CULTEC's recharger 330XLHD has a capacity of over 400 gallons, making it one of the largest chambers available. It was installed at Shemin Nurseries
in Greenwich, Conn.
Photo: Courtesy of CULTEC

Shemin Nurseries, Inc., is a wholesale supplier of landscape and nursery supplies. The company also stocks a wide assortment of trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and irrigation and drainage products. With 28 locations across 14 states, Shemin has been a top-performing wholesale landscape supply company for over 55 years.

In 2008, the company pursued the subdivision of its entire Greenwich, Conn.-based location, splitting the property into five lots with a private right-of-way roadway. Under this new arrangement, four lots would be marketed and sold as separate residential properties and the fifth would be the nursery. A significant portion of the property is wetlands.

However a majority of the upland areas will be part of the new residential lots. At the beginning of 2014, Shemin Nurseries implemented the design and began construction on the common improvements of the approved subdivision.

With the addition of the roadway and other impervious surfaces, Stamford, Conn.-based Redniss & Mead, Inc. engineers needed to include a new stormwater management system to mitigate the increased stormwater runoff. In addition, the roadway leading into the development had to be mitigated for peak flows and stormwater volume. The project required that the team provide detention on the site using a subsurface stormwater management system.

Given the requirements of the site, the team chose CULTEC Recharger® 330XLHD, an efficient chamber that has a relatively low volume in the early stages of a storm. The chambers were supplied by the client, Shemin Landscape Supply, and installed by White Contractors based out of Old Greenwich, Conn.

A stormwater system, which includes 204 chambers, was placed beneath Shemin's current employee parking lot of about50 parking spaces. This location was chosen because during the approval process. The town of Greenwich ruled that the wetlands were not to be used as a volume control function for the drainage.

The unit itself measures 52 inches wide by 30.5 inches high and has an installed length of 7.5 feet long with a bare chamber capacity of 7.5 cubic feet per linear foot. The CULTEC system provides a total of 17,429 cubic feet of storage, maximizing storage capacity within a small footprint to best satisfy the requirements of the site.

In addition, a Vortechs® Model 2000 and a VortSentry® HS unit produced by another manufacturer are placed upstream from the pipes leading to the CULTEC system. These oil-grit separators pre-treat stormwater runoff before it flows into the chambers using a cyclonic separation method to control pollution. Another two hydrodynamic separators will be placed in the roadway to provide pre-treatment for the pipes that will be in-letting into a rain garden and a surface water quality detention basin.

For additional information about Shemin Landscape Supply, visit www.shemin.net or follow them on Facebook. For more information about CULTEC's stormwater chambers, please call (203) 775-4416 or visit www.cultec.com.