The UK Building Industry is a slave to the weather. Too cold and your mortar won’t go off, too wet and rain washes off your rendering.
Hiring machinery or ordering materials can be seriously wasteful of resources if the conditions are not right when they arrive, and labour costs can escalate out of control if the weather scuppers planned works.
The Met Office have recognised this problem for builders, and they have introduced a new series of Location Based Reports which will provide site-specific weather reports for the area of your build. The reports are available as either location-based monthly planning averages or location-based monthly downtime summaries.
How do Location Based Weather Reports Work?
The Met Office claim their reports will accurately reflect onsite conditions, by comparing climate conditions over the last 30 years and from over 3,600 locations, so that they can give a monthly projection for likely conditions. This gives contractors greater confidence in weather forecasts and allows them to identify times where only inside work would be appropriate.
The Met Office has combined Long Term Average values from their historic gridded database together with a database of current observations. They have then used this data to drive the supercomputer forecasting models, which in turn have been test over the last twelve months to ensure the results are robust and practical.
Information provided will include daily rainfall, temperature, humidity, frost, snowfall, wind speed averages and maximum wind gusts.
The idea is that with this more accurate information at their fingertips builders will be able to identify potential downtime, develop realistic contingency plans and negotiate more accurate contracts with their customers.
Met Office Construction Business Manager, John Faragher, says:
“These reports are the first of their kind in the industry and will make a real difference thanks to their extremely accurate reflection of onsite weather conditions specific to individual sites”.
Let DIY Doctor Know if You Use Local Weather Reports
We would like to hear from anyone who decides to try out this new service for their build. Let us know how accurate you found it, and whether it did save you time and money during your construction work.
Go to the Met Office website to find out more about their Location Based Reports.
Of course you might like to create some of your own good weather if the Met Office say your construction site is going to be rained off. Try DIY Sunshine.
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