THE DECISIONS YOU'LL NEVER SEE | Monty Majeed & Nicolas Sleiman
Walk into a finished building and the electrical design is the last thing you'll notice. The lights come on, the power stays on and nothing needs fixing. According to our Principal Electrical Engineers and Team Leads, Monty Majeed and Nicolas Sleiman, that's exactly the goal, and most of what makes it possible is decided long before anyone is thinking about electricity.
Take the main switchroom and risers. Early in design they're just boxes on the architect's plan, and there's constant pressure to shrink them to make room for more units. Nicolas would rather fight for that space in week two than try to find it during construction, because once the slabs are poured, there's no getting it back. Get it wrong and you're left with long cable runs through the car park, no room for EV charging down the track and core drilling through finished slabs.
Then there's how much power a building really needs. Add up the rating of every appliance and you get a number the building will never see. Not every apartment is cooking, running the air conditioning and charging a car at 6pm. Working out what genuinely runs at the same time is what stops a project paying for a bigger substation, heavier cables and larger switchboards than it needs.
Monty applies the same thinking to power outages. Emergency lighting has to work instantly so people can get out. Fire pumps and smoke control need to keep running for as long as the fire does. Air conditioning can wait. Treating everything as critical is one of the most common mistakes he sees, and an expensive one, because the backup system ends up far bigger than the building needs.
Sometimes the best decision is questioning the brief itself. For years, apartment briefs asked for Pay TV and free to air outlets in every living room and bedroom, with all the cabling and equipment behind them. Nicolas noticed most residents now stream over wifi, so he replaced them with a single data point behind the TV. It's simpler, cheaper to maintain and closer to how people actually live.
None of these decisions show up in a finished building. When they're made well, the building just works.
Thanks Monty and Nicolas for sharing how you think about the parts of a project most people never see.
