Well Prepared with WINSTA®
By using WINSTA® from WAGO, the 100 employees in planning and manufacturing at Pitthan Elektrotechnik have the chance to prepare the wiring installations in a ready-to-mount state prior to delivery at the construction site. All that remains is to plug everything in on site – as in the Luxembourg project. The European Commission’s office building, completed in 2016, was the first project where Pitthan used the WINSTA® Pluggable Connection System. The building consists of 447 container modules over three floors and currently provides a useable space of 10,500 square meters.
During the design phase, Pitthan worked together with WAGO to determine the necessary types of cables, cable runs, distributor box variants and color coding. “The base quantities could be easily standardized with WINSTA®,” says Gerhardus. When rooms follow grids with a fixed definition – an essential characteristic of container architecture – then the pre-assembled installations can be easily duplicated. In addition, this design reduces the risk of mismating, which can lead to problems on projects with short time frames – especially when tight construction schedules involve the threat of contractual penalties. “One time, we had five clamping faults. But that was before the WINSTA® system,” says Gerhardus.
This “almost zero defect precision” in Luxembourg is also due to the fact that the electricians only had to connect one feed point per office block by hand. After that, WINSTA® took over, and everything was pluggable – from the lights to the power outlets. “Our goal is very clear: to prepare the wiring in advance to the point where the work on site mostly just amounted to plugging everything in,” emphasizes Schlate. Hager provided the cable ducts for the project, which were cut to the axial dimensions of the container and pre-assembled with the WINSTA® system.