WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

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milwaukeesteve

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Milwaukee, WI
Does anyone have experience with using both of these installations?
I am wondering if anyone has strong likes or dislikes for either.
Looking only for an Electrical perspective first.
 
Re: WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

i have worked in a building for twenty-five years that has twenty floors of walker duct. i worked on the original installation and the maintainance and upgrades for twenty-five years.

it is the biggest waste of money i have seen in wiring methods! it was never really used other than the initial outlets -- a few times we used it to re-pull some additional circuits, but only a few times because it is never really located where you need the new circuits. this was dual duct--power and communication! and after it was abandoned- it became a problem with floor surface cave in's! the only place i have seen it work efficiently is in commercial store register lines.
 
Re: WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

Walkerduct is very inflexible and in my experience it is just as expensive as raised floor. The presets are very inflexible and when you relocate at a later date you almost always have round holes covered with a brass plate where you do not use the presets anymore because the furniture layout has changed. Another drawback is I have seen these ducts get jammed packed with wire over the years as people add circuits and do not remove any old wiring. The one good thing is you get a more solid feeling floor since it is concrete.

We are installing raised access floor on (3) very large office projects currently two of the projects are also using the raised access floor for their air distribution and the last one is installing an 8" rasied floor just for electrical and communications cabling. This installation will give the owner much more flexibility to relocate furniture and circuits at a later date. We are using an MC type cable for our homeruns to a zone distribution box that will handle up to 12 circuits. from the zone distribution box we are then feeding out to individual floor boxes mounted under the desk of each piece of modular furniture. This makes it easier to make changes since you do not deal with electrified furniture just floor boxes that pop out of the raised floor and with the modular plugs on the floor boxes they can easily be relocated.

Hope this helps.
-Ed
 
Re: WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

The problem I keep seeing with the walker floor duct is that all the rows terminate in a "header duct" that goes back to the telephone/electrical room. When these were installed (a long time ago) they were sized for telephone cables. They don't have the capacity to run 3 or 4 cat 5 cables to each workstation.

If you do use walker floor duct, I would reccomend stubbing conduits up into the bottom of them and home running them back to the closet.
 
Re: WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

Thank you for your responses. This helps alot. I have my opinions, but wanted to here from someone else without knowledge of what it is for.
Thank you.
Steve
 
Re: WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

More information is needed.
What type of building is this? What type of loads will be served from this? Will there be change of layout in the future? Is it for Data and power?
 
Re: WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

I was hoping for opinions that people might have. Both for and against either one.
Not many people have dealt with both I'm sure, so I wasn't expecting alot of responses.
The ones I got back are what I was looking for being that they are strong opinions.
I would like to know what you think, too, and base it on your own formed opinions.
Thank you
 
Re: WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

Some disadvantages of raised floors that haven't been mentioned:

1. Some space is eaten up by ramps.
2. The floor - ceiling height is reduced. This is even worse in very large open offices, because the proportions of the space make the ceiling look lower. Its also bad in spaces that already have marginal floor -ceiling height.
3. You still need some wiring method below the floors, in addition to the cost of the raised floor.

Steve
 
Re: WalderDuct VS Raised Floor

With constant changes in the foresight, a raised floor is the only clear choice.
 
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