Week 66-68 - 1st Fix Electric and Plumbing

For those not in the ‘know’ [he says being only recently knowing himself – and ‘knowing’ being a fairly relative word]

1^st fix is when you run all the pipe work and cabling through the structure of the building for all your electrical and plumbing needs. 2^nd fix is when you put all the relevant taps/plugs/lights etc. on the end of these cables and pipes. Are we all following?

This means however that you have to make your mind up where a lot of things are going to go in the finished building now, with very little physical land marks to go on. Time will tell if I have laid everything out as well as it could be I suppose, but to be honest I do already plan to lie and say everything was intentional, regardless of the outcome – so bear that in mind!

As we saw in the last post we now have the internal walls creating the residential bathroom and utility closet and the kitchenette and WC of the gallery. The new main soil pipe for the building we put in way back at the beginning of the project already came up to floor level in the right hand corner of the picture above.

The large black pipe connects to the two toilets and then slims down to a 40mm pipe that continues to 3 sinks and the utility closet for washer and drier. The thinner white pipes you see are the water supply pipes to all utilities and also to where the hot water boiler will be. In the same pipe it then runs away from the boiler to sinks for hot water. There is also pipe work running through the floor for the shower tray waste.

The first job with the electrics was to split the mains power where it comes into the building in the front corner and run it to the different areas of the building. We will be having 4 fuse boards in all, one for each floor/area of building. The electric supply we have is a 3 phase 100 amp supply – or in other words BIG! Unfortunately this also requires big cables.

Thank you to my brother Paul who came up to visit me for a weekend to help me run these 2 large reals of cable to the new fuse boards. You may be able to see in the picture above that the cables are not only very thick, they are also armoured with steel wire all around the outside. This makes them less than flexible! To be honest it was a job just getting them off the drums, let alone thought the walls and ceiling. These big cables don’t play well with corners.

Large supply cables running thankfully in straight lines here to the different fuse boards

Cupboard for MOS Workshop fuse box. Each of the larger silver cables run to isolation boxes for the larger machinery

Cables running down to the 2 main light switch points for the ground floor and lower ground floor workshops

While the buildings in an open skeleton like this rather than boarded and plastered etc. it is obviously far easier to run cables around. To this end, during this stage I have also run cables to fully network the building, shown below terminating in the new loft space where we will have a network box.

We have also put in the fire proof cable for the fire alarm and run speaker cable for recessed ceiling speakers.

All in all for this stage of wiring we have run over 1.7 kilometers of cable. This will grow to well over 2km by the time all floors have been fully fitted out.