All wired up (and ready to go)

Tight lead times from clients throughout the construction sector are leading electrical installers to look at ways to shave valuable time off all projects.

A main driver for the cabling industry to introduce time-saving innovations comes from the public sector, on schemes including schools and hospitals.

Projects such as the Government’s Building Schools for the Future programme will provide cabling installers with a fair chunk of work over the next few years. In his pre-Budget speech, Gordon Brown backed the Building Schools programme further, with an extra £36 billion for construction and refurbishment.

For any contract, time is money, and the public sector can be very cost-efficient, so any savings are absolutely critical. Lead times on schools projects are dictated by term times, so everything is tight.

It is a sign of the electronic age that there is now more data and information cabling going into school buildings than there is power cabling. When working on schools projects, installers are faced with increasing pressure to fit more cabling into smaller spaces. The same heavy demands are true across the board, from other public sector projects such as hospitals to private sector ventures like offices and shopping centres.

With these high demands in mind, if contractors went into a job with a clean sheet, time, space and cost would convince them to specify wire cable tray over alternatives such as perforated steel.

Installation times

It is generally considered possible to install three metres of traditional perforated steel tray in an hour. Using wire cable tray allows you to install cabling 30% faster.

The time savings are mainly due to the fact that wire cable tray is lighter and easier to handle than perforated steel. If you save half an hour each time you transport 20 or 30 metres of tray across the site, that saving will make a big difference by the end of the project.

The most significant time saving lies with the product’s flexibility. Contractors buy wire cable tray in straight lengths, cut sections out with bolt cutters on site and bend them to fit. When working with bends and junctions for perforated steel tray, installers have to order pre-manufactured components ahead of time instead of using bolt cutters on site.

Using wire cable tray, installers can modify the awkward sections while the rest of the team puts in the straight sections.

You don’t need power tools or a licence for hot work when working with wire cable tray, as you would when working with perforated steel. This is of great benefit when working in a hospital, for example, as there is no need to close off the ward.

The flexibility of wire cable tray allows installers valuable inches with which to work in tight refurbishment projects. Cablofil is currently supplying a project for Marks & Spencer, where the services are so tight that contractors have difficulty getting their fingers into certain spaces. With Cablofil, they have a flexible tray that they can modify to fit the space available.

Training on the wire

Installing wire cable trays is hardly rocket science, and the job can be carried out by an experienced cabler under the supervision of an electrician. This leaves more qualified and experienced operatives free to use their skills elsewhere on site. Cablofil offers free on-site training, with a typical session taking about 30 minutes. The company’s engineer will show installers how to join lengths of tray, and how to cut and form it using bolt cutters. Installers are also tutored on fixing brackets, loading capacities and spacings.

Many contractors working on public sector projects, such as hospitals, do not have English as a first language. Technical terms do not translate well and it helps if installers are working with materials that are straightforward to use. Wire cable tray is a highly visual product to work with – trainers find they can just hand it over and people understand easily what is required to install it.

Because wire cable tray is easy to handle, it also makes health and safety regulations easy to observe. In these safety-conscious days, most people on site wear gloves. This can be incredibly laborious, and a product that can be felt and worked with through protective clothing is of great benefit.

Despite specifications for buildings to include higher levels of cabling, and greater demands for contractors to install cabling on time and in more constricted spaces, installation costs have not risen very much over the last ten years. This can be put down to demands from clients for contractors to find more efficient and economical ways of getting the job done.

The public sector holds great potential, and it is up to the cabling industry to find innovative means to meet this demand within cost-efficient specifications. One way of doing this is by studying the efficiencies of cabling products.

Wire cable tray is not only quicker to install than perforated steel, the materials are also 25% cheaper. Considering that a hospital can take 500 000 metres of cabling, which in turn would use 40 000 metres of wire cable tray, this can make an enormous saving on just one job.

Paul Courson is managing director for Cablofil UK.