Piletest develops and manufactures systems for quality control / quality assurance of deep foundations with their focus on quality, modularity and ease of use. Their products are specific to NDT (Non-Destructive Testing) of piles. They are all based on international standards which the company takes part in forming at the ASTM standards body.
Gadi Lahat, VP of Business Development points out on their unrivalled products, “All our products are simple to use and require no lengthy training. We have sold them in over 100 countries worldwide for over 20 years. They all come with a 3 year warranty and free software upgrade. They can be operated with a user-owned smartphone or a personal computer. All our products have lots of UX thinking in them, to enable simple, fast, and effective operation in the harsh construction site. Our ease of use knowhow is based on years of field work before we started designing our own equipment”.
All products undergo extensive testing, including pressure chamber, vibration table, heat oven and more, and carry a full three (3) year warranty (Excluding physical damage). We focus on building pile testing systems, not on computers. Therefore, all our products connect to a standard PC, Laptop, Tablet or Smartphone via their USB or Bluetooth connection. This approach minimizes your downtime and keeps you up-to-date and independent, and reduces your overall costs.
Lahat further emphasized that they see Africa as an important growth market, where lots of new infrastructure projects will be executed in the next 5-10 years. For these projects pile (or deep foundation) testing equipment is critical to ensure these construction projects lead to a safe infrastructure.
The company works closely with its customers where it communicates with them with the aim of offering support. To help them with this they provide free on-the-job training. Piletest also supports new users with the analysis of their first projects, and commenting on the following ones, until the company and client are both satisfied with the results.
“Pile testing is an established technology and at the same time a growing market. It gives new entrepreneurs an opportunity to kickstart their own pile testing consultancy while empowering the Piletest team support and experience through our SOS service (Second Opinion Service). One can start with a basic pile integrity tester like our PET, which addresses most of the small to midsize piles and grow to the larger crosshole tester, the CHUM, which can handle any size of pile with access tubes.
If one already has this equipment he can broaden his service with unique tests like parallel seismic, for testing old piles under an existing building or structure. Another option is to offer inclination testing with the Piletest BIT, for testing the inclination of boreholes or deep wells. BIT also offers the unique option of testing the inclination of existing piles, making use of their access tubes,” Lahat concludes.
