IS YOUR FLOOR BOX REALLY NECESSARY?

The ‘biscuit tin’ floor box with its piano‐hinged lid has become the standard vehicle for connecting the cable which is fed below the raised floor to the desk equipment. Sometimes the unit has been specially developed — at what one can only presume to be considerable cost in the case of prestigious buildings like the Norman Foster Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank headquarters. In most installations, they are more mundane derivatives of the floor box which was housed in the floor screed and provided on a design module of something between 1.5 and 2m. Despite the greater flexibility supposedly inherent in a raised floor solution, the reality is that the floor box in the raised floor copes no better with the transition between the ‘secondary’ and the ‘tertiary’ wiring than it did in the screeded floor.