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Clean Sheet Design4 August 20263 min read

Designing a board someone can maintain

A distribution board is a document as much as it is hardware. The difference shows up five years later, at 2am, in the dark.

Any competent electrician can make a board that works on the day it is installed. The test is what happens the first time someone else has to work on it.

Label everything twice

Spare ways are not spare if nobody knows what they were intended for. We label the outgoing ways, the containment runs and the schedule inside the door — and we photograph it before the lid goes on.

Leave room for the next person

Twenty per cent spare capacity costs very little at design stage and saves an entire additional board when the building grows. The same applies to containment and riser space.

Handover is part of the job

Test certificates, as-built drawings, schedules and a short note on how the system is intended to operate. It is the difference between an installation and an asset.