Yet another gameroom build log : My ArcadeForge

[bencao74]

exactly, there is plastic foil for the insulation material. So this should work. I´ve seen this kind installation in some old house also with Styrodur / Styropor.

Delivery time of furniture is 4 weeks. So time to finish the rest.






Comparing the old pics with the ripped walls this comes out really nice. Next I was painting the ceiling the last time and ripped of the paint protection from the wooden bars.








 

[bencao74]

Starting with the floor :





when I was fed up with floor I installed some sockets





Changing work keeps me motivated. Finally Lotte and Nike inspected my work

[Q*ris]

You're living the dream, man. 
Love to follow this build!

[Etienne MacGyver]

Great progress!

I like the laminate flooring

[bencao74]

I like the laminate flooring

  Thanks a lot !!!

[Arch]

This is coming along nicely, bencao! Nice cat too!

[Muerto]

Looking good! - nice progress!!

[scr33n]

Good job Bencao 

[level42]

Classy !

[leonk]

Looking Great! 

Strange design for your sub floor.. never seen that done before!  No worries about moisture seeping in and soaking insulation?

I was thinking the same thing, but realized that different countries have different building standards. For example, in Canada, that will not pass inspection for 2 main reasons:

- your footings are on top of the ground.  In Canada, because of -30C or colder winters, the ground swells and moves. It will break your floor and house into pieces.  Here we have to put concrete beams almost 2 meters deep into the ground! (below frost line)
- we never put wood close to ground due to termites or carpenter ants. It's a big problem here with 100+ year old homes.

Still, very interesting.  Some other things I found interesting about this build is:

- electrical lines are 16 amp.  (our standard is 15 or 20)
- electrical lines installed into round openings. We have a standard that all outlets must be in metal boxes. These boxes are all grounded to prevent shock and fire.

Keep up with the pics! And thank you for sharing.

[level42]

US/Canadian/UK electrical standards are ancient. We have left metal housings and tubes behind ages ago, thank god, everything is plastic.

Round holes are much easier to make in walls using one of these:


Another advantage is that the boxes can be connected together to make a row in any way you like:



We recently had a project at work, a data center from an Irish company, near Amsterdam. They had hired Irish installers and ALL electricity was done using metal piping and UK boxes. No problem, but they also used this for our fire alarm system and it was a nightmare, we had loads of earth leaks and practical problems. F.I. UK standards say that a device that is directly connected to the mains (without a plug) must have a switch installed near the device. However, it is kind of silly to make a switch near a fire control panel because you do -not- want someone to switch of the mains for a fire alrm, so there were a lot of discussions following.
We simply use a separate 16A group (fuse) which has its group switch in the electrical cabinet which is usually restricted access.
 The bad thing is that Dutch norms still allow metal piping and boxes so they were allowed to install it here...

I think that it is at least 45 years ago that metal was used here, maybe longer.

I can't think of how expensive it must be to still do metal piping.

On the other hand, I think US norms allow to run wire through fake walls without any protection in homes. We Must use( plastic) tube everywhere. like this:

or easier, flex pipe like this:

[Muerto]

same in Denmark! 

[leonk]

I should clarify some assumptions that were made in this thread; for those that have never done electrical work in different parts of the world.

Unlike most of the world, in Canada/USA most homes are build from wood. (Stone/brick is used on the outside of the house for beauty only.  It adds no structural support.  In fact, we use metal ties every few rows of brick, to attach the stone/brick to the wood!)

Wood is cheap .. I mean REALLY REALLY cheap for us.  We have forests in Canada that are bigger than 3X the size of all of Europe.  It's also a lot faster/easier to work with wood, than with stone.  Wood is also a lot warmer (imagine walking on a concrete slab when it's -30C outside .. imagine how much it will cost you to heat a concrete house vs a wood house).

Between the wood studs/joists (typically set 16" apart) insulation is installed, and finally, drywall/gypsum board is screwed into the wood. Inside these cavities, electrical, plumbing, cable TV, etc is ran.  Holes are drilled into the wood, and wire is pulled.  Typical electrical wire is called 14/2 (14 gauge solid core with 2 wires insulated, and a 3rd not).  The 2 insulated wires are in plastic, and all 3 are then twisted and bunched together in another outer insulation of plastic.  black wire is 110V, white wire is neutral, uninsulated wire is ground (which is the same as neutral, as the 2 connect together in the electrical panel).

So metal "tubes" are NOT used.  I can imagine it to be very difficult to work with and not flexible.  The ends though have to go into metal boxes.  If there's ever a SPARK, you don't want it to start a fire and burn your house down!  Hence why metal boxes are required by law.  We have plastic boxes, but they can only be used for low voltage applications (telephone, cable TV, internet).

I live in a 100 year old house.  It had old electrical wire, and no cable TV.  The advantage of wood homes is that it's very easy to run new wire without breaking the wall.  You drill a small hole at the top and "fish" the wire through.  You can also use really long, flexible, drill bits that drill through the wood, and then you can pull the wire.  Little patching .. and you're done. 

Hope this clears some things up.  Please do continue to share stories.. construction methods interest me a lot .. I've never worked with a concrete house before, and always wondered how the heck electrical wire is pulled through one.

[Etienne MacGyver]

They have the pipes and points in before pouring the concrete, and then the electrician only needs to pull the wires in with one of these:



That is what i have understand from "prefab" houses
basicly the house is build from concrete panels that where "pre fabricated" in the factory and put together on the building site



That are the inner walls, and then they put insolation on that and build a brick wall around it for the outside wall



and here the same building with the outer wall and the windows installed:



and inside the the two walls there is the insulation:



You get the idea i think

[level42]

The plastic boxes used here can easily withstand any sparks (although I have no idea how a spark can happen in a well installed installation), in fact because they are plastic there is no chance of passing through any sparks or mains carrying wires that may be damaged and get "open" unlike metal boxes.

For this reason your metal boxes must be earthed very well and there is a risk in that if the earth connection ever gets damaged or carrying a higher restinance.

So that's why I don't understand why you guys still use them.

I think the metal tubing is still used in buildings that are not homes over there. I have seen the wire as you described but with a metal shielding like a shower hose and I saw that a lot in non-residential buildings.

In general we try to hide our cabling as much as possible here. Like Etienne describes. My home was not built from prefab concrete elements but they used tunnel-building. Because they build a lot of similar homes in relatively large numbers on a certain site they use a metal tunnel or, if you want, mould. Concrete is poured around the tunnel and then they heat the tunnel from the inside using fixed torches to make the concrete set quicker. In is building style, and other poured concrete walls, the plastic pipes and wall outlet boxes are mounted before the pouring of th concrete.

If you have to make new piping in excisting hard walls then there is no choice but to make sleuths with a special "frees" (cutter ?)  In gypsum block walls which we often use for inside walls you can even do this with a hand tool easily by scraping.