Modern offices and other commercial buildings tend to have two things in common; space is at a premium which influences the design, and this is coupled with a lot of pressure to create a unique, stand out building that can be labelled ‘award winning’. 

 

Together these two requirements lead to an unfortunate oversight by many architects and that is in the finishing of the not so sexy bits of the building, we’re talking about the air conditioning and heating appliances. 

 

The term for all these different pipes, water tanks, inlets, valves and exhausts is HVAC, which stands for heating, ventilation and air conditioning and these are commonly found on the roof of the building, often nestled in behind attractive cladding and because of the design oversight, HVAC quickly becomes a haven for pigeons. 

 

 

All this essential equipment is exposed to the elements up on the roof and as they inadvertently provide some degree of overhead shelter and even warmth, its not long before feral pigeons start making their homes in and around the ducting and all that machinery. As we said at the start, it’s a very common problem associated with modern buildings. 

 

We recently attended a site in Buckinghamshire where the birds had moved onto the site and HVAC engineers couldn’t service the equipment due to the sheer depth of guano from the pairs of breeding birds.  

 

We cleaned out a skip load of large bags of guano and netted over a complex system around the HVAC equipment. Spanning the layout of the roof, the area consisted of two separate recessed wells that were each, connected to three open areas, all of which sat on top of the largest water tank as it led down to a small void with a electrical cabinet. 

 

 

Two horizontal nets were installed to act as a roof and seal off the recessed areas and we covered the ladder and walkway with a frame which was encased by another net.  

 

We did this for two reasons, the first for safety as contractors have to climb up and down the two vertical raking ladders and rather than have them squeeze through zips, which would mean taking their hands of the ladder to open or close the zip with a potential drop, and to deny the birds perch points on the existing metal framework.