A working machine shop, rewired and re-served, without losing a broadcast day.

The brief

BBC Elstree's machine-shop wing needed its electrical infrastructure brought back up to today's regulations, without disrupting the workshop side of the site, which keeps the rest of the studio campus moving. The existing board layout had grown ad-hoc over years of small additions; circuits were sharing protection in ways that wouldn't pass a fresh EICR, and there was nowhere clean to add the next machine.

What we did

Aaron and the team installed a new wall-mounted distribution board and ran SWA cables in to feed it. Metal cable tray went up along the structural beams; perimeter trunking dropped down to small-power and lighting circuits at workshop benches. Containment was sized with a comfortable margin so the next set of machinery additions doesn't mean ripping anything back out.

• New surface-mounted distribution board, sized for current load plus headroom.
• SWA cable runs from the incoming supply, dressed neatly on cable tray.
• Galvanised metal tray and perimeter trunking through the workshop and along the heritage brickwork.
• Small power and lighting circuits throughout, first fix, second fix, fully tested.
• Electrical Installation Certificate issued; circuits labelled and recorded for facility management.

What changed

The workshop now runs on a clean, properly documented installation that's ready for the next decade of production work. Distribution headroom means new machine additions can be quoted on time and circuit availability rather than as another remedial project. And, because everything was installed alongside live operations, the broadcast schedule never noticed.