Electrical Installation in the Dining Hall
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wires coming up from the floor meet in a junction box. The BX (metallic wire) then continues onward to enter the wall in an access hole.
There are many components in the dining hall that need electricity. Overhead lights, fans, emergency lights, fire alarms, and electric switches and outlets to name just a few. Power to the dining hall originates in the basement space under the kitchen and then feeds into the larger space via conduits that are buried under the concrete floor. But what happens to those wires when they rise out of the ground, and how can they be hidden from view?
Wires for enter an access hole into the sip.
Many houses and buildings are built with a stud frame that is essentially hollow and can be filled with electrical wires traveling all around. However, the dining hall is a timberframe where the structural components are all inside the room and exposed. The wall is comprised of sip panels which are placed all around the structure as a “skin”. In this case our “skin” is about 12 inches thick and filled with expanded polystyrene - which is a solid foam insulation.
cut-outs from the access holes sit on the top of the wainscotting framing.
Electrical wires come up from the floor in plastic conduits that are hidden from view by a wainscotting around the lower portion of the wall. To get up higher and into the roof area, these wires are fished (threaded) through the interior of the sip panel. This is managed by drilling out access holes in the sip panels and then drilling out a narrow channel between these access holes. A string is then used to pull the wire from one hole to another - daisy-chaining up to the desired location.
Labor intensive for sure, but it allows the big space to be wired without a lot of unseemly wires stapled to the surface of our beautiful walls and timberframe structure. Check out the short video below to follow the path of one circuit.
The distance between the holes is limited to how long your drill bit is. This one is almost 5’ long.
