How Do They Do That? Test for Water Leaks on the Glass Curtain Walls of the Children’s Hospital

The other day, I noticed a funny looking contraption on the glass curtain wall panels on the south wing of the Children’s Hospital tower. From where I was standing it looked like a giant mosquito stuck to the side of the building. When I returned to get a better angle of the thing on the window, it had disappeared. At the end of the day, I had to be satisfied with the couple of photos I was able to capture. To my disappointment, when I tried to open the two images, they were blank. The next day, the device was nowhere to be found. The following day, the device was about halfway up on the curtain wall on the Children’s Hospital southeast wing. I clicked the shutter several times, but it clung, as it did two days prior, motionless to the side. It was then, I began to question my assumption. Approximately 30-minutes later, I came around the south side of the Children’s Hospital and to my amazement, the critter had come to life. At first, I thought it was misting water on the windows. As I got closer, I could tell, it was spraying water, with some force, directly on the windows. Bingo! After a close inspection of the enlarged images on the computer screen, I was quite certain that the piece of equipment or rack, which I was soon to learn, was part of a water leak testing system. The rack had 20 nozzles, four on each pipe, which sprayed water on the glass panel with some force. How the testing process worked would be my next task.

Perhaps you saw one of the glass panels being lifted by the crane to a location on the side of the Children’s Hospital tower. Did you wonder if the joints around and between the panels were sealed to keep out the elements such as water, dust, and air? I too had wondered about how such tests were done on highrise buildings. This post will illustrate how then such tests are conducted.