Ipswich Borough Council – via 3 teams at Chantry Park, Holywells Park and Christchurch Park - maintain all natural surfaces of sports grounds, open spaces, schools and play areas in the Borough.
When the decision was taken to pull the synthetic surface maintenance in-house, the council decided that a Verti-Top and Verti-Comb from Charterhouse Turf Machinery were the right tools for the tasks at hand.
“In addition our grounds teams also offer an external contracting services through Borough Landscapes,” explained Chantry Park Manager Ian Clarke. “Within our remit is specialist turf care, landscape design, wildlife and habitat management plus much more.
"To do all this work we’re lucky to have a large machinery fleet of over 250 units so it was logical to add some synthetic kit to our range, enabling us to deal with all types of surface we come across in the Borough.”
At the town’s two main sports centres, 3G pitches have been installed, along with an ever-increasing number of schools that are now playing sports on artificial surfaces.
Ian again: “We’d looked at the maintenance specifications as outlined by the pitch installers and then looked for machinery which fulfilled the grade. It was really the knowledge and support offered by Curtis Allen of Charterhouse and Adrian Brown from our local dealer Tomlinsons that sealed the deal – that and the quality of the kit of course.
"Curtis and Adrian trained up 12 operators on the new machines and have provided excellent back-up support when we’ve needed it.
"With the Charterhouse kit now established in our fleet, we’re in a position to increase our working capacity and take all synthetic maintenance work in our stride. In fact, we won an additional contract after a local school came to us with concerns over an imminent FA pitch inspection. Together with advice from Charterhouse and a deep clean from our Verti-Top, they passed the test with flying colours.”
The Redexim Verti-Comb is the Councils most used piece of kit, utilised at least one school site a week. Whereas, depending on the specification of the client, the Redexim Verti-Top can offer anywhere between 3 and 16 cleans at a site each year.
Last word from Ian: “From the very first demo of the Redexim Verti-Comb, the impact was evident immediately. The team at the sports centre could see and feel the difference after just one pass by the machine - everyone commented that it was by far the best the pitch had ever looked.”
