Educational Establishments
“I’ll make no apologies for saying that the artificial turf industry, in my experience, is a dirty, poorly regulated sector which is filled with salesmen of little to no
accountability”
integrity, false promises, poor installations and little
The efforts of the EasiGrass team laying the carpet were first class ...
one company, which I shall refrain from naming at this time, were somewhat ‘put out’ by the news of their unsuccessful quote, and the gentleman (believe me, I use the term very loosely) in question decided to try to mislead me by way of discrediting his competition by using every dirty trick in the book, and then some; “there is a two tier pricing strategy and you were put in the wrong one; that other carpet is not fit for purpose; it has texturisation issues; the strands reform to a blob of plastic before long; poor installations; can’t honour the warranty because the technology isn’t up to date; pitch is a leg breaker” etc., in addition to sending a very misleading picture to ‘support’ his case. Initially, I wasn’t sure what to think, so I contacted a number of venues with my carpet of choice, all of whom had nothing but the highest of praise. It soon became clear what was going on. I was dealing with a desperate liar who would sink to any level to win a contract, with no thought for the welfare of the customer, or the integrity of the industry as a whole.
Variations in the shockpad depth ranged from 6mm to 40mm
It is with genuine contempt that I speak of this issue, even more so when I am talking of a ‘proudly British’, market leading company. Needless to say, ‘words’ were had, that issue put to bed in the hope of now being able to move on to a straightforward installation.
Unfortunately however, this was not to be the case. Upon proceeding with the carpet lift, an earlier identified potential issue became a reality. At each seam or join, glue had either run through the jointing tape, or had been applied to both sides of it during the joining process of the original installation. In effect, this led to a very large portion of the carpet being glued to the shockpad, with no way of separating what should be two completely separate component parts. Obviously, by the time the carpet had
been rolled up, significant damage had accrued to the shockpad. At this stage, and whilst examining the damage to see if there was any way to retrieve the shockpad, a further issue presented itself - what should have been a 15mm thick shockpad, wasn’t actually 15mm thick. The FIH (International Hockey Federation) guidelines state that a shockpad should be within 10% of the stated thickness - with the stated thickness of 15mm. I was aghast to find sections of less than 6mm, and other areas approaching 40mm thick! It was clear that we were already significantly outside of FIH tolerances, and I wanted to know how, and why.
A hasty check of the original test
report (BS EN 15330) showed that the surface levels of the carpet were within tolerance, so only one possibility was left
■ Regular Sweeping ■ 3G Decompactions ■ Infill Top-Ups ■ Vegetation Treatments ■ Machinery & Equipment ■ Demonstrations & Training ■ Specialist Deep-Cleaning ■ Infill Extraction & Replacement ■ Line Marking ■ Repairs
96 PC DECEMBER/JANUARY 2014
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