EFFECT OF CONSTRUCTIONAL DEFECT ON THE RATE OF MAINTENANCE OF EDUCATION PROPERTIES

Poorly designed buildings are more expensive to maintain. Besides, typical building designs in Nigeria usually do not incorporate human factors engineering and maintenance considerations. These design flaws makes facility maintenance of these components to be expensive with much higher resource requirements and could discourage the execution of (preventive) maintenance activities.

 

Poor supervision and unauthorized changes in design during the building infrastructure construction often distorts facility maintenance elements of the design thus making the execution of the later after commissioning to be cumbersome. Construction defaults are another source of the high cost of maintenance which happens during the construction stage and because of construction performance or material used.

Faulty construction is one of the most common causes of early deterioration. Common construction faults include inadequate compaction and failure to position the reinforcement, so that it has adequate concrete cover. Under almost any exposure conditions these faults will eventually reduce the service life of the structure as a result of reinforcement rusting after the concrete has become carbonated (Seeley, 1987).

 

As known, the environment of construction is constantly changing and the authorities actions continuously give new conditions. At the same time, competition between companies may become stronger factor that leads the contractor accept the bid with low margin of profit.  Also, (Grosskopf & Lucas, 2008) Showed that 69% of all construction defect claims in U.S. are related to moisture penetration through the building envelope. It is injustice to beer this ratio to construction defects lonely, because these defects that relate to moisture penetration may result from using of bad insulation material or poor implementation of these materials.

 

Defective construction includes activities such as compaction not done to specifications, which leads to ground movement and eventual failure of foundations. This may lead to the complete failure of a structure (Zietsman, 2008).