Electrical Solutions for Real Estate

How a development actually loads the supply

A property development is not one electrical load but several stacked on top of each other. Individual apartments, shops and offices draw modest, highly diversified loads. Landlord services such as lifts, borehole and booster pumps, fire pumps, car park and corridor lighting, water treatment and central air conditioning run for long periods and are far less diverse. Commercial floors in a mixed-use scheme add server rooms, kitchens and retail refrigeration. Mixing all of that onto shared boards without thought makes metering, maintenance and fault isolation harder than they need to be.

Kenyan developments are almost always supplied by KPLC at low voltage into a main distribution board, with sub-main boards on the risers feeding each floor or block and final distribution boards inside the units themselves. The riser design settled at ground-breaking is the constraint every later tenant fit-out has to live with, so honest cable sizing and genuine spare capacity at that stage cost far less than retrofitting them.

Metering, landlord supplies and recovering costs

The commercial question on most developments is who pays for what. Meter boards let a landlord apportion consumption unit by unit instead of absorbing it into a flat service charge, and clean separation between tenant supplies and landlord services is what makes that possible. Where the landlord account sits on a commercial tariff, the motor load in lifts and pump rooms drags the power factor down and attracts penalties on the monthly bill, a recurring charge that an APFC panel is designed to remove.

Assemblies commonly specified on residential, retail and commercial developments include:

• Main distribution boards at the intake, sized around the KPLC supply and the ultimate connected load of the scheme rather than phase one
• Sub-main and final distribution boards on risers and inside units, arranged so a fault in one unit does not disturb its neighbours
• Meter boards for per-unit measurement in apartment blocks, malls and multi-tenant office floors
• ATS and MTS transfer panels for the standby generator serving lifts, fire pumps and common area lighting
• Motor starter and VFD panels for borehole, booster and sewage pumps and for central air handling plant
• Feeder pillar panels for estate and external lighting and for distribution across a gated development

Standards, approvals and the handover file

Panels installed in a building that will be sold, let or mortgaged get inspected far more often than panels in a private workshop. Assemblies manufactured to IEC 61439-1 and IEC 61439-2, built with KEBS-certified components and installed by EPRA-licensed contractors, give the project engineer and the incoming facilities team a defensible position. Board schedules, single-line diagrams and component documentation belong in the handover file, not in the memory of whoever wired it.

Panel Tech Systems builds to IEC 61439-1 and IEC 61439-2, holds ISO 9001 and assembles around Schneider Electric, ABB, Siemens and Control Techniques switchgear, with Rishabh instruments and current transformers where measurement and metering are required.

Getting boards specified early enough

The most expensive electrical decisions on a development are taken before a single board is quoted. Riser sizes, board positions, generator rating and the split between landlord and tenant supplies are all cheap to change on paper and painful to change in concrete. Bringing a panel builder into the discussion while the single-line diagram is still in draft usually shortens the programme later and avoids boards that are full on the day they are energised.

What a board costs depends on the incoming rating, the number and rating of outgoing ways, the form of separation, the switchgear brand specified, the enclosure and whether metering, transfer or power-factor equipment is included, so pricing follows a load schedule and a single-line diagram. Panel Tech Systems manufactures in Nairobi and dispatches field teams from there for installation and commissioning across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and South Sudan.