COACH: Cost-effective Custom Balconies
Material costs are on the rise due to various factors across the globe. The ongoing global pandemic, coupled with the conflict in Ukraine, has caused a spike in material costs that currently has no end in sight. Whilst this might seem troublesome for the construction industry, it is nevertheless possible to create custom balconies in a cost-effective way.
We’d love for you to be inspired by our innovative design tool COACH. Using COACH, you can create designs that suit your project aesthetically whilst making decisions that keep your order simple, repeatable, and cost-effective – proving that custom doesn’t have to be inaccessible.
Reducing the cost of balcony design
Customisation is at the core of COACH. By changing various factors in the balcony design, costs can be drastically reduced across the board. For example, COACH provides a guide to designing for repeatability. Repeatability is crucial to keeping costs down in a custom design as it ties directly to design hours, labour costs and crane costs – considerations that should be taken both before and during the installation process. By keeping your design simple, repeatable, yet customised, the costs of the project can be reduced.
Secondly, COACH enables a preview of anchor choice in the design phase. At Sapphire, we recommend our pioneering Glide-On™ anchor, which has helped to reduce on-site installation time and achieve record installation speeds of up to 62 balconies in a day on a single project. This cost-saving achievement can be previewed using COACH and the design will even come with a report showing details of the anchors and how forces are distributed amongst both them and the balcony itself.
Less expensive balustrade options
Reducing costs can be achieved at any stage of the balcony design process, from the repeatability of a project to the balustrade options chosen. There are plenty of balustrade options available, each of which could benefit the customer from a cost-saving perspective.
A classic option for balcony balustrading is a vertical bar – a highly customisable, inexpensive to manufacture and lightweight option that suits many projects. COACH has a wide range of vertical bar balustrade options available, from various colours to rotations, each variation is visible in our dedicated design tool. By using a vertical bar balustrade, not only can weight be shaved off each balcony, but the cost of materials can be brought down, making the balcony cheaper to manufacture.
Alternatively, options such as frameless structural glass or modular panel balustrading are available using COACH. Each of these can save money on a project in specific ways – modular panel balustrading, whilst highly customisable and uses more aluminium, is relatively cheap to manufacture on larger projects if designed in a repeatable fashion.
For more information on cost-effective balustrading options, please read more here: https://balconies.global/our-product/balustrading/
The benefits of COACH
Beyond just visualisation and customisation, COACH has cost-saving benefits too. After designing a series of balconies, and before getting in touch with our dedicated sales team, several reports become available to download at no extra cost. These range from two and three-dimensional models, to anchor design reports and carbon savings reports.
The carbon savings report specifically can help a great deal with saving money across a project. By considering the embodied carbon relevant to a project, a view can be taken of the necessary transport, labour, and crane costs during the installation. By using COACH to design intelligently, the potential increased costs of installation can be reduced instantly. Further to this, by using COACH to design intelligently and repeatably, the design hours on a project can be reduced, saving on costs even further by allowing the design team to work at a more efficient rate.
Creating custom balconies in a cost-effective way can be as simple as clicking a hyperlink and having a play around. From the ability to preview your choice of anchor to the wide range of balustrading options available, COACH can guide you through the most efficient use of your funds and make sure that your balcony choice is right for you.
To learn more about COACH, see what is available to create and use the tool yourself, follow the link below and try COACH today:
