I've been retrenched from this Ara Hill site on 25 September 2009. I sent the resignation e-mail because the company said I wasn't terminated and only their workers were and so I had to resign instead. My guess is that the main contractor Tanjung Mahsuri will complete everything.
Only got to take 2 photos of the main pool in bird's eye view for progress comparison. Still don't know whether it's a swimming pool or a water feature. Hopefully it's a swimming pool. 
Main pool on 15/8/09.
Main pool on 28/8/09.
The circular pool at the top of the site near the main entrance received lean concrete, conduits were then hacked or were made during lean concreting. Reinforcement bars were then laid on the lean concrete in preparation to receive the structural concrete.
8/9/09 – Blue cold water piping installed into the lean concrete conduits.
9/9/09 – Slab reinforcement laid on top of the lean concrete.
11/9/09 – Pool slab presently being concreted with the excavator and bucket.
The blue polymer things at the slab to upstand beam joint is possibly to make the joint more watertight because the slab was concreted first and then the circumference upstand beam concreted on another day.
14/9/09 – Slab has been fully concreted and upstand beam formwork for pool circumference installed hiding the blue polymer bands which are attached to the reinforcement.
14/9/09 – Concreting the perimeter circular upstand beam.
14/9/09 – Shower piping inserted into the wall conduit and plastered flush to the shower cubicle wall. Tanjung Mahsuri will complete the wall tiling.
Roof tiling for the low-rise blocks behind Blocks 1 and 2 (21/8/09).
Gutter installation on 21/8/09.
I thought there was a chinese man doing the roof truss and tiling work. But he was installing the rainwater gutter on the roof.
WC cemented to the floor – 16/9/09.
The workers were cementing the Johnson Suisse water closets to the tiled bathroom floors before the bosses called stop work. A worker told me it's only cement mixed with water. There's no sand (fine aggregate) or coarse aggregate, just cement and water. It then sets very quickly. I tried pushing a few but they didn't budge even though the cement still looked wet. In the British Standards code the dividing line is 5 mm between fine aggregate and coarse aggregate for mixing concrete. Someone at the Tanjung Mahsuri site office had a bar of Swiss chocolate on his desk but it probably doesn't have anything to do with the WCs.
I didn't get to take many photos of the penthouses. If I got to work longer I would've but unfortunately got sacked. There are two penthouses on the 10th floor of Block 2, one on the left tower and one on the right tower. The penthouse type AP-3 has both an open-air internal courtyard and Jacuzzi. The other penthouse type AP-2 on the other tower has neither and is smaller in size. Block 1 has no penthouses at all.
The screeding looked so high so I took a photo of it. Normally I thought the screeding is fully completed before floor tiling begins. The tiles look very big size as well, not like the tiles in my house.
Floor screeding and tiling in one of the penthouses of Block 2 (15/9/09).
This is canteen 2 in the middle. A nice Indonesian girl wearing a tight T-shirt at the top works here. She just smiles all the time and doesn't say anything. I usually have my breakfast here as canteen 3 is quite crowded in the mornings. On day she made fish in curry gravy. It was very yummy. The curry was not hot at all. I didn't have anything else but rice with the fish curry. It's difficult to find fish that can be eaten without swallowing the bone as well. Or fish that actually has more meat than bone. But this fish was so soft and meaty. If only they cook good food everyday. I would've eaten more since the pricing is a bit cheaper than outside food but I was afraid if I got too heavy I wouldn't be able to climb those staircases.
Canteen 2 but I didn't get a photo of the Indonesian girl (14/9/09).
Workers site housing facing Block 2.Tanjung Mahsuri was building a rubble retaining wall just in front of their site office. Their container style site offices were later towed away and they moved to the 1st floor of Block 1. I first saw a rubble retaining wall designed by Ir. Raymond Koay Ah Fatt who was the Head Design Engineer at Perunding Delima in 1995. Raymond was an Honours graduate from Australia and had a Master's from New Zealand. He had also worked with Dr. Lee Chiaw Meng & Partners at Marine Parade in Singapore. Dr. Lee passed away in May 2001. In Singapore Ir. Koay designed a raft foundation for a temple at Tampines using the biharmonic equation and the computer SMIS (Symbolic Matrix Interpretive System) which uses punched cards. I have been told that Raymond has since migrated to New Zealand.
Now I got to see how they built it on site. The foundation is a strip footing with no piling underneath. The subgrade is compacted and then lean concrete poured into the shuttering. BRC mesh is placed on top with bottom spacer blocks being small rocks. Bent-up bars are tied to the BRC mesh at intervals. A horizontal bar is tied to all the bent-up bars for stability. This strip footing is now concreted.
Lean concrete, BRC mesh and bent-up bars (10/9/09).
Concreting the rubble retaining wall strip footing (10/9/09).
The bent-up bars act like wall ties. They penetrate into the gaps between the rocks. Cement is pasted all over the rocks' sides so they adhere to the adjacent rocks.Laying rocks for the rubble retaining wall stem (8/9/09).
Rubble retaining wall in front of the Tanjung Mahsuri site offices (8/9/09).
Bird's eye view of the rubble retaining wall now also in front of Canteen 1 (23/9/09).
The pressure test was done by a HLS worker and I read the gauges daily and wrote down the readings. There was generally an approximate 2 psi drop per day. Some readings are a bit inconsistent because they may have added or reduced the pressure.
| Ara Hill Apartments Pressure Test |
| Date | B1 L4 (Left) | B1 L4 (Right) | B1 L5 (Right) | B2 L9 (Left) |
| PSI | | 10/9/09 | | | X,72,0,0 | |
| 11/9/09 | 75,70,28,0 | | | |
| 12/9/09 | 0,70,54,now | 0,0,0,58 | X,66,0,0 | |
| 14/9/09 | 80,80,80,50 | 0,0,0,56 | X,62,0,0 | |
| 15/9/09 | 50,80,74,0 | 0,0,0,58 | X,64,0,0 | |
| 16/9/09 | 45,75,70,0 | 0,0,0,56 | X,62,0,0 | |
| 17/9/09 | 40,75,66,0 | 0,0,0,54 | X,60,0,0 | 0,0 |
| 18/9/09 | 35,75,62,0 | 0,0,0,52 | X,58,0,0 | 50,0 |
| 19/9/09 | 35,72,60,0 | 0,0,0,52 | X,58,0,0 | 15,0 |
| 23/9/09 | | 0,0,0,50 | X,56,0,0 | |
| 24/9/09 | 30,70,55,0 | 0,0,0,50 | X,32,0,0 | 0,0 |
B1 = Block 1
L4 = 4th floor
(Left) = Left Tower
X = no pressure gauge attached to the pipe jutting above the floor
now = pressure test being done now and reading could not be taken
4 pressure gauges for the 4 apartment units on this floor (14/9/09).
These are the 4 pipes to the 4 apartment units on this floor. The pipes then go under the screeding to the 4 apartments. The readings for the table above are from left to right so 0, 0, 0, 56 means the first 3 readings are zero and the last reading on the right is 56 psi. If there is an "X" the pressure gauge is not attached to the pipe. The above recess in the wall is something like shown below. The steel riser pipe brings water to the roof tanks. A pump at the suction tank on the Lower Ground 2 (LG2) floor in the carpark of Block 2 supplies the water. There is no suction tank in Block 1. Block 1 receives all its water via the Block 2 to Block 1 water transfer pipe which then becomes a riser to supply water to the roof tanks. The top three floors of both Blocks 2 and 1 have water supply by booster pump which is located with the water tanks at roof level. Below the top three floors the apartments receive water supply by gravitational flow. It's like an elevator which skips floors. The dropper pipe for the apartments below the top three floors do not discharge water to the top three floors at all.
Header pipe for discharging cold water supply to the apartment units on each floor.
Mr. L.S. Hong, manager of HLS Construction tells us that the header pipe is the horizontal pipe which is attached to the dropper pipe for discharging water from the roof tanks to the apartments on each floor. The header pipe has as many outlets as there are apartments on this floor. When I was at site none of the headers had been attached to the dropper pipes yet. The dropper pipe, like the riser pipe, is steel. The header pipe is usually also steel. It then connects to the blue cold water PVC pipes jutting out from the floor.
According to the drawings there is a pressure reducing valve (PRV) on the 1st floor of Block 1 and 3rd floor of Block 2. Block 1 is 8-storeys and Block 2 is 10-storeys. There are roof tanks on both the left and right towers for both Blocks 1 and 2. The PRV is also located at both towers.
Mr. Tan Teng Koon, manager of Pure Water System, first mentioned PRVs when they were installing the Lakos Central Filtration System from Claude Laval Corp., USA for the Boulevard Hotel at Mid Valley. According to those who were there the PRV is supposed to reduce water pressure on the lower floors of high-rise buildings. The Ara Hill drawings also show a reduction in pipe diameter as the dropper heads towards the lower floors. For example for Block 2 from the 5th to 10th floor the dropper is 150 mm, 100 mm on the 4th floor, 80 mm from the 2nd to 3rd floor, 65 mm on the 1st floor and 32 mm on both LG2 and LG1 in the carpark. This could be an alternative to using a PRV.
This is the HLS store on the LG2 floor of Block 2. There are lots of pipes and fittings here.
The store has so many pipes and fittings that they can't be kept inside the store but overflow into the carpark.
