The BPDA on-line Material Cost Calculator, which compares the material cost of a number of bedding designs for concrete pipes and for plastic pipes, now provides the engineer with the opportunity to use advanced options to optimise material costs based on minimum trench widths.
These updates can result in lower material and installation costs and includes editable fields such as trench depth, embedment compaction requirements (based on the quality of embedment used), trench slope angle and soil type. The level of detail required for the editable fields can only be reliably provided with good knowledge of the actual site conditions. This is an advanced function and the user is expected to have appropriate engineering knowledge and experience. However, if the actual site conditions are not known for a certain editable field, a default value is provided. This may not result in the lowest cost solution but can still provide a useful comparison between the material costs of alternative bedding solutions.
The advanced user functionality follows the installation methodology set out in BS EN1610: 2015 Construction and testing of drains and sewers.