Plug n play mechanical room

Gene Davis_3

On the latest "This Old House" series, the gang is building new. Actually, they tore down an old house first, but what they are doing is all new, right from the foundation up.

They have Tedd Benson involved, of timberframe fame, and the house is a totally pre-engineered package, a hybrid frame of timbers and beams and panelized walls and floors.

All the radiant floors are shop-built, meaning that I'joists, OSB sheathing, and beams are all made there, then each panel gets its tubing and joist-track and insulation. When installed at the site, the PEX connections are made there.

CNC is used extensively. For example, all the between-bay holes in the I-joists needed for the tubing are CNC cut. Sure looks easy doing track and tube and insulation when it is on the floor under your feet.

The mechanical room is shop made as a three-wall unit, U-shaped in plan, all wall surfaces inside the room done with 3/4" MDO plywood, and the boiler, control board, electrical panel, etc., is all installed. The "room" is flown in with a crane, the same crane that is being used to set all the pre-made walls and floors and stair sections.

They showed another mechanical room, completed for another job, in which there was a floor panel under as part of the structure, and this one contained two water heaters all set and piped, besides all the other mechanicals.

They even have the kitchen room module complete as a plug n play, done with cabinets, electricals, and even the microwave.

Does this have a future? Should plumbing and heating contractors think about how they can shop-build mechanical rooms, forklift them over to their dock, and load them onto a flatbed for shipment to jobs?

Or, is this just "this old house" giving us a whiz-bang show for entertainment?

Rocky_3

\"Panellized\" is what's coming I think

We are already doing that on a smaller scale. We pre-fab the boiler piping here at our shop. We pre-fab the air separator/expansion tank, boiler and DHW pumps, boiler feed/backflow valve, and the outdoor reset control, with pump wiring already done, on one piece White Board. We also have several prefabbed supply and return manifolds with three, four or 5 zones, complete with zone valves, ball valves, drains etc on another piece of white board. We prefab the DHW tank piping from the unions out so that we just connect the two union halves together on the job. This does three main things for us: It allows me to keep my guys working when things are slow in the field by allowing them to prefab in the shop; it keeps my installation costs down because all the tools and parts are available at the shop so there are not a billion hours wasted running back and forth from a job to a supplier, and, it allows me to do more installations during the busy season because I already have 60% of all my piping done and about 40% of my wiring. I just have to connect my prefab panels to each other. It is a win-win-win situation.
My two cents worth,
Rocky