It wasn’t an obvious problem until now, but the arrival of the home office, domestic data cabling and home automation have made it a pressing one.
While there has been much talk of adding data and coaxial cabling into new homes to make them smarter, how and where these cables should be run has been largely overlooked. Nick Thompson, main architect of the Integer House which put some cabling in ducts behind skirting boards fixed with screws, commented: “We were amazed at just how fast the superstructure of the Integer House went up but when it came to fitting out the services we seemed to step back into the dark ages. It’s an area of housebuilding which badly needs rationalising.”
Richard Moseley runs a building consultancy, Obuild, which specialises in these areas. “I see sorting out how we run services in housing as Lifetime Homes Phase Two,” he says. “There are two parts to the process. One is to introduce more accessibility into the service runs which essentially involves designing suitable spaces within the house. The other is to make the job of installing these services much faster and easier. This has already happened with plastic plumbing which is can be simply cut and pushed together. It also happens with wiring in the commercial sector. But porting the whole thing into housebuilding will take time.”
One business already working on doing just this is Weiland Electrics. They already produce a system called GST which is widely used in the commercial sector. It’s a modular system which does away entirely with the need for stripping cables and wiring up sockets and roses. Instead the actual task of wiring begins to resemble cabling up a computer network or a video recorder - all the sockets and cables you need arrive in a box and simply have to be connected in the correct order. Their technical manager Simon Horlock commented: “The technology of modular wiring is now well established: what we need is a new concept of how to build houses.” To this end Weiland are partners in the Meeting Customer Needs Through Standardisation research project involving Sussex University’s SPRU, Cardiff University, Wilcon Homes, Southern Housing Group, architect PRP and others aiming to address these and other issues.
Richard Moseley identifies flexibility as one of the problems. “Every one agrees that flexibility is a good thing and that any system we come up with must allow easy adaptation in the future. But that doesn’t sort out the problem of just how much flexibility you need to build in. Added flexibility comes at a price and frankly we’ve no idea just where to draw the line between flexibility and cost.”
There is also the difficult issue to be addressed of the deskilling of the workforce. One of the main reasons why plastic plumbing has taken so long to catch on is that there is very little in it for plumbers. Both Moseley and Horlock expect similar reactions from electricians if their job is reduced to simply on-site kit assembly. “To make sense of these innovations,” says Horlock, “you need what we call wet electricians, a new breed of specialists who have a broad understanding of the technical issues of all the services so that they are responsible for plumbing, wiring and even data cabling. We also need to design out the split between first fix and second fix. Fitting services within removable ducting must become a one stage process.”
Another area which may prove fruitful is the use of wiring looms. But Richard Moseley thinks their uptake in Britain is going to be of limited interest because the economic logic only makes sense with long production lines. “I think in the private sector the need for flexibility is going to make modular wiring a more important development.”
Source
Building Homes
