Modular Home Plumbing and Electrical Plans
In addition to floor plans and elevation drawings, you will also receive modular home plumbing and electrical plans. May general contractors and subcontractors have begun their work without first reviewing these plans, much to their regret and their customer’s dismay.
What Can Happen If Your GC and His Subcontractors Do Not Review Your Modular Home Plumbing and Electrical Plans Before Beginning Their Work
Soon after I started offering GC services, I had a serious problem with a plumbing leak in a two-story colonial I built for a young couple. The leak was more like a deluge. The plumber I hired had no previous modular experience, and my supervisor on the job was also quite inexperienced with modular homes.
A month after my customers moved in, the wife invited her parents to stay with them. While my customer bathed her young children in the master bathroom, her father took a shower in the hall bathroom. Both bathrooms were on the second story. A few hours later, my customer found a puddle of water on the kitchen floor. While trying to figure out what caused the leak, the drywall ceiling suddenly let go and water poured down. It turned out that my plumber had not made all the connections for the hall bathroom. The critical one was the waste line in the second floor access area. The water had no place to go but in the bays between floors.
Make Sure Your Mechanical Contractors Look Closely at the Modular Home Plumbing and Electrical Plans
The plumber missed the connection because my manufacturer had carpeted over the access panel. Neither my supervisor nor my plumber had looked at the plans to identify all of the access points. They also hadn’t completed a pressure test, which would have told them that a connection had been missed. If you hire your own GC, don’t make the mistake I made. Make sure your mechanical contractors (plumber, heating contractor, and electrician) look closely at the modular home plumbing and electrical plans to find every access panel. And make sure your plumber pressure tests his work!
For more information about how to use modular home plumbing and electrical plans, see The General Contractor’s Responsibilities for Building a Modular Home in my book The Modular Home.
