Foundation | Volume #11
+ Container Rough Electrical Lessons
+ Update: Rough-Ins for Container Electrical Lessons — MC Cable over Romex
I’m late on the update, we had a busy week last week after getting back from our trip to Portland. The building and development landscape in Portland is markedly different from the Bay Area. Far fewer skyscraper-sized cranes along the skyline, but far more local housing developments — bobcats parked along the sides of roads, older houses mid-renovation, and modular components sitting in parking lots near popular streets.
Portland is a special place for housing and urban development. I stumbled upon CityObservatory.org not too long ago and was captivated by their deep research and fair and insightful reporting. It was through one of their reports/articles where I learned how invaluable policy was to making changes in local housing supply and impacting the way houses are built. In Portland particularly, ADUs are incredibly important to the densification of the city, production of housing, and overall economic growth.
*End of PDX Love*
Last week, while we were out of town, the container crew was busy routing all the electrical and plumbing work through the studs. I can’t emphasize enough how much I love using steel studs and railing for framing. 10' lengths notwithstanding, our cuts are limited and we don’t have to spend any time boring or notching wooden studs to run our electrical wires and PEX tubes.
The steel studs are prefabricated with openings to fit lines, so routing everything is smooth and painless. Finishing the rough installation will trigger another inspection to verify the lines are properly set up and that the fixtures will have adequate spacing for installation.
Here’s the problem — although we’re routinely familiar with use 14–3, 12–3 romex wiring throughout our home building and remodel projects, we’re combining variables on this project that make it unique compared to other container or modular projects that are near identical. If you compared our project to Ben Uyeda’s Home Depot container project, we variate by using steel studs in contrast to wood studs. But aren’t steel studs are common practice in many container projects — so why not romex? Well, when wiring build-in-place structures, running normal wiring with standard romex sheathing would be fine, but in our case, where site delivery is included, the impact of transportation on the structure could lead to unintended movement, where sheathing could be cut in transit and when live wires come in contact with the steel framing, the whole panel can short. That’s where MC cable comes in — NEC rated metal-sheathed, flexible wiring will prevent any shortages even in transport, making it the ideal material for our job.
You learn something new every day. The value is whether we learn from this lesson for next time.
🔥 Hot Takes
‘Build More Housing’ Is No Match for Inequality
It’s easy to blame one thing for causing problem — it’s the least amount of effort we can put into solving a problem and sets groups on a path towards a solution. But this article in CityLab quotes economists that looked deeper into socioeconomic trends to reveal that the housing policies created by local governments are addressing symptoms rather than the source(s) of the problem — and working in silos rather than a holistic approach isn’t bridging the gap for inequality.
Solving the economic and geographic divisions of America and other advanced countries is a task that goes far beyond local housing policy.
Get smart: Looking at the future of homes
Although the Sidewalk Toronto initiative by X’s Sidewalk Labs is a giant step in the right direction, I don’t believe it will be the poster child of a futuristic city. As this article describes it, Sidewalk is working from the ground up to develop a city/community on the Toronto waterfront that will infuse technology from the ground up. Technology to this team is more than superimposed tech on buildings and integrated IoT devices. It incorporates facets of building technology and economies of scale to make building faster, safer, and denser.
I agree that the future of cities will be taller, denser, and smarter, but that is a future for few rather than most. As sprawl continues to expand and contract, builders and homeowners should look at their current situations to understand how they can impact less-dense areas around cities that could benefit from the same technology and building advancement.
How I. M. Pei Shaped the Modern City
I am a huge fan of geometric shapes in architectural design. I.M. Pei, who passed last week at the age of 102, masterfully infused his geometric design sensibilities into landmark buildings around the world.
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