Day 218: Review of data/phone cabling - many things going wrong here!

Sometime on Monday or Tuesday (days 215-216) the data people came in to fitoff data, TV and phone points. However, things were definitely NOT done to plan or contract, and there's a lot of rectification work they'll have to do.

First of all, let's have a look at one of the fitoffs, the connector on the left is an F-Type aerial for TV, the blue is a data point.

Looks OK - except we upgraded all electrical fitoffs to be Clipsal Slimline, and this is a standard C2000 fitting. To explain it better, have a look at the next photo. It shows a Slimline powerpoint, and above it a standard C2000 phone fitoff - looks huge by comparison!


And just ignore the hole in wall for now... our construction drawings even have this reference added to the electrical plans: "Slimline white switches, data points and power points throughout (except for wet area switches)".

Next problem is in the walk-in-linen. There's going to be 4 shelves in the walk-in-linen, with the top one being at 1700mm. So of course, we planned ahead and specified the powerpoints and data returns to be at 1800mm above floor level. But this is what we got, the starserve box and data points at about 1000m, pretty much exactly where the shelf is meant to go.

They should be at the level of that wall light or higher, but definitely not lower as they've done.

And just to add insult to injury, we paid another $765 to upgrade to a Clipsal Starserve 3 input/8 output box. And what was installed?


It's a basic 2in/4 output box, with a passive 4 splitter instead of an active 8 splitter than I specified. The difference between the units is shown below...


*mad*! Basically, because we have 7 TV points through the house, I wanted a TV splitter with 8 amplified outputs. The basic unit they've installed has 3 amplified outputs, and using a 4 way passive splitter, 4 weaker passive outputs. All we want is what we paid for as specified in our contract, and I'm damn sure we're going to get that at least! To be fair, I don't think this is Metricon's fault - more likely the data people, either through laziness or deliberately installing a cheap unit and pocketing the difference, have screwed up.

So, basically the data people are going to have to be called in to fix all their f#ckups.

1. Replace all fat standardfitoff plates with slimline
2. Relocate starserve enclosure and all data returns in walk-in-linen to at least 1800mm or higher
3. Replace 2in/4out unit (3105VDU24T) with correct 3in/8out unit (3105VDU38IRT)

And this should be done prior to the shelves being installed, because they can't fix the laundry shelves while all the fitoffs are at the wrong height.

So again it's 3 steps forwards and 2 steps backwards. Wonder why these subcontractors find it so hard to read plans and follow them. So I was going to save up all these little things until our SS calls maybe later this week, but will be sending through an email tonight to our SS to make sure these things aren't glossed over. Meh.

T&T