Fernando
14 May 2026
Every time we talk to a new contractor – whether they’ve seen us at an event, read about our work with National Grid or Costain, or watched one of our project videos – the conversation follows a familiar pattern. There’s genuine interest. Then come the questions.
They’re good questions. They’re the same ones we’d ask if someone told us they could cut 65% of the carbon out of our foundations while making them stronger. Here are the five we hear most often, and the answers we give.
1 “Do these foundations comply with the same structural codes as traditional ones?”
Yes. Every foundation we produce is designed to the relevant Eurocodes – BS EN 1997 (Eurocode 7) for geotechnical design and BS EN 1992 (Eurocode 2) for structural concrete – with the UK National Annexes applied throughout. The same design standards, the same load cases, the same safety factors, the same structural verification process.
We are not asking anyone to accept a lower engineering standard. We are asking them to accept a different manufacturing method that delivers to the same – or in many cases higher – structural performance.
When our substation foundations were independently tested at the University of Sheffield’s ICAIR facility, the small foundations achieved eight times the required safety factor, and the medium and large foundations delivered three times their anticipated capacity. These are not marginal results. They confirm that optimising geometry and material placement through computational design can produce foundations that significantly outperform the over-engineered, material-heavy approach that traditional methods rely on.
If your technical team needs to see the engineering, we are happy to share design calculations, test reports, and the full independent validation data.
2 “How does the cost compare to traditional foundations?”
This is the question everyone wants to ask first. The honest answer is that the unit cost of each foundation depends on the project – geometry, loading, quantities, site location, and programme all play a role, just as they do with traditional methods.
What we can say with confidence is that our foundations use up to 70% less concrete and around 50% less on-site labour than conventional alternatives. They require no formwork. They are lighter, which means smaller lifting equipment and fewer truck movements. And they install faster, which compresses the site programme.
When you account for the full delivery cost – not just the price of the concrete, but the formwork, the labour, the curing time, the crane hire, the transport, the programme duration, and the site prelims that run for every extra week – our system is always cost-competitive. On the majority of projects, it delivers a net cost saving.
At Welsh Water’s Usk Reservoir, the programme acceleration alone – eight weeks saved – represented a significant cost saving for the client that went well beyond the price of the individual foundations.
We’re always happy to run the numbers against a live project so you can see the comparison in your own terms, not ours.
3 “What does my site team need to do differently on installation day?”
Less than you might expect. Our foundations arrive on site as finished, precast units – no formwork to build, no reinforcement to fix, no concrete to pour, no curing time to wait for. The installation process is essentially: prepare the formation, lift the unit into position, check levels, backfill.
Your site team will be familiar with handling precast elements. The key differences are that our foundations are typically lighter than traditional precast equivalents (because the geometry is optimised rather than solid), which means smaller cranes and simpler lifting plans. And because there’s no wet concrete involved, there’s no curing period – the foundations are structurally ready as soon as they’re placed.
We provide full installation guidance, lifting plans, and technical support. On projects where this is the contractor’s first time working with our system, we’ll have one of our engineers on site for the initial installations to ensure everything runs smoothly.
The most common reaction we get from site teams after the first day is that they wish the rest of the job was this straightforward.
4 “What evidence do you have from real projects?”
We’ve moved well past the prototype stage. Our foundations are in the ground, under load, and performing on live UK infrastructure projects.
For National Grid, we designed and manufactured a series of full-scale substation foundations and led a comprehensive programme of laboratory and on-site testing in collaboration with the University of Sheffield’s ICAIR facility and Murphy. Full-scale tension and overturning moment tests were carried out under controlled conditions, followed by on-site load tests to confirm performance in real-world environments. The results exceeded every requirement.
At Welsh Water’s Usk Reservoir, working with Mott MacDonald Bentley, we delivered 66 pipe support foundations as part of critical upgrade works. The optimised foundation design reduced concrete demand by approximately 560 tonnes, saved an estimated 70 tonnes of CO₂, and accelerated the construction programme by a factor of three – shortening the overall site programme by approximately eight weeks.
On Net Zero Teesside, we are currently manufacturing concrete sleepers for Costain’s work on the Northern Endurance Partnership CO₂ pipeline, one of the UK’s most significant carbon capture infrastructure programmes.
Each of these projects has a published case study with detailed performance data. We’re also happy to arrange a reference conversation with an existing client if that would be helpful.
5 “How far in advance do we need to engage you?”
Earlier is better, but we’re more flexible than people expect.
The ideal scenario is to engage us during the design phase, before foundation specifications are locked in. That gives us the opportunity to optimise the geometry and materials for your specific loading requirements and site conditions, which is where the biggest carbon and cost savings come from. On projects where we’ve been involved early, the savings have been substantial – both in material use and programme time.
That said, we understand how construction programmes work. Design freezes slip. Specifications change. Sometimes the conversation starts when the programme is already under pressure and someone is looking for a way to accelerate foundation delivery. We can work with that too. Our offsite manufacturing process means we can produce foundations faster than traditional in-situ methods – each unit takes approximately 40 minutes to manufacture – and because production runs in parallel with other site activities, it doesn’t hold up the critical path.
As a general guide: for a straightforward project with a standard foundation type, we can move from initial engagement to delivery in 4-6 weeks. But talk to us – we’ll give you an honest assessment of what’s achievable within your programme.
Ready to explore this for your next project?
If you have a project in mind and want to understand whether our system is a good fit, tell us about it. We’ll come back to you within 48 hours with an honest assessment.
Tell us about your project.
