| Planning Today for Tomorrow’s
Technology Section 3 of 3 | designshare home
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| What makes sense for them to buy from
the contractor to install? One thing: Anything behind the walls, always have the contractor provide it. Along those lines (price point) one of the things we recommend to most of our clients: Don’t go out and bid for your technology any earlier than eight months prior to first use. If I’m building a high school and it takes me three years to build a high school, I bid my technology with the general construction trade. You want to delay it as long as possible. Why? Because it does change that fast. If I designed a data network today that you’re going to install-let’s say it takes two years-we’re saying if you’re opening a building in August of 2001, you don’t put the systems out to bid until November of 2000 at the earliest, only so that you get the latest, greatest thing at the current price point. Technology is changing, even data hubs and switches. The types of buildings being built-they’re definitely 1940, 1950 designs being replicated today, which means they don’t have infrastructure for technology. They don’t have the infrastructure that can support technology today or 40 years from now. One thing people lose sight of, when we build a school today, no one will give money to renovate that building for 30 or 40 years. So if I don’t put the power in there today for every student to have a laptop, it’s not going to be in there. One of the big issues we see is the electrical power requirements. Electrical engineers have not done their homework. We fight. We almost get into yelling matches with engineers around the country who are not paying attention to what’s happening with electrical requirements of technology. They are designing overkill. For example, an engineer says a computer requires 6 to 7 amps of power, for the monitor and the CPU. Where he’s getting that from is he looks on the back side of the computer and there’s a UL label. Section 19 is one of them, and they say "It’s rated at 4 amps," and look at the back of the monitor and it says 3 amps. So they say each computer is 7 amps. You de-rate that by 80 percent, so it’s 5.6 amps, but I can only design to 16 amps on a 20-amp circuit. These are National Electrical Code issues. So they’re saying, "I can put three computers on a single 20-amp circuit." So at each five-student workstation, there’s two 20-amp circuits right there. Most of them put in a TV and some other stuff. We’re seeing four, five circuits per classroom going into place. And each circuit is $750, almost $1,000 per circuit when you’re talking the cabling and the circuit breaker pertaining to it. But yet when you go and do all the research, you find out that the UL label has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of power that device draws. It has to do with the amount of power the manufacturer wants the box connection rated at. To determine the amount of power the device draws, you have to look at the manufacturer’s specifications, not the UL label. The engineers are simply reading the label. What we’ve found, we’ve gone out on the Web and look at Dell, Gateway, H-P, and we find out that the maximum power drawn by today’s top-of-the-line Pentium is 115 watts. One amp. The maximum power pull from a 17-inch monitor is 1 amp. If you de-rate that, because not everyone is going to run maximum power all the time, we’re saying 1.6 amps. When you start thinking how much it costs to install a 20-amp circuit in a classroom, each circuit is $1,500 to $2,000 total cost all the way back. So we’re saying $3,000 to $4,000 per classroom you don’t have to spend on electrical. This sounds like an area where a standard is sorely needed. It’s really needed. IEEE, the industry association of all electrical engineers, has all this information, but the engineers aren’t looking at it. The National Electrical Code does not address it. You’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per building in electrical requirements that are not needed. It’s a big money issue. What resources
can districts use to find planning information?
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| Author: Eric Butterfield
is the editor of School Construction News, http://www.schoolconstructionnews.com, a
bi-monthly news magazine covering the planning, funding, design, construction and
management of educational facilities.
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