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Maybe it will help with standardised placement of plumbing and pipes etc.

Real examples:

I had a gas leak. The pipe was hidden behind all the kitchen cabinets. 1/3 of the cabinets had to be removed to get to the pipe.

At a new build one guy was sloppy and put a nail into a water pipe. The entire wall had to be redone.

You don’t have to save cost if you can increase reliability and speed.



I would guess prefab will absolutely not make this better, the pipes are still hidden but probably inside the walls rather than behind cabinets...


You'd have to design it in, but all your components would be preplanned or standardised. You'd know before hand where all the piping and cabling went. Maybe the walls could even be finished in the factory and you just have to attach them together. You could even have standard ways to connect built in storage and kitchens.


In custom houses they actually can and often do pre-plan those things. In practice though plumbers know what they are doing without needing to look at the prints and it isn't important enough to make the plumbers put the pipes where the plan puts them. The architect knows this and rarely puts enough effort into those parts of the plan to get them perfect, just enough to be sure that where space is tight everything can fit.

No plan is perfect the first time. For pre-fab you do a few prototypes and find out and fix what doesn't work, then make the jigs so everything works. For custom work the trademen are smart enough to get it working without extensive pre-planning.

The above only applies to small scale single family houses. As you get into larger buildings: correct planning becomes very important. Eventually things must planed correctly in the design phase or the whole will not work.


So this would probably decrease the cost of maintenance - as well as increasing the reliability and speed.

there is, I think, a pretty strong correlation between reliability of a solution and the future maintainability costs being lower.




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