Not a smooth start in the week

On Monday I continued to estimate the data outlets and cable length in ‚Castle Court‘, I needed half the Day to finish that task.
After my lunch Mark (another Mark!) gave me a new task, to estimate the data outlets and cable length in the Ulster University on 9 Floors. I also have to estimate the cable length for the CCTV and access control
in the university. On Tuesday I was halfway through the estimation for
the data outlets and the cable length for them.
Later that day we decided to make some burger and suprisingly it worked better than expected. We were a little bit concerned due to our awesome pans that got a nice little dent in the middle therefore are only getting hot in the centre. This morning Mark and I took a look at my measurements and the blueprints for ‚Castle Court‘. As we went through my measurements and the blueprints we realised that we have a little problem the cables are too long (over 90m). And without any additional information or a site visit we’re can’t solve that problem. But we can’t do a site visit so we had to do a lot of assumtions for the pricing of that job. We will see how that goes.
After having lunch and a little chat with my co-workers I continued to do the measurement for the Ulster University. I finished the measurement for the data outlets, tomorrow I’m going to finish the estimating for the CCTV and access control. And hopefully I won’t encounter any problems.

Two weeks over, six to go

This weekend was a pretty boring weekend we didn’t do that much. We went to the city centre even though everything is opened on saturday and sunday its only till 6pm which was bad for us because we decided to go at 7pm. So we arrived at the city centre everything was closed but before we headed back to our accomendation we decided to walk through the market that they put in front of the city hall. The theme of the market was food from around the world you could find everything from german food to food from africa, we bought some german sausages before we went back home.
Today we went to tesco and iceland to buy food and water for the next days/week.
I’m looking forward to the next 6 weeks.

Guests from Germany, a trip to Derry and a lot of measuring

Yesterday Lawrence introduced me to one of the tasks at KNI, which is essential for structured Cabling.
He showed me the blueprints of three floors in the ‚Castle Court‘ that need to be rewired, but before we can do that we have to estimate the data outlets that are needed and the rough cable length.
Lawrenced showed me how they usually run the cables within a building, which is in the middle of a floor and within a room along the wall. So I started to count the needed data outlets I came up with about 1.600 data outlets for all three floors. Afterwards i did a rough measuring of the cable length but during the measuring I discovered a problem there is no Communication Room on Floor 5, so no place to run the cables to. So we have to go to the Site to see if its possible to run the cables to a comm room a floor below. Later that day two teacher from our OSZ came to visit us and talk to me and Lawrence to see how things are going. In evening we met again in a little bar called ‚The Madison‘ to talk a little bit more about our stay here in Belfast. Today we did a trip to Londonderry/Derry. KNI is currently involved in a pilot project within the Derry city council, they refurbished a test floor where they changed the lighting, to a intelligent lighting thats able to react to certain events (movement, daylight) to either dim the lights or turn them completly off depending on the policies that are applied.
After a little tour through the floor and rooms, they had a little meeting to discuss if the project is still on track and if not why. The meeting went well and the project is still within the schedule and on track. But there is no perfect day so of course something had to happen and one of the redwood engines that powers LED had a failure, at this point the energy manager at the city council told us that the CCTV went out as well so we assume that there was power peak and the engine simply didn’t survived it.
Luckily we had a spare engine in our store in Belfast so one of my co-worker made his way up to Derry to replace the engine so the council employees got light when they come back to work on Monday.