Comms and server rooms
Water in or above a comms room, where the equipment risk and the business continuity risk are both immediate.
24/7 commercial response · Cremorne
Water damage restoration for Cremorne offices and warehouse conversions
Cremorne packs a lot of technology company into a few blocks of converted brick warehouse. The buildings are old, the fitouts are expensive, and the two things fail together in ways that a standard office response handles badly.
Call (03) 7035 0623
Minutes from the CBD and Richmond
What Cremorne tenancies call us for
Warehouse conversion fabric
Exposed brick, original timber and steel structure that shows every mistake made during drying.
High-value fitouts
Bespoke joinery, acoustic treatments and finishes that cost far more per square metre than the base building.
How Cremorne buildings fail
Cremorne’s stock is largely late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century industrial building repurposed as office. The conversions were often excellent, but they sit on original roofs, original brickwork and drainage that was designed for a very different use.
- Original roof and box gutter failure — Wide-span warehouse roofs with internal box gutters that overflow in heavy rain. The water enters at the roof line and runs down the inside face of the brickwork, often well away from the actual defect.
- Rising and penetrating damp in brickwork — Solid brick walls with no cavity and no damp course draw moisture up and through. A flood event saturates them, and they then release that moisture into the tenancy for weeks.
- Retrofitted plumbing in unexpected places — Kitchenettes and bathrooms added during conversion, with pipework threaded through original structure. When a connection fails there is often no accessible service void to find it in.
- Water reaching comms infrastructure — Racks and patch panels installed wherever the conversion allowed, which is frequently under a section of roof or beneath a wet area on the level above.
Working in Cremorne
Old buildings, expensive contents
The economics of a Cremorne loss are unusual. The base building is often the least valuable thing in the room — brick, timber and concrete that has already survived a century. What sits inside it is a fitout that may have cost several thousand dollars a square metre, plus technology infrastructure that the tenant’s entire operation runs on.
That changes the priorities. Getting the structure dry matters, but protecting and stabilising the fitout and the equipment usually matters more in the first few hours. We triage that way: isolate and protect the technology, salvage what is moveable, then deal with the building.
Drying exposed structure without wrecking it
Exposed brick and original timber are the entire aesthetic of a Cremorne office, and both are unforgiving. Drying brickwork too fast draws salts to the surface and leaves white efflorescence across a wall that was the feature of the room. Drying old timber too fast cups the boards and opens the joints.
So we dry these buildings more slowly and monitor more closely than we would a plasterboard-and-carpet office. It takes longer, and we would rather explain that at the start than hand back a dry building with a permanently marked feature wall.
Business continuity comes first
Cremorne tenants are mostly technology and professional services businesses whose people can work from anywhere for a few days, but whose systems cannot go down. If water has reached a comms room the priority is not the building at all — it is getting the equipment isolated, assessed and either dried or replaced quickly enough to keep the business running.
We work alongside the tenant’s IT provider on that rather than around them. They know what is critical and what is redundant. Our job is to stop water reaching more of it and to get the room to a condition where equipment can safely be energised again.
Services we provide in Cremorne
- Emergency water extraction — rapid extraction with priority on keeping water away from racks and cabling
- Structural drying — slow, monitored drying for exposed brick and original timber to avoid efflorescence and cupping
- Flooded carpet drying — commercial carpet and acoustic underlay assessed for salvage against fitout replacement cost
- Mould prevention — solid brickwork monitored well past the point it appears dry at the surface
Nearby precincts we cover
Water in a Cremorne tenancy?
Call now. If it is anywhere near a comms room, say so first and we will prioritise accordingly.
(03) 7035 0623Cremorne water damage FAQs
Water has got into our comms room. What should we do before you arrive?
If it is safe to do so, stop water reaching more equipment — sheeting over racks buys real time. Do not energise anything that has been wet, and involve your IT provider straight away so they can make decisions about failover. Tell us it is a comms room when you call and we will prioritise that space over the rest of the tenancy.
Will drying damage our exposed brick walls?
It can if it is done too aggressively. Pulling moisture out of solid brickwork too quickly brings soluble salts to the face and leaves efflorescence, which is very difficult to reverse on a feature wall. We deliberately dry these more slowly with closer monitoring. It adds time to the schedule and avoids a permanent cosmetic problem.
Our building has no damp course. Does that affect the drying?
Yes, considerably. Solid brick with no cavity and no damp course holds and moves moisture in ways a modern wall does not, and it will keep releasing it into the tenancy for weeks after the surface reads dry. We monitor those walls at depth and for longer, because signing off early is how you get mould behind a newly installed fitout.
Can you work around us staying in the office?
Often, yes, though it depends how much of the floor is affected. Most Cremorne tenancies are open plan, which makes containment harder than a cellular office but does allow us to work one end while the other stays occupied. Where the whole floorplate is wet, a few days of remote work usually gets everyone a faster result.