Construction Fixings

ECAP has launched downloadable Good Site Practice guides for installers, and through its cooperative approach has ensured they are available in a number of European languages.

The Treaty of Lisbon establishes that security is the competence of Member States. Execution and installation do not form a part of the Construction Products Regulation. The management of such an important issue is left to individual producers and Member States – and that includes the installer’s education.

While there are extremely detailed ETAs, rich in information and specifically conceived for the designer, a shared European approach on simpler European documents to support good practice on the jobsite is lacking. Across Europe it goes from one extreme to the other – from countries that have given no consideration at all to the education and guidance of installers, to others that have issued detailed national standards. In some, the installer certification becomes a true barrier to trade. One example is the mandatory ‘single-product certification’ required by Germany for post-installed rebars – which means installers are obliged to repeat certifications for each single product of each individual manufacturer.

So, each manufacturer adds to its products a user manual, or YouTube videos, or provides company seminars and creates its own ‘academy’.

Everything is strictly customised for each product, with huge costs and dispersion of information for final users.

Whilst ECAP is trying to tackle the topic at European CEN level, ECAP members felt the need to produce concise and short documents, to be used on the construction site, which underline not the ETAs’ detail, but the macro problems of installing anchors. The members’ shared experience shows that installers who have been prepared to face the main problems of installation are ready to accept and acknowledge the specificities of each product. 

So, in 2017 the ECAP Good Site Practices for installers was born, divided according to the anchor families. The Good Site Practices mainly contain drawings and concise texts, and are made to be displayed on-site on smartphones or printed on an A4 page. Single Good Site Practices can be downloaded from the Members’ websites in their respective languages. All of the translations, carried out by each ECAP member in mutual exchange, are available from the public area of the ECAP website, under the section ‘Projects’. The Good Site Practices project will continue in 2018, during which it will be extended to different product families. 

www.ecap-sme.org