BIOTRANS UK - FAQ page. Biotrans Field Liners (Internationally patented field liner protection)

Q1: How long will a Field Liner last for?
A:The below-ground portion is completely inert in soil and will last indefinitely. The above-ground collar is made from 4 layers of UV resistant woven fabric, each successive layer is designed to last at least 20 years.

Q2: What does the Field Liner cost?
A:The cost depends on the model and/or size of Field Liner chosen. In general however, the cost of a Field Liner is much less than the cost of the new pole that it will be fitted to, while its value to the pole owner is much greater than the cost of the pole.

Q3: When will I recoup the up-front capital cost required to fit Field Liners to my poles?
A:Since costs are recouped from various sources such as reduced inspection frequencies and eventual elimination of remedial treatment costs; reduced preservative requirements; reduced insurance premiums payable on pole inventories, reduced pole replacement rates, and so on, the crossover points of the savings and costs graphs vary according to local factors specific to the pole owner.
However all the NPV case studies conducted have shown that the crossover point occurs after 7 years, whereafter costs become negative and factors such as cost savings and IRR's begin to increase dramatically.

Q4: That's all very well and we really want to start saving all this money. However, we didn't budget for Field Liners this year, so how can I afford to start buying them right away?
A:Various cost-cutting measures can be implemented before you even buy a Field Liner - for example, preservative retentions need no longer be specified at H4 loadings, since poles protected by Field Liners are not actually in soil contact - they are really in H3 service conditions.
Furthermore, reductions in insurance premiums to cover the effects of premature pole failure can be negotiated immediately.
Can you redeploy some of your maintenance crews into adding value to other aspects of your service delivery? For example, immediate reductions in budgets under current negotiation for future expenditure can be calculated from predicted reductions in inspection frequencies, and so on.

Process-related

Q5: Can Field Liners be fitted to poles already in service?
A:This would probably be impracticable since the pole would have to be removed from the ground in order to fit the Field Liner. Also, the Field Liner is a PRIMARY, PREVENTATIVE treatment - if fitted to a pole BEFORE any rot has happened, it will prevent it from EVER happening. Therefore, if a pole in service was excavated and found to be rotten, there would be no point in fitting a Field Liner to it. On the other hand, if the pole was NOT rotten, a Field Liner would be beneficial but impracticable. However, this question has been asked so many times over the years that Biotrans scientists have now developed a Field Liner that CAN be fitted to poles in service.

Q6: Will the use of Field Liners slow down our installation process?
A:No - the poles can be delivered to the end-user by the treater with heatshrink Field Liners already fitted, or alternatively, Woven Fabric Field Liners can be applied in 2 - 3 minutes by the end-user at the side of the hole that the pole will be set in. The Bioplast^TM inner sleeve is an integral part of each model.

Technical

Q7: Should Field Liners be used with ALL poles irrespective of preservative type?
A:For environmental reasons alone, there is no doubt that every preserved woodpole in the ground should have a Field Liner on it.
While the most mobile of the 3 major ground-contact preservatives used around the world is creosote, penta is also oil-based and visibly leaches from poles in service.
Thirdly, while waterborne salts treatments like CCA have traditionally been considered to have been "fixed" in poles, numerous documents published by the International Research Group on Wood Preservation in recent years have documented their losses from wood in soil - while at the practical level, documentation of rotten salts-treated woodpoles constitutes a daily task of remedial treaters around the world.
Then, apart from the environmental reasons, when the point is reached at which sufficient preservative has been lost from a pole, that pole is no longer protected from biodeterioration - and that's when all the cost factors and financial losses associated with pole failure become a reality.

Q8: Why is there a small hole left at the bottom end of the Field Liner?
A:The hole is there to let the butt of the woodpole "breathe" and remain aerobic. If it became stagnant, anaerobic bacteria would rot it.
The hole therefore allows 2 important things to happen in this respect - it lets the pole continue acting as a "wick" that conducts groundwater upwards, and it simultaneously prevents rainwater-buildup in the sleeved portion of the butt. These two effects in turn combine to maintain a microaerophilic environment, with traces of oxygen in the pole, that neither supports anaerobic bacteria nor does it support the strongly oxidative wood-destroying fungi.
The Field Liner is actually a biotechnological device in this respect.

Q9: This is related to the last question - are you SURE that the Field Liner will not cause the butt of the pole to become waterlogged?/
A:Six-year field trails have proven that this is not true - the interiors of the butts of lined poles have actually had LOWER moisture contents than unlined ones.

Q10: This is also related to question 8 - if there's a hole at the bottom of the Field Liner to permit water movement, won't that let the preservative escape from the pole?
A:The microstructural orientation of a woodpole in service prevents this - see the drawing on the Home Page of this website. At the microscopic level, the treated outer sapwood vessels surrounding the heartwood of a preserved woodpole in the ground resemble a bunch of drinking straws held vertically around a piece of heartwood - and any liquid in them escapes largely from their open ends at the bottom (of course, wood vessels are not 100% identical to drinking straws in that they DO have pits in their sides that allow some lateral movement of liquids between vessels in living trees, but such movement is relatively slight in poles). In the case of a pole with a Field Liner fitted, the open ends at the bottoms of the outer sapwood vessels are closed off by the overlap of the Field Liner, and the weight of the standing pole keeps the closure tight. Field Trials have confirmed all this, and they showed that the preservative that diffused into the heartwood with time actually IMPROVED standards in terms of producing increased depths of preservative penetration.

Q11: What if the Field Liner is torn and has other holes in it? Won't that cause the pole to rot?
A:Folk sometimes imagine this to be a catastrophic event - rather like a balloon bursting - but the reality is that if an unintentional hole occupies, say, 5% of the area of the Field Liner, very little preservative leakage occurs because the hole doesn't actually "draw" preservative out of the pole. You're left with at least 95% of the Field Liner's protection.

Q12: With preservatives moving down the pole by gravitational forces and becoming concentrated there by the Field Liner, won't that result in the Field Liner eventually filling up with overflowing preservative?
A:Calculations show that the volume of preservative in the whole of a specification-treated pole is less than the volume of wood in the below-ground region of the butt of that pole. So the Field Liner cannot fill up with preservative from the pole - even if all of it ran down.

Q13: Well the results certainly show that the Field Liner protects the pole and greatly extends its service life. But what about heartrot becoming a significant factor in the life cycles of poles whose service lives have been greatly extended by the use of Field Liners?
A:The preserved sapwood of a woodpole contributes 90% of the bending strength of the pole, and since woodpoles are biological material with a degree of variability in their physical properties, they are conventionally 400% overengineered in pole specifications. Therefore, even if the untreated heartwood was totally lost, the pole would still have sufficient strength to perform its functions. On the other hand, when poles without Field Liners do succumb to heart rot, the less visible, but equally important, contribution from concomitant shell rot has also played an important role in the failure of the pole. With a Field Liner in place no shell rot whatsoever can occur, and indeed, lateral preservative diffusion with time even increases the thickness of the preserved shell, so heartrot could never be sufficient to cause that pole to fail.

Q14: Many plastics contain phthalates which are harmful to fish and generally environmentally undesirable. What about Field Liners in this regard?
A:All the plastics used in Field Liners are food-grade plastics with, for example, EPA approvals for use in food contact, and they are also manufactured to conform with European Directives as such. Even the masterbatch used to include the fungicide with the Bioplast^TM is phthalate-free, so Field Liners are completely free of phthalates and they are recyclable.

Q15: What if I think of any more questions? Do you have an MSDS? Do you have Users' Specifications that I can read?
A:Contact any Biotrans personnel via their e-mail addresses (see "Contacts") and they will be only to pleased to discuss any points you wish to talk through.

BIOTRANS SITE MAP

Biotrans Home Page: After a decade of research and development, Biotrans scientists produced a patented method of pole preservation which is both technologically sound and meets international environmental requirements. The Biotrans Field Liner is a unique product which protects the pole, without doing harm to the environment. The Field Liner is manufactured in such a way that chemicals with an insecticide or fungicide action and confined within the Field Liner to proect the pole and lengthen pole service life without these chemicals leaching to the soil around the pole. The Biotrans Field Liner is patented in several countried around the world and manufactured under licence.

Biotrans Products - the Field Liner: The Biotrans Field Liner can be used by Utility companies for electricity and telephone distribution, in the Agricultural sector, especially where wooden poles are used in the production of export crops. Field liners can also be used on wooden poles used to construct fences, verandahs and pergolas. The preservation of poles by the use of a Biotrans Field Liner results in a saving in the cost of pole replacement and creates a 'superpole' which can be re-sold at the end of its service life.

Field Liners can be fitted manually in a matter of minutes, or by machine. In the USA, engineers designed an automatic heat-shrink machine to fit Biotrans Field Liners to wooden poles for an electrical distribution line. Fitting the Field Liners manually requires no special skills or technical knowledge.

In countries where the use of Creosote is still allowed under environmental regulations, the Biotrans Field Liner prevents any leaching of the preservative into the ground around the wooden pole. In many countries, medical research has found components of preservatives used in wood to be carcinogenic

About Biotrans: Biotrans International's vision and mission statements are based on a firm belief by the company's founders that woodpoles would remain the best alternative to steel, fibreglass or concrete in cost, performance and environmental terms.

Biotrans International environmental biotechnologists and wood preservation microbiologists were driven to find a permanent solution to the problem of so-called 'preserved' poles rotting long before their service lives had elapsed.

With a strong in-house research and development base, and by working with utility companies and research organisations to conduct scientific feasibility tests in Africa, North America, Europe and Australasia, Biotrans perfected the Field Liner solution to woodpole decay.

Costs & Savings using the Biotrans Field Liner: In a case study for a Biotrans customer which was undertaken by UNISA MBA students, the annual costs of pole replacement was significantly reduced on poles fitted with the Biotrans Field Liners. In addition, annual and accumulated savings were considerable using these Biotrans Field Liners.

Biotrans Field Liner Literature: Over the past decade, the founders of Biotrans, AA Baecker and MR Behr have produced research papers which have been presented at various conferences around the world, and published in Industry and Environmental journals in South Africa and overseas.

Biotrans Field Liner - Frequently Asked Questions: Among the questions asked and answered, the most queries are related to the life of poles fitted with the Biotrans Field Liner; the cost of the Field Liner; where immediate cost savings can be effected and questions relating to the technical process of fitting the Biotrans Field Liner either by the Pole Treater in the Pole Yard or by the End User on site. Questions regarding the presence of phthalates (often found in plastics) was answered decisively as all elements in the Biotrans Field Liner are approved as 'Food Grade'.