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If there was a way to never have electric cables or plumbing in walls, that would speed up construction and reduce the cost. The savings for this don't just sh

• ianbicking 5y ago
  Instead of walls I guess you could use... the floor and ceiling? Would that help? Walls at least don't have people walking on them. In some sense just having "channels" through walls or floors would make things simpler, if electric and plumbing could be installed after the structure of the house was completed. But I can't come up with a way that would make sense. If you integrate channels into the framing that seems very similar to the current process (where "channels" are drilled through the wood), only you've added bulk and access panels. If you add channels that aren't part of the framing then you've increased the wall size with a lot of cascading effects. Though there are basically channels through the floors that align with the joists. Maybe you could save effort by using those channels? But at the cost of material unless there was some wholistic design change. Kind of related: it does seem possible that all-electric HVAC could be distributed through the house instead of using a central unit, and that might simplify things. Like it's unclear to me that central A/C is really much better than smaller split units, and certainly electric heat doesn't benefit from centralization.