down which is when salt begins to work. Moreover, our enhancer actually lowers salt’s freezing point substantially making our system effective even when the temperatures drop unusually low.
And, it’s an agricultural by-product which means it provides a layer of protection against salt’s more harmful properties. Plus, its viscosity helps “weight” salt down reducing bounce.
And to make matters even better, we utilise special combi-spreading equipment which is road-speed-related and features specialised GPS tracking. Our combi-spreaders also fit in the back of trucks (even as small as your standard pick-up) allowing it to access sites better and gives us an opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint.
When: So we’ve got the Who and the What sorted. The next question is when do we service? Our standard policy is to service sites where the RST is forecast to drop to zero or lower. Of course, we would be doing our clients a disservice if we simplified it that much.
Our winter operations team has over 20 years of experience and, as life-long Scots, each member understands our volatile Scottish weather very well. They will examine the forecast to take into consideration other factors including what the weather conditions have been like. For example, has it been raining or has it been dry? Additionally, we’ll look at the temperature variance forecast. IE Is a zero or lower temperature set to be sustained for several hours or is it set to be that low for an hour in the middle of the night?
Based on our assessments along with the Met Office OpenSite report, we will then determine what areas will be serviced. Which leads us to our next point.
Where: Where do we grit? We cover the length and breadth of Scotland with teams stationed to cover the areas including Central Belt, Perthshire, Dundee, Inverness-shire, Aberdeenshire, Fife, Lothians and Borders and Ayrshire.
Once the team has determined if and where we’ll be servicing, we send out our daily notification email. This will show all regional areas to which our client sites have been assigned. This email provides a grid using a simple red (for gritting)/green (no service required) system along with Yes/No to remove any doubt to notify our clients where we will be out that night.
Our office phone is forwarded to the winter manager on duty after hours to ensure 24/7 availability.
Why: Why should you have a robust plan? It’s shared risk and responsibility to outsource your winter maintenance. With the onset of the Health & Safety Executive’s Fees for Intervention policy in 2012, the HSE now charges businesses for the time it spends on health and safety investigations: and, it’s a whopping £115 per hour! Just one unfortunate accident can cost your business substantially more than a season’s worth of outsourced maintenance.
What Next: If you’re not already utilising our service or know a business who might be interested, click here. We are happy to provide a complimentary quotation.