A truism of construction is the more remote your building project is, the costlier it will be, with transportation, manpower availability, and other factors adding to the expense.
Honco buildings are world famous for their resiliency and attractive architectural capabilities, but strictly from a dollar and cents viewpoint the company has structured its operations as well as its products in order to make remote construction easy and affordable.
For starters, self-supporting buildings such as the ones Honco creates are ideal for remote locations that can’t be accessed by cranes and other heavy machinery. Transportation costs – frequently a sore point for any construction budget – are radically reduced because the shipping volume of the materials required for a Honco building is 45 percent less than for a conventional structure.
The weight of a Honco building is distributed evenly over the foundation walls instead of being concentrated at the base of the columns, thus eliminating the need for massive foundations and reinforcements (which alone cuts construction costs by up to 40 percent).
The common practice of re-purposing buildings is normally more difficult in remote locations due to manpower issues and equipment availability. But Honco buildings can easily be put to a different use: new openings can be made where needed, and equipment or partitions can be installed wherever they are required.
Energy efficiency is especially important in remote locations, where utility bills are high. Honco buildings provide an energy savings of approximately 15 percent on heating and air conditioning costs; and a 15 percent savings on lighting.
Finally, Honco’s success working in remote locations is also due to management’s ability to plan all of the building phases, from pre- to post-construction, as well as provide other services such as site assessment and conceptual design.
This has proven to be vital for clients such as Xstrata Nickel, which between 2000 and 2010 relied on Honco for the procurement, delivery, and construction of structures (including a maintenance garage and administration facility, biodisc building, heating plant, various surface and generator buildings, and core library facility) at the Raglan mine in northern Québec. Honco put in place the necessary technical support during these projects, resulting in the optimization of each site operation.
Similar services were provided in Iceland, and through close collaboration with the client and through the professional firm Groupe SCV, Honco successfully undertook the design, material supply, fabrication, and delivery of a steel building, right down to coordinating all the openings and electrical components that had been planned under the floor structure.
For more information about Honco and its experience in far-fling locales, please visit www.honcobuildings.com
