Season’s Greetings from all at ADS.

2024 gave us a harsh reminder of the challenges of heavy rainfall. In dense, urban developments, 95% of the rainfall can flow off the catchment as surface runoff, overwhelming the outfalls. Whilst many SuDS adopting bodies mandate ‘green’ vegetative SuDS, our article in Drain Trader showed how this could be balanced with proprietary ‘grey’ SuDS elements to create technically, environmentally and economically preferable solutions over the lifetime of the development.

Despite the change of Government in July, water treatment, storage and quality remain at the forefront of the political agenda. Only ADS StormTech has Isolator Row, an inbuilt water quality management device with independently tested and validated Mitigation Indices. This means that expensive additional treatment may not be needed in the SuDS management train.

Also in July, we introduced a new UK navigation system for our online StormTech Design Tool. Offering comprehensive technical support for design, installation and maintenance, 24/7, 365 days a year, Design Tool generates site-specific layouts, which can be integrated with CAD and other design, specification and submittal documents. It's free to use and even gives you a schedule of materials as part of the design output, so you can prepare estimates in minutes.

September saw the UK launch of the new ADS StormTech SC-800 chamber, offering greater storage, a smaller footprint, with less stone and more options. It holds more water than the best-selling SC-740 chamber, and requires less embedment stone. The corrugated design reduces the minimum cover depth and delivers a 7% smaller footprint for the same storage volume.

As 2024 drew to a close, there was much discussion in the trade press about the importance of standards and compliance. Whilst StormTech was designed in the USA to AASHTO and ASTM International Standards, our Eurocode Study validates minimum and maximum cover depths, based on HGV traffic and standard StormTech installation guidelines using four Eurocode Load Model cases.