When a large Northeast Ohio healthcare system expanded its research campus, the project added a new laboratory and office building alongside the existing campus. The Smith & Oby Company, a Cleveland mechanical contractor in business since 1898, handled the mechanical HVAC scope: four stories of lab and office space served by a fifth-floor mechanical room. The central plant included four boilers, six chillers, four cooling towers, and four air handlers, fed by large-diameter chilled-water and hot-water mains.

The footprint was the hard part. The building’s chiller room sat at its center rather than at an accessible end, so nearly every length of pipe had to travel down one narrow corridor, with little room to stage material or bring in a crane. The largest mains were 18 inches in diameter and weighed roughly 90 pounds per foot, too big for crews to move the largest prefabricated sections through the building in one piece. The owner’s piping standard added another layer, allowing grooved pipe anywhere on the chilled water system but restricting it to mechanical rooms on heating hot water.

Smith & Oby built the project around the Victaulic grooved mechanical piping system, which it runs on most of its jobs. The first advantage was speed. A grooved coupling on large-diameter pipe goes together in a fraction of the time welding takes. A single 16-inch welded joint could tie up two pipefitters for the better part of a day, while the same connection with a grooved coupling took about 30 minutes. The second was flexibility. Because grooved joints come apart as easily as they go together, crews could break down a prefabricated assembly to fit it through a doorway or down the corridor, then quickly reassemble at the point of installation.

“Sometimes we just didn’t have the means to move the bigger pieces,” said Corey Lynn, field foreman at Smith & Oby. “Being able to break them apart made it easier on the guys. We could just wheel the pipe right through the building.”

Smith & Oby fabricated the assemblies in its own shop and made the grooved connections in the field, using Victaulic Series 761 butterfly valves for system flow control, couplings for pipe joining such as the Style 107V, and flange adapters at equipment connections. An owner’s representative on site around the clock kept the work moving, approving field changes on the spot. Temporary heating had to be live by November 2024, so the other trades could close in walls and start drywall, and the project successfully met that deadline. The building reached substantial completion in spring 2026, about three years after Smith & Oby started.

For a research building going up on a tight, busy campus, the Victaulic grooved system gave Smith & Oby a faster, more adaptable way to install and route heavy pipe in tight quarters, the kind of fit that keeps Victaulic on the contractor’s healthcare jobs across Northeast Ohio.