The Benefits of Using Slide-on Balconies

With high-rise residential projects becoming an ever-popular feature of a city’s skyline, the need to provide outdoor space becomes a major factor in the design of any project.

October 12, 2021

A balcony is a go-to way in which to provide outdoor space for high-rise living. However, with the installation of balconies comes its own set of challenges and constraints.

The need to provide smarter construction solutions has led Brooksby to develop FlightDeck® – a slide-on cantilevered balcony system that provides many benefits to construction projects. These include:

A reduction in on-site labour requirements

The UK construction sector is facing a skilled labour shortage due to both an ageing population and a poor pipeline of young workers, so delivery of completed pre-assembled balconies ready to slide on helps alleviate labour issues on-site. No drilling, complex fixing is required.

Saves crane & installation time

Slide-on balconies require minimal installation time. They are simply delivered to site and slide onto pre-installed arms that are precast into the building structure as and when required. Therefore, there is a considerable time saving for high-rise projects, especially one with multiple elevations.

No scaffolding

With slide-on balconies, the need for scaffolding is eliminated. Because our steel balconies are manufactured off-site, they are brought to site already constructed and assembled as one complete unit. This achieves instant edge protection due to the balustrades being fitted in the factory, removing the need for temporary edge protection. This allows the scaffolding to be struck at the earliest possible opportunity, prior to the install of balconies, in effect removing the balcony install from the critical path, significantly reducing the costs of the overall construction. This also frees up the area directly below for groundworks.

In addition, with slide-on FlightDeck® balconies, you can work from top-down, and install balconies directly behind the scaffold strike, before all the scaffold is down. Conversely with traditional steel bolt-on balconies you can’t start installing balconies until the scaffold is fully struck as you must work from the ‘bottom up’.

Health & Safety

Slide-on FlightDeck® balconies are installed in less time than traditional bolt on balconies, reducing the timeframe of the overall construction programme and therefore the Health and Safety risks to all on-site. They can also be installed from the top-down, no longer having to be fixed from the balcony below, achieving Health and Safety Executive compliance by removing the need for people to ‘work under a live load’, thereby eliminating another potential danger.

Offsite manufacture

Every slide-on balcony is manufactured and assembled at our purpose-built facilities, and we only deliver to site exactly when they are required, which in turn helps with the demands and challenges of a busy construction site environment.

Factory fix of soffits

As opposed to bolt-on and concrete balconies, soffits are fixed to slide-on balconies during manufacture therefore there is no need to fix these onsite after the structure of the balcony is in place. Furthermore, factory fitting the soffits also helps when the stacks of balconies are offset –where there would be no balcony on the floor below from which to work to fix the soffits to the underside of the balcony above.

Design Flexibility

One of the key benefits of the Brooksby FlightDeck® slide-on balcony is the design flexibility that they afford the architect. Steel is a very flexible and efficient material to work with structurally, so unlike other systems, FlightDeck® balconies are not made to set dimensions, but are designed and manufactured bespoke to your requirements. So, as long as your FlightDeck® balconies conform to building regulations, you can have whatever width, shape and depth you require.