The construction industry has a profound responsibility to help combat climate change. With roughly 10% of the UK’s CO₂ emissions resulting directly from construction activities, it is time to act. But a notorious lack of innovation in the industry makes it difficult for contractors and their projects to make such positive changes. 

Our recently released next generation ECO mobile welfare unit is designed specifically with this in mind. It features a variety of innovative features, which will help improve the efficiency, environmental impact and bottom line of your construction site.

Here are three of its most exciting features:

1. Smart ECO Power

In an ideal world, we’d let every customer come and test out our welfare unit in person – that direct experience has always been a big part of our customer service. 

But let’s be honest: we don’t live in an ideal world right now, and that means we need to find new ways of showing our customers exactly what it is they’re hiring. 

We pride ourselves on having the largest, most modern and innovative fleet of mobile welfare units in the UK, so it’s only fitting that we solve the problems COVID has presented in an equally innovative way. 

2. Smart Water

Sustainable water use is an increasingly vital topic for construction businesses, with 2.2 billion people worldwide living without access to safe water. But saving water is not simply a matter of social and environmental responsibility – there is also a powerful business case for it.

The ECOXLi is the most water efficient mobile welfare unit you will find. Its Smart Water system uses 100% recycled rainwater, with a XXL non-chemical water tank. or stores unnecessary quantities of water. And because of its size, the system needs to be serviced less frequently – reducing transportation costs and emissions whilst optimising onsite WC and wash facilities.

Ultimately, the Smart Water system enables the ECOXLi to provide the absolute best hygiene and wellbeing on the market – with XL hot water sinks and ECO Water Flush toilets in two full-size separate WCs.

3. Smart Telemetry

Too often, eco-friendly technology is built without a thought to the end-user. But we understand that not every site worker has the time to make sense of complicated new equipment, so we’ve designed the ECOXLi to be supremely user-friendly. 

Its Smart Telemetry system features a live dashboard, making it simple to manage the welfare unit for optimal utilisation. This enables real-time monitoring, as well as providing live volumetric data for your sites and projects. And in combination with the ECOXLi’s Smart auto system, it means you will get the optimal value out of your water and power system. 

Its Smart Telemetry system features a live dashboard, making it simple to manage the If you would like to learn more about how the ECOXLi could improve your site, click here to get in touch today.

Mobile welfare units are often simply considered a matter of Health and Safety compliance. But the truth is, the facilities you hire can be a defining factor of your project, setting the tone from the get-go and determining what kind of environment your site will become. 

The best mobile welfare units provide a comfortable space for workers, making them feel safe and valued – and that directly impacts staff wellbeing, motivation and productivity. So choosing the right welfare pod is not merely a case of reading about the unit’s capacity or ecological efficiency – it’s about understanding how the units add value. 

This is exactly why we pride ourselves on providing a fully immersive 360° virtual tour that allows you to step inside our welfare units. Because while our range is designed to cover all needs, and you can pick and choose depending on your site requirements, it’s still vital that you understand the kind of environment you’ll be creating.   

Why we created the immersive 360° virtual tour  of our welfare units

In an ideal world, we’d let every customer come and test out our welfare unit in person – that direct experience has always been a big part of our customer service. 

But let’s be honest: we don’t live in an ideal world right now, and that means we need to find new ways of showing our customers exactly what it is they’re hiring. 

We pride ourselves on having the largest, most modern and innovative fleet of mobile welfare units in the UK, so it’s only fitting that we solve the problems COVID has presented in an equally innovative way. 

How does the virtual tour work?

We’ve designed the virtual tour to give you as much control as possible: you can click on the ground to ‘walk’ through our showroom, and you can control the view of the camera so it really feels like you’re moving around inside the range of welfare hire products. 

We’ve ensured you can get an inside look at the ECO7, ECO10 and ECO14 mobile welfare units. That means you can see the various innovative features – like the smart water WCs, separate offices and XL spaces – up close and personal. And as you explore, you’ll notice various information icons: you can click on the info points to read in more detail about the feature you’re looking at.  

We want you to see what makes our ECO units unique

There are lots of things we want our customers to know about the unique benefits our mobile welfare units offer – in particular their positive ecological impact. But there’s only so much you can read before it starts to feel abstract. 

We hope being able to actually immerse yourself in our welfare units will help you truly understand how they can positively impact your site. 

So step inside our innovative welfare units for hire, and see how it feels: 

This year’s Water Saving Week is all about highlighting the ecological impact of water wastage. As we’ve discussed before, the construction industry has a profound responsibility to rise to the occasion and become more green – and more innovative onsite water usage is a great place to start. 

But when we talk about the ecological impact of mobile welfare units and Smart Water wc systems in site welfare hire products, it tends to frame the issue as purely a question of environmental duty. And that overlooks the simple fact that more efficient water usage is not only good for the environment – it’s good for your business.  We look at how Welfare Units can save water on site.

The Business Case For Saving Water 

To understand the full financial implications of water usage, we need to unpack each element that goes into supplying your site with H₂O. While water itself is relatively low cost, keeping your facilities fully serviced and operational brings with it operational and financial overheads. 

First, you need to undertake regular servicing to ensure your WC facilities are properly maintained, emptied and replenished. And given that most welfare units require weekly servicing, this adds up very quickly across multiple welfare units and projects. 

But you also incur operating and administrative costs in the management of regular water replenishment and waste services. Service vehicle transport and associated externalities, you will notice, are also big sources of CO₂ emissions, demonstrating how business and environmental incentives so often overlap.

Ultimately, inefficient waste and water service systems can have a seriously negative impact on the environment and your bottom line – especially on larger sites.

How Smart Water Systems Improve Your Bottom Line

Our fleet of mobile ECO welfare units features innovative Smart Water systems. These systems not only provide up to 4x more hot water for handwashing and water flush ceramic toilets – they also resolve the problems described above. 

These Smart Water Systems are extra-large, increasing capacity and therefore requiring fewer servicing intervals. While the average onsite chemical toilet reaches capacity and requires servicing on a weekly basis, our unique XL Smart Water systems are, on average, only 40% full by the end of a single week. 

This means they only require servicing every two to three weeks. So you can more than halve the frequency and costs of services, without compromising; in fact, you will actually improve onsite hygiene and facilities, as well as reducing labour and operational costs significantly.

By simultaneously reducing your carbon footprint and the cost of maintaining your onsite water supply, our mobile ECO welfare units empower our partners to help both the planet and their business.  

How Welfare Units Can Save Water On Site
If You’d Like to See Them For Yourself, Take Our Online Virtual Tour

Keeping a hygienic worksite has never been more important. Not only is hygiene a crucial safety component, it is also vital for maintaining your reputation; instilling trust and confidence in employees; and creating a positive atmosphere on site. 

To achieve the necessary levels of hygiene, however, it is no longer enough simply to provide basic cleaning facilities. Instead, mobile welfare units and welfare vans are now an essential part of any safe, healthy worksite. We look at how Welfare Units improve hygiene on site.

How welfare unit improves hygiene on site

Welfare units are important for many things: wellbeing, comfort and team-morale building. But innovative welfare units like those that we provide at Welfare Hire also have numerous features built in to maximise hygiene on site.

1. Contactless handwashing

Handwashing on site is vital for hygiene: nearly 80% of illness causing germs are spread by hand. But most traditional washbasins require you to press the tap before you’ve washed your hands. 

Contactless handwashing removes that point of hand contact. This ensures that employees can wash their hands thoroughly whilst minimising the risk of spreading germs via the tap. 

What’s more, with an XL water tank of up to 340 litres onboard supplying between two and three separate large hand to elbow washbasins, there is plenty of on-demand hot water for frequent use.

2. Separate heating and drying systems

During the pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) has gained increased attention – and for good reason. PPE is essential to site safety, but it also needs to be kept clean. 

Our welfare units feature separate heating and drying systems with an auto mode, which ensures that PPE continues to dry when left onsite – so it’s dry and ready to be worn at the start of the next shift.

3. WELFARE UNITS WITH Extra space

Social distancing has changed our lives, and the uniquely designed XL space our welfare units provide – providing up to 40% more room internally – enables employees to rest and relax without risk of breaking protocol. However, space is not just important when resting or taking time out. 

That’s why our welfare units also feature uniquely designed dynamic spaces, including separate work and mess stations, XL seating and tables, dedicated large working offices, drying and changing rooms and up to two separate WCs with ceramic water-flush facilities. So employees can maintain a safe distance and ensure their hygiene is always of a high standard whilst optimising performance and wellbeing onsite.

With our 360 degree virtual tour, you can see the spaciousness for yourself:

Nothing could have prepared us for the last year: almost overnight, how we work and what safety means changed. And for those of us in the construction industry, the impact will surely be felt for years to come.

But with every challenge, there is opportunity. And while it will be a long time before we really understand the legacy of the pandemic, there is already so much we can learn from COVID-19 about worksite safety and how to develop more employee-friendly, productive sites. 

In this article, we’re going to explore three ways we believe the pandemic could produce meaningful change in the industry.

1. The power of space

During the pandemic, space has become a serious challenge for construction projects. Social distancing – combined with labour shortages – has caused a 7% decrease in productivity on site. 

Many businesses are looking to solve these problems with innovative mobile welfare units that can provide employees with the space they need. Products like our Eco14 unit provide not just extra space, but separate rooms to ensure distancing can be maintained. And this is a trend which we believe should continue long after the pandemic is over.
Ultimately, worksites of the future will be safer, happier and more productive places if they embrace wellbeing and space not just as benefits but necessary elements of a secure working environment.

2. Hygiene is about ease

Good hygiene may well be the single most important weapon against coronavirus and more generally against illness spreading onsite. During the pandemic, a new emphasis has been made to ensure sites stay clean and employees hygienic. 

Behavioural scientists have demonstrated that the best way to ensure people wash their hands and maintain good hygiene is to make doing so easy. And that means we need to ensure hygiene facilities are hospitable and simple to use. 

In our innovative welfare units, we ensure the hygiene facilities are state-of-the-art. They all feature additional WCs and handwashing basins to ensure hygiene is not just required – it is easy for employees to maintain. 

3. The importance of process

Maintaining social distancing and all the other vital elements of fighting a pandemic can be difficult. What we’ve learned is the only way to truly ensure necessary measures are followed at all times is to put clear, detailed processes in place – and follow them. 

When hiring welfare units and access vehicles, the handover process is an easy-to-overlook opportunity for germs to spread and protocols to be breached. And that’s why we’ve put in place clear processes to ensure every single unit, including VMAPs and pole erection units, are handed over in a safely-distanced manner and every vehicle and all welfare units are cleaned and sanitised as soon as they are returned. 

Ultimately, hiring welfare units and access vehicles throughout the pandemic has given us a new perspective on worksite safety that will carry forward with us. We believe, in the end, it will make the service we provide even safer, even more secure and even higher-quality than ever before.

For over twenty-five years, the UN’s annual World Water Day has been raising awareness of the importance of water. With over 2.2 billion people living without access to safe water, and growing anxieties about the sustainability of our current water supplies, there could hardly be a more important topic to bring light to. 

The construction sector is not exempt from these concerns: from cleaning facilities to concrete batching, sites use water in a variety of ways. And, while it’s easy to take that for granted, at Kelling Group, we believe it’s time to seriously consider how we could make our water usage more sustainable on site.

LET’S BE SMARTER ABOUT WATER

There are countless brilliant minds at work across the world, developing technology that will help improve the ways we use and distribute water. And fortunately, the same is true of construction. 

The facilities in onsite welfare units are a great example. While traditional welfare units have relatively small water tanks and chemical toilets, the unique Smart Water systems in our welfare units utilise extra-large water tanks. 

This enables a unique water flush system, which recycles grey water from the washbasins, ensuring that water wastage is drastically reduced, along with the service frequency, whilst delivering even greater handwashing and WC facilities.

But the impact of innovation can go much further than just this.

Sustainable Water Usage On Site – THE BIG PICTURE

As the pressure to make sites more eco-friendly increases, it’s important to consider how Sustainable Water Usage on site impacts our overall environmental footprint. Many seemingly negligible factors, such as servicing transport, actually produce very high carbon emissions over time, especially on large sites.

The efficiency and extra-large capacity of our Smart water systems in our welfare units therefore also positively impacts your site’s overall carbon footprint. And innovation once again provides the best solution to the problem.

By improving capacity by at least 50%, our Smart Water systems lessen environmental externalities. Standard welfare units require weekly servicing, whereas our ECO units only need servicing every 2-3 weeks on a like-for-like basis. This radically reduces the carbon footprint incurred from the servicing transportation, as well as saving man-hours and operational costs.

Ultimately, we believe this goes to show how relatively small innovations can have a far-reaching impact. By simply introducing innovative smart water systems, we’re able to use water more efficiently and reduce carbon emissions, as well as improve onsite hygiene and wellbeing.

Want to find out more about how you can be more environmentally friendly in our construction site and save water? Compare our welfare unit products or speak to our team who will be happy to advise you.

In terms of gender equality, construction has a long way to go: just 13% of construction workers are female, and only 1% of those work onsite.

The benefits of increasing diversity are clear, from increasing the talent pool we can draw from to broader perspectives on strategic and creative problems. Overall, research suggests organisations with greater gender equality are 15% more likely to earn more than competitors, and are 6 times more likely to innovate.

But that doesn’t mean increasing female representation is straightforward: it will take time and effort to make construction truly inclusive. And it all starts with the kind of culture you build onsite.

What kind of environment is your site? 

It can be difficult to detect a lack of inclusivity – in many cases, it is just considered the norm. But organisations and contractors who wish to increase the diversity of their teams should scrutinise the way their teams interact onsite.

Simple factors like building team morale and ensuring onsite comfort can have a dramatic impact on the kind of workplace culture that emerges. And that can be heavily influenced by things as simple as the equipment you hire.

Choosing the right mobile welfare units can totally change the attitudes you find onsite, putting an emphasis on wellbeing and changing how employees feel about their work.

Take our ECO14 welfare unit: with 2 separate smart water WCs, 3 hot water basins, a supersized separate drying and changing room, and an extra-large welfare room, there’s enough space for 14 workers. This enables teams to spend time together in comfort, with our large, dynamic design and layout providing market-leading welfare, hygiene and break facilities.  

The net result is that workers feel more at home onsite, and more valued by their employer. They also become more comfortable in their work environment, creating a more inclusive, productive and safe culture.

With our 360 degree virtual tour, you can see inside our welfare units for yourself:

Small decisions, big impact

Introducing more innovative welfare units to your site might seem like a relatively small step, especially considering the scale of the gender gap in construction. But it’s exactly these kinds of small, practical steps which will gradually build our industry’s ability to attract and retain more diverse talent.

Rather than worrying about the big picture and feeling powerless, we need to start looking at the decisions we do control and figuring out ways to ensure we’re doing the most we can to foster the kind of culture and workforce we want in the future.

Mobile welfare units are often simply considered a matter of Health and Safety compliance. But the truth is, the facilities you hire can be a defining factor of your project, setting the tone from the get-go and determining what kind of environment your site will become. 

The best mobile welfare units provide a comfortable space for workers, making them feel safe and valued – and that directly impacts staff wellbeing, motivation and productivity. So choosing the right welfare pod is not merely a case of reading about the unit’s capacity or ecological efficiency – it’s about understanding how the units add value. 

This is exactly why we pride ourselves on providing a fully immersive 360° virtual tour that allows you to step inside our welfare units. Because while our range is designed to cover all needs, and you can pick and choose depending on your site requirements, it’s still vital that you understand the kind of environment you’ll be creating.   

Why we created the immersive 360° virtual tour 

In an ideal world, we’d let every customer come and test out our welfare unit in person – that direct experience has always been a big part of our customer service. 

But let’s be honest: we don’t live in an ideal world right now, and that means we need to find new ways of showing our customers exactly what it is they’re hiring. 

We pride ourselves on having the largest, most modern and innovative fleet of mobile welfare units in the UK, so it’s only fitting that we solve the problems COVID has presented in an equally innovative way. 

How does the virtual tour work?

We’ve designed the virtual tour to give you as much control as possible: you can click on the ground to ‘walk’ through our showroom, and you can control the view of the camera so it really feels like you’re moving around inside the range of welfare hire products. 

We’ve ensured you can get an inside look at the ECO7, ECO10 and ECO14 mobile welfare units. That means you can see the various innovative features – like the smart water WCs, separate offices and XL spaces – up close and personal. And as you explore, you’ll notice various information icons: you can click on the info points to read in more detail about the feature you’re looking at.  

We want you to see what makes our ECO units unique

There are lots of things we want our customers to know about the unique benefits our mobile welfare units offer – in particular their positive ecological impact. But there’s only so much you can read before it starts to feel abstract. 

We hope being able to actually immerse yourself in our welfare units will help you truly understand how they can positively impact your site. 

So step inside our innovative welfare units for hire, and see how it feels: 

Do you ever feel like you’re living the same day on repeat? Like it’s Groundhog day, all over again?

Well, you’re not alone: recent data shows that UK construction sites are not making nearly enough effort to innovate or introduce cutting-edge tech into their processes. And the result is sites that feel like they’ve barely evolved in the last twenty years.

At Kelling Group, we’re dedicated to changing this: our fleet of mobile ECO welfare units are the most innovative on the market, and we continually invest in incorporating the most exciting new features, so that they remain best-in-class. Changing Groundhog Units for the better.

Most companies find that innovation pays for itself many times over. Yet investment in state-of-the-art equipment appears to be falling. 

The proportion of UK construction companies actively involved in innovating has fallen by 11% in the past couple of years, according to the ONS.

And that’s at a time when we’re seeing unprecedented pressure being put on firms to improve their environmental efforts and become more economically efficient.

Innovation should be instrumental in making this happen: innovative mobile welfare units and lighting can actually reduce carbon emissions, lower service costs and boost firms’ bottom-line.

But that’s not all they do: they also help revitalise your site, improving staff wellbeing with improved facilities and internal space, ultimately creating a more positive working environment in the process.

And what could be more welcome in 2021 than a significant refresh?

Take a look at Kelling’s truly innovative mobile welfare hire facilities

Not only is Kelling’s fleet of ECO mobile welfare facilities the UK’s largest – it’s also the youngest. With over a decade of experience, we’ve developed specialist expertise in innovative welfare products with our own proprietary design and unique look and feel. And that means we continually source the best and most exciting new features available, to ensure our clients never have to settle for second best.

Take our ECO7 Mobile Welfare Unit: it has been designed specially to increase both employee wellbeing and eco-efficiency. It offers 20% more internal space, and runs on hybrid power that dramatically reduces fuel consumption. The smart water system further reduces site operational costs and carbon footprints with fewer services required.

You can see for yourself here, with our fully immersive 360° virtual tour.

So if you’re looking for a fresh start, let’s move on from Groundhog Day and try something genuinely new and innovative this year with an ECO friendly mobile site cabin from Kelling group,