Installation day: from a crate on the truck to water at 4 degrees

The day, hour by hour

The schedule below is the real one for a 400-litre terrazzo tub at a house in Java or Bali. Add a day for anything above 600 litres, for a sunken tub, or for an upper floor. We send this same table to you three days before the date, so that everything in the right-hand column is settled before the truck leaves the yard.

What moves this schedule is almost never our work. It is a base that is not cured or a distribution board with no spare way, and either of those adds a day plus the crew's accommodation. That is why we are tiresome about both from the survey onward.

The base: a 100 mm pad, not paving

A 400-litre terrazzo tub full of water weighs about 780 kilograms on a footprint under 1.4 square metres. Set that on paving, compacted soil or an old timber deck and within six to twelve months one corner drops a few millimetres. What fails is not the tub, it is the overflow: water starts spilling on one side only and the tub never looks level and full again. Weights and footprints for every shell are listed on the products page.

We do not pour that pad ourselves, and it is deliberate. Your builder knows the ground, buys materials at local prices, and our drawing is a single A3 sheet any mason can read. Everything that is and is not inside the tub price is set out on the pricing page.

Water and power: the two connections we make ourselves

The water side is simple but three things catch out an unprepared house. Pressure: below 1 bar, filling 400 litres takes over two hours and shifts the whole schedule. Drainage: a 1-inch drain valve empties 400 litres in about eight minutes, which an ordinary garden soakaway cannot take. And incoming water quality, which in some cities decides whether we fit a 50-micron pre-filter on the fill line, as explained under maintenance and service.

• Fill line — a dedicated tap and a 3/4-inch hose, not something borrowed from the car wash tap each time.
• Overflow — piped to a drain, never into the soil beside the tub, because saturated ground is what makes a pad settle.
• Drain — 1-inch valve at the lowest point, and we leave five metres of hose on site.
• Dedicated breaker — 10 A up to 1 PK, 16 A for 1.5 and 2 PK, 20 A for 3 PK, never shared with a water pump or an air conditioner.
• Earthing — mandatory, and we measure the resistance. Below 5 ohms we continue; above it we ask for an additional earth rod.
• Stabiliser — fitted where evening voltage regularly drops below 190 V, which includes Singaraja and much of Kalimantan.

If you do not yet know which chiller is coming, and therefore how many amps to prepare, the chiller calculator works it out from volume and city in about ten seconds.

Getting it in: gates, spiral stairs and two-metre lanes

A crated 400-litre terrazzo tub measures roughly 1.75 by 0.95 by 0.90 metres and weighs 390 kilograms before any water goes in. It does not pass a standard 80-centimetre door and four people cannot carry it up a spiral staircase. So the first question at survey is not the colour, it is the narrowest opening between the road and the tub position. There are three answers and we choose between them at drawing stage, never on the day: over the top with a triangle hoist across a wall or balcony, which is how most tight Bali gang and walled-villa sites are done; a modular body split into three to five pieces under 95 kilograms, grouted and re-ground in place, adding a day and about 12 per cent to the shell price; or, for a cast-in-place tub, no opening at all, because nothing has to come through the house.

When the owner is not in the country

About a third of our English-speaking clients are abroad on installation day, and it works perfectly well provided one thing is agreed in advance: who signs. We need a named representative on site for the forty-minute handover — a villa manager, a project architect, a trusted neighbour. They watch the cold test, receive the training and sign the sheet, and we send you the same photographs, the probe reading, the panel picture and the chiller serial number the same day. What we will not do is hand over to an empty house and email a PDF, because the training is the part that keeps the tub working. For apartments there is one extra step: written consent from building management, which we require even when the unit owner insists it is unnecessary.

The cold test: the number that closes the job

We count the job finished when the water is cold, not when the tub is standing. The final 20 per cent falls due once the probe thermometer shows the temperature written in the quotation — not the figure on the chiller display, which reads water inside the heat exchanger rather than water where you sit.

1. The probe goes 30 centimetres below the surface on the opposite side from the inlet, and is read after three minutes of stability.
2. The difference between probe and chiller display is logged. More than 0.8 degrees means poor flow and we correct it on the spot.
3. The compressor runs one full cycle while we measure current and condenser outlet temperature.
4. The lid goes on, the time is noted, and an hour later we read again to record the passive temperature rise.
5. The handover sheet is signed by both sides, with photographs of the tub, the panel and the chiller serial number.

The forty minutes of training afterwards covers what people forget first: how to rinse a cartridge, how to wash condenser fins, and the early signs of water going wrong. We leave it in writing and the full schedule lives on the maintenance page.