AOL/Time Warner Building

This project was fun in so many ways. First, it was the largest construction site at the time in NYC. Second, everything that was done for the first tower was duplicated for the second tower, which doubled the fun. The main point of interest was the size of the project with each pump being constructed to move 200 gallons of water per minute 1000 feet. This may have been one of the first projects to use stainless steel pipes for domestic water instead of copper primarily due to the high cost of copper. The sheer footprint required 7 duplex sump pumps for water drainage, 2 for sewage, 2 large duplex tank fill systems. Now for the fun part– our tank fill systems for this project consisted of horizontally mounted multi-staged segmented ring pumps (sometimes referred to as pancake pumps). We provided ductile iron pump casings and a high grade stainless investment cast CD4MCU impellers and diffusers. Our competitor had quoted cast iron bronze fitted pumps. With the difference in construction materials on these pumps alone, the expectation would have been that our pumps would have been at least 2 or 4 times the cost of our competitor’s. The truth is our pumps were twice as expensive but when the quote went out, our competitor’s price was three times as expensive as ours because we pass the savings onto our customers. Our competitor thought they were locked in with the contractor and added tremendous amounts of profit to the project, it but when it came down to it the owner could not ignore a 2 million dollar savings.