Our History - There had to be a better way!

In 2003 the company that evolved into SlottedSection consisted mainly of Peter Dudley and Peter Merrien who had been in the insulation and ducting business for over 40 years and together for 28 years.

They found that insulating and weatherproofing external pipework and ductwork in the traditional method with mineral wool and weatherproofing with either PIB (polyisobutyline) or aluminium cladding, was problematic. The air leakage from the ductwork was a major problem as it would pressurise the sealed PIB or Aluminium Cladding and ultimately burst the seams allowing water into the mineral wool which would become saturated and fall off.

They would normally have to repair the PIB projects prior to the one year retention release period in order to obtain the retention for the whole project. This was costly both in monetary terms and labour time taken from newer projects.

Innovation at our core

Having started to manufacture KoolDuct pre-insulated ductwork they found that the method of manufacturing this by hand was extremely limiting in terms of the size of project that could be undertaken as site programmes were too fast to allow time for the highly labour intensive ductwork to be made in the factory.

In 2005 they were the first in the world to resolve this with the purchase of a CNC routing machine to manufacture KoolDuct in a faster and more precise manner, making it stronger and more robust, by investing in writing the programmes to run the machines. These programmes are now used globally for the manufacture of square pre-insulated ductwork.

Two Trades in One

The beauty of the KoolDuct system is that it incorporates two separate trades into one (ducting and insulation) resulting in only one installation on-site. Disatisfied with the method of external insulation they came up with the idea of using new weatherproof laminate technology combined with grooving Phenolic and PIR boards to manufacture a circular external weatherproof product (now called SlottedSection) for insulating both ductwork and pipework.

This combined two site processes into one as the weatherproof cladding was applied to the insulation in the factory saving a significant amount of time on-site and, as the insulation is delivered to site flat packed, there’s also a big saving in space and transport costs.

On-site time saving

From the external product there followed the internal foil finished pipe and duct section products we have today and since then we have developed the technology to pre-cut bends, of any size from 100mm up to 2m in diameter.

This means that all our insulation is simply wrapped around the pipe or duct and taped on including the bends, eliminating much of the on-site cutting, another time saver.