Sustainable working methods

sustainable working methods

Huge advances have been made in the way buildings are constructed over the last sixty years, insualtion materials, glazing, heating systems have all improved beyond recognition and it is now difficult to make major gains in efficiency. The way we generate heat is beginning to change with the introduction of ground source and bio-fuels BUT these ground breaking advances have not been reflected in in the way we are installing cable into our buildings.

Here in the UK we are still installing cable systems into our houses, schools and offices that were originally conceived and designed over sixty years ago!

If you could get access to the TARDIS and zipped back in time to a 1950s building site grabbed a sparky (let's call him 'Alf') bundled him back into the TARDIS then zapped forward in time again to a present day building site, pointed him at a house and told him to get on with the job of wiring it up he would be able to do it. OK, so I'm willing to concede that there would be a certain amount of head scratching and complaining going on as the materials used have certainly come on BUT Alf would still be able to carry out a competent job of wiring the house. Once he had finished if you then took Alf on a little side trip to six months in the future (before you took him back to the fifties - hey we do not condone irresponsible time travel here! We have enough to worry about without creating temporal paradoxes all over the place). When the family had moved into the house he had wired up. Alf would think he was on the deck of an alien space ship. The point I am trying to make is that the technology we are using in our homes and offices has evolved beyond all recognition in the last sixty years but the cable infrastructure in these buildings hasn't... WHY?

When you really get down to it the way we construct buildings hasn't changed by much in the last sixty years at all - I'm not talking about methods and techniques, I'm refering to the way the actual 'work' is carried out on site. There is far too much demarcation between site trades, and on the majority of sites nobody is prepared to take responsibility for ensuring that ALL of a building's disparate systems work together in harmony - what they need a systems integrator. At Intelligent Buildings we do exactly that, part of our role is to ensure that not only are the systems within a building talking to each other but the subcontractors are are as well! We call it "joining all the dots".

It is a common sense approach and initially can be very hard work including a certain element of knocking heads together but the rewards are tenfold. Wasteage is reduced, the installation becomes a lot more efficient and problem solving becomes simpler and more of a team effort.

More often than not the priority is on keeping the construction costs down with little forethought as to the future operating costs of a property which is very short sighted given that studies have shown that on average operating costs have exceeded the initial investment after just seven years.

To an outsider there doesn't appear to be much that needs to be change, it is only when you have worked within the sector as an outsider coming in do you realise what a fundamental change needs to occur within the industry in order for this unified approach to take place. This change can happen, it's easy people just have to start talking to each other.

What we advocate is picking up on everyones core competancies and specialisims, we don't do heating systems or fire detection, we're no use with door entry systems, we couldn't design an air conditioning plant to save our life - we leave those bits to the experts. What we do say is "we do building control", you install your specialist hardware we'll work with you to integrate the control into OUR specialisim,

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sustainable working methods