81 Bay - CIBC Square, Toronto

• Building Type: Commercial
• Consultant: The Mitchell Partnership (TMP)
• Main Contractor: Ellis Don
• MEP Contractor: Plan Group
• Services: HVAC

CIBC bank are building two new commercial buildings to house its CIBC staff amongst other tenants. 81 Bay is the first of these new builds and forms a part of an impressive downtown development in Toronto, Canada.

The building is 49 floors in total and the MEP contractor – Plan Group – split themselves into two teams in order to effectively complete the project. The first concentrated on the base build whilst the second focused on the tenant fit-out. Gripple’s standard UniGrip™ was used by the base build team to hang the unit heaters whereas the tenant fit-out team used the Gripple Duct Trapeze along with the Express hanger to suspend spiral and rectangular ductwork.

The project was worked from the ground up, meaning that the floors became increasingly busy with multiple trades.

The site operatives used 4 elevators on the side of the building to get around the 49 storeys. This meant that Gripple was very beneficial from the point of view of manual handling. The size, packaging and reduced weight of Gripple products allowed the builders to easily transport the necessary equipment. This ease of movement between all 49 floors meant that a lot of time was saved by using Gripple.

Overall, the use of Gripple products allowed the project to be completed in just 247 hours. With more traditional systems it would have taken 1,130 hours. Therefore, not only were the Gripple products safe and easy to install, they also saved a huge amount of time and massively reduced labour costs.

“Gripple was chosen for the labour saving aspect of the installation. It was also a huge benefit on the manual handling side for us. The difference between trying to get a couple of boxes under a guy’s arm moving from floor to floor compared to bundles of threaded rod and strut was massive. It made site deliveries so much easier to co-ordinate and saved us so much time moving the materials around the site. It was fast and simple for the guys to install.”

- Richard Sinclair, General Foreman, Plan Group -