Residents of Columbia County, Georgia’s largest county without a hospital, have long traveled outside their community for care. The six-story Wellstar Columbia County Medical Center changes that, featuring 100 acuity-adaptable patient rooms and serving communities across east Georgia.

To deliver the facility’s mechanical infrastructure, mechanical contractor National Mechanical partnered with Victaulic for Virtual Design and Construction services and a complete prefabrication package. Victaulic approached National Mechanical early in the project, proposing to handle all coordination through its VDC process, an approach that also set up prefabrication, eliminating field cutting and field welding entirely. Brody long, Project Manager for National Mechanical expressed his gratitude; “Victaulic’s VDC team has worked like tirelessly on trying to make every single piece of pipe fit in the CUP. It was a very time-consuming process. There had to be a lot of offsets, a lot of shifts and equipment. They completely ran all of the coordination for all of the large board piping, sat in on all the coordination meetings with the general contractor. Anything that needed to be uploaded or added to the models, they took care of that.”

The contractor’s scope of work covered 2-1/2″ to 18″ hydronic piping throughout the medical center and its central utility plant (CUP), which supplies chilled water, low-temperature chilled water, and heating hot water to the medical center. Chillers, pumps and air handlers packed the mechanical rooms, leaving limited space for large-diameter piping and creating the project’s greatest coordination challenge, an area which would have been impractical for welding. Victaulic’s prefabricated solution moved that work off site where pipe spools could be fabricated under controlled conditions and delivered site-ready. Fitting every piece of pipe into the CUP took a time-consuming, iterative process of offsets and equipment shifts, resolved in the model well before crews arrived on site.

Victaulic’s Virtual Design and Construction team modeled all hydronic piping within the medical center and CUP, coordinating with the general contractor and other trades to resolve conflicts before fabrication began. The team also sat in on coordination meetings throughout the project, so any model updates were handled without slowing the schedule. From those models, Victaulic fabricated and delivered pipe spools in sequences matched to the construction schedule. Each spool arrived pre-cut to length, and crews moved them from delivery trucks directly to installation points.

“Everything comes assembled and ready to go, very user-friendly and quick to install” said Hunter Gamble, Superintendent at National Mechanical. That ease mattered most against a tightening skilled labor market: with prefab piping and drawings in hand, National Mechanical ran the system with a single pipefitter instead of the five or six a traditional welded installation would have required.

The medical center used 24 custom outlet fittings, complex headers, pump drops and vibration isolation assemblies. National Mechanical’s crews used Style 107V QuickVic™ Installation-Ready™ Rigid Couplings throughout the project for piping connections. The couplings arrive pre-assembled, streamlining installation by only requiring installers to align the grooved pipe ends, position the coupling house and tighten bolts with an impact gun. Shift-limiting slant pads on each coupling provide visual confirmation that the connection is secure, allowing teams to move quickly while delivering high-quality joints.

Beyond joining, coupling placement had to adapt to how piping would move over time. the hydronic system, Victaulic’s Piping Movement Design team positioned flexible couplings at calculated intervals throughout the piping to accommodate thermal expansion and contraction. Flexible couplings allow the pipes to deflect at controlled points, eliminating the need for space-inefficient expansion loops or anchors at every direction change and reducing structural loading on the building.

National Mechanical credits Victaulic’s involvement across the life of the project. Victaulic was a total partner from preliminary coordination meetings through final install, keeping the CUP’s congested piping on schedule and reducing the skilled-labor burden on site.