Asbestos Partition Wall Removal in Guildford

Partition walls are where a refurbishment most often goes wrong, and the reason is timing.

Partitions come out at the very start of a project, before anyone has thought hard about materials. A builder arrives, the wall is in the way, and it is out and in a skip within the hour. If the infill panel was asbestos insulating board, the whole site has been contaminated on day one and everything after that is remediation.

What the panel might be

Stud partitions of this era were filled with several different boards, and from a metre away they look much the same once painted.

Asbestos cement panel. Hard, dense, rings when you tap it. Non-licensed work, and we remove it directly.

Asbestos insulating board. Soft, light, dulls the tap, and marks under a fingernail. Licensed work where the job is not short duration, so it goes to an HSE-licensed contractor.

Plasterboard. Paper faced, and at a cut edge you can peel the paper. Not asbestos.

Wood-based board. Chipboard, hardboard or plywood, obvious once you see an edge. Not asbestos.

Two of those four are asbestos and they carry completely different legal treatment. That is the whole reason this page starts with identification rather than with a price.

Where it turns up

The main run of a partition is the obvious place, but the pieces that get missed are the small ones, and they are the ones most likely to be insulating board.

Infill above a door frame, closing the gap between the frame head and the ceiling. Boxing round a steel beam or a column, which was done for fire protection. Casings round service risers and soil pipes. Panels forming the back of a built-in cupboard. And the reveal linings in a partition that carries a serviced opening.

The pattern is consistent: wherever fire resistance mattered, insulating board was the material of choice. So the sections built for fire protection are more likely to be board than the general wall is, even within the same partition.

Getting the order right

For anyone planning building work, the useful sequence is short.

Identify before you demolish. A survey at £200 to £400, or a single sample on a specific panel, during the planning stage rather than during the strip-out. A refurbishment and demolition survey is the intrusive version and it is the right one where walls are coming out.

Get the asbestos out before the trades arrive. Non-licensed panels are usually a short visit. Licensed panels need three to four weeks because of the statutory fourteen days notice, and that is the number that ruins programmes when it is discovered late.

Then hand a clean space to the builder. Every trade that follows, from the electrician chasing a wall to the plasterer, is working in a space where the material question has already been settled.

What happens on the day

Panels come off whole. They are usually screwed or nailed to the studs, and the fixings are removed or cut rather than the panel being levered off, because levering is what breaks it.

The area is sheeted and the doorway sealed, with floor protection out to the exit route. Everything is kept damp. Panels go into wrapping as they come off rather than being stacked against a wall.

The studwork itself, once the panel is off, is ordinary timber or metal and goes out as construction waste. So does any plasterboard on the other face where a partition is mixed.

Then the clean, with a filtered vacuum, along the floor line and into the corners where fragments gather. You get the hazardous waste consignment note for the asbestos portion.

Drilling and fixing, without taking the wall out

Not every partition question is about demolition. Plenty are about hanging something on it.

Drilling into an asbestos panel is a disturbance, and HSE has specific guidance covering drilling holes in insulating board and in cement, both as non-licensed work with controls. Done properly it involves shrouding the hole, keeping the drill speed low, and collecting the dust at the point it is made rather than afterwards.

Done with a cordless drill and no controls it puts a small amount of fibre into the room. One hole is not a crisis. A kitchen fit with forty fixings into an asbestos partition, over three days, in a space people then cook in, is a different proposition.

The practical answer for most households is to avoid fixing into the panel at all. Fix into the studs behind it, which is better for the fixing anyway, or use a wall that is known to be plasterboard. If that is not possible, the material needs identifying first and the drilling needs controls.

Around Guildford

Partitions of this type are more common in commercial and institutional buildings than in houses, which shapes where the enquiries come from.

Offices, shops and light industrial units from the 1960s and 1970s around the town centre and on Slyfield Industrial Estate frequently have panelled partitions and fire-protective boxing. Those buildings also carry a Regulation 4 duty to manage, so there is often an asbestos register already, and the first useful question is whether anyone has read it.

In housing it turns up in flats and maisonettes of the same period, particularly in the partitions around service cupboards and between a hallway and a kitchen. Houses at Park Barn, Bellfields and Stoughton built with non-traditional systems are worth checking before any wall comes out.

We work across Guildford and the surrounding towns. The areas we cover page lists them, and the commercial page covers the duty to manage.