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Wayne High School Engineering Lab Renovation

Wayne High School's engineering lab in Huber Heights teaches with equipment that moves. The worktables get pushed into different arrangements for different projects, the computer stations grow and shrink with the course load, and the power feeding all of it came from the walls and from a handful of ceiling-mounted cord reels hung over where the tables used to sit.

Huber Heights City Schools renovated the classroom and its office under a single CTE contract on a pre-bid TOP-C unit price agreement. In this space the work was architectural, electrical and data only. Built-in casework was removed. The whiteboard and projector came down, went into storage, and went back up. Carpet and cove base came out, the slab was ground and prepped, and a new epoxy flake floor went down in the classroom and the office with six-inch vinyl cove base. Walls were patched, primed and painted. The room's wood-top worktables were removed by the contractor, stored, sanded and refinished, then reinstalled — the district kept its tables and got them back better than they left.

New casework and countertops, a steel pegboard, 13 enclosed 60-inch classroom desks, 24 adjustable-height stools, 24 mesh-back task chairs, four storage cabinets and a 55-inch wall-mounted display furnish the room. The existing ceiling grid stayed; only the tiles disturbed by relocated cord reels were replaced. Electrically, existing circuits were reused, 12 new 20-amp circuits added, six combination power and data floor boxes set into the slab, five cord reels relocated over the new table positions, and a 208-volt receptacle run back to the panel. Every computer station has its own CAT 6 drop.

Workstations and tool benches in the Huber Heights engineering lab

Technical Discussion

Power and data for a room that keeps changing

A teaching lab gets renovated on the schedule of its finishes and rearranged on the schedule of its curriculum, and those are not the same schedule. The epoxy floor and the paint will outlast a decade. The table layout will not last five years — a new course, a donated machine, a different class size, and the room is rearranged over a summer. A renovation has to decide which parts survive that.

The answer here is six floor boxes. Each is a combination power and data box: concrete cut, conduit and conductors run, box set, slab repoured. It is the most disruptive item in an otherwise light renovation and the only one that cannot be redone without breaking concrete a second time. That is exactly why it happens now — the floor was already coming up for the epoxy, so the trenching is done once, in the one window where it is close to free.

Around them, 12 new 120-volt 20-amp circuits and a CAT 6 drop at every computer station give the room more capacity than the current layout uses. That is the point. Density in the rough-in is what lets a room be rearranged with furniture rather than with an electrician; a lab circuited exactly for today's tables needs a permit and a panel schedule the first time it changes.

The five existing ceiling cord reels are the counterweight. They were relocated over the new table positions rather than replaced, and only the tiles they disturbed were swapped out of a grid ceiling that was staying. Reels already in the building are the cheapest way to drop power onto tables that move, and not replacing them helps pay for the floor boxes.

The single 208-volt receptacle run back to the panel is the same kind of anticipation: one outlet for the class of equipment that does not run on a standard 120-volt circuit, installed while the conduit path is open rather than after a machine shows up on a loading dock.

Our Work