What lies in the wall today as an empty conduit decides what your house can do in 20 years. We plan routes, runs and spare capacity before the shell is closed up — it costs little during construction and saves expensive intervention later.
A conduit in the open shell costs a few euros of material and minutes of labour. Adding one later means chases, dust and decorating. So we plan conduit routes to every key point — from the technical room to the floor distributors, to TV positions, terrace, garage and garden. What stays empty today takes the cable nobody is thinking about yet.
The provider's fibre connection usually ends in the basement or the service entry room. For the bandwidth to reach the upper floors as well, we plan the route onwards: position of the handover point, the link to the network cabinet, the transition to your structured cabling. We settle the details with the provider early, so that nothing clashes on site.
Conduit routes compete with the structure, ventilation ducts and plumbing risers. Decide only once you are on site and you get compromises: radii too tight, crushed conduit, dead runs. We coordinate the routes on the drawings — agreed with the architect and the specialist planners, with sensible diameters and draw boxes in the right places. That way every conduit is still usable in 15 years.
In a new build the case is clear: conduits belong in every plan, and the extra effort in the open shell is small. What matters is not the quantity but the system behind it — every conduit has a documented purpose and an end that can be found again.
In a refurbishment we look at what is already there first: old conduits, disused chimneys, shafts and boarded floors often offer surprisingly good routes. Almost always more is possible than clients expect.
A single conduit from the boundary to the utility room, two tight bends, no draw wire — and on the pull the fibre stops after four metres. What follows is an excavator, a dug-up drive and a conversation with the network operator that nobody wanted to have. We plan the routes before the concrete arrives, because this is precisely the part that cannot be renegotiated later.
The network operator's handover point is not a matter of chance. We put it where the multi-utility building entry, the equipotential bonding and the technical room fit together — with a socket, spare space for the ONT and the media converter, and a proper distance from water-carrying pipework. Leave it until the connection appointment and you get the point wherever the fitter happens to be standing.
From the boundary to the technical room we plan with radii rather than angles: no 90-degree bend, minimum radius set by the conduit diameter, sand bedding, warning tape and a draw tape already installed with slack at both ends. Every detour left out of the drawing costs pulling length later that cannot be recovered.
A conduit coming out of the ground is an open path for water, soil gas and gas. We seal the annular space at the building entry, fit duct plugs on every unused conduit, and seal again once the cables have been pulled in — including a check on the fall, so that seepage water does not run towards the handover point.
Instead of one conduit we lay bundles: occupied, labelled, colour-coded — and at least one entirely free conduit per direction. Outbuilding, gate operator, camera mast and pool area get their own routes rather than spurs. The material is the cheapest item in the whole electrical design; retrofitting is by some distance the most expensive.
The technical room determines every cable length in the house. We place it as centrally as possible and plan heat removal, rack dimensions, door width and supply with it — linked to the handover point directly and by the shortest route. In the Villa Riyadh the control cabinet arrived from Germany fully assembled; without a floor area and a delivery route defined in advance, that does not work.
Single-mode as standard for all runs, multimode only where there is a reason for it; fibre count with spare capacity, rodent-protected in the ground. Whether it is a fusion splice onto pigtails or a pre-terminated trunk cable we decide from the loss budget, the connector configuration and the pulling route — with a test record and labelled fibre allocations at handover.
Garage, garden house, pool area and driveway belong in the route planning from the outset. At the villa in Cologne the pool and the garden irrigation run on the same system logic as the house; at the 400-year-old Cologne manor house, access control, alarm and the Siedle camera were added. Without a conduit in the garden it all ends up wireless for want of anything better.
Fibre carries light, not potential. Between the house and an outbuilding that removes equalising currents and the surge path a copper cable reliably brings with it over sixty metres of ground. We run fibre wherever buildings, masts or outdoor installations are to stay electrically separate, and keep copper inside the building envelope.
One conduit is a single point of failure — an excavator, ground settlement, water ingress. On properties with a higher protection requirement we plan a second route with its own building entry and a mobile network path as a fallback, so that alarm, access control and the camera monitoring link do not all depend on the same trench.
Before backfilling, everything is surveyed and photographed: route, depth, conduit allocation, fibre allocation, labelling at both ends. At the listed Cologne manor house it was precisely this documentation that made it possible to retrofit to a plan at all, rather than guessing what lies behind four-hundred-year-old masonry.
Fibre is the backbone, copper covers the area. Floor distributors and outbuildings hang off the fibre; access points, cameras, door stations and control panels off PoE-capable Cat cabling. We plan the access point positions on the floor plan rather than at the ceiling — including spare outlets where experience says equipment will be added later.
Wallbox load management, PV and battery storage communication, sensors still to come: what does not exist today needs a route tomorrow. At the SIDOL Lofts in Cologne, around 645 modules in 23 strings hang off data routes that were thought through beforehand. Spare conduits cost almost nothing during shell construction and later decide what is feasible.
Plan the conduits properly and you do not have to guess at tomorrow's technology — the route for it is simply already there.
Specific planning components — agreed with the architect and the specialist planners.
Continuous conduit runs from the technical room to floor distributors, TV positions, terrace, garage and garden.
Position of the fibre handover point, agreed with the provider early — where your network cabinet sits.
Smooth-walled conduit with spare cross-section and generous radii, so that every later pull works.
Set at changes of direction, so cables can still be pulled in 15 years from now.
On long backbone runs — basement to loft or to an outbuilding — planned with bandwidth in reserve.
Routes agreed with the structural engineer, ventilation and plumbing, before anything is improvised on site.
We go through with you what your house needs today and should be able to do tomorrow — from the TV position to the outdoor areas to the systems nobody is thinking about yet.
We fix conduit routes, diameters and draw boxes on the drawings and coordinate them with the structural engineer, ventilation, plumbing and the electrical design — before the shell is closed up.
We settle the position of the handover point and the link to the network cabinet with the fibre provider early, so that nothing clashes on site and nothing ends up as a makeshift arrangement.
The work is carried out by our sister company elektrofabrik or by your own electrical contractor, working from our documents. We check the routes before screed and plaster close everything up.
A listed building made smart without touching the fabric — existing routes used carefully, and wireless where cables were out of the question.
Complete electrical and network planning including a cinema with projector and screen — infrastructure that was on the drawings before it was needed.
A complete electrical installation in an existing building — including shading, DoorBird and a smart office. Proof that clean infrastructure works in a period property too.
smartfabrik is a smart home planning practice based in Düsseldorf (Reisholzer Werftstr. 31A). We plan for private clients and companies in Cologne, Düsseldorf and across North Rhine-Westphalia — and, where wanted, nationwide and internationally. A selection of the places we have already planned and delivered in:
There is no blanket answer – the requirements differ by local authority and development area. What is clear: fibre into the building is increasingly standard in new builds and is more and more often laid as part of the site development. We establish early what applies at your plot and plan the handover point and the cable routes to match.
For data cabling, smooth-walled conduit with a sufficient diameter and generous radii has proved itself – corrugated electrical conduit with tight bends often makes the later pull impossible. More important than the product is the route planning: continuous runs, draw boxes at changes of direction, no crushed sections. That is exactly what we fix on the drawings before anything is concreted.
As far as the service entry room: yes, the provider does that as part of the rollout. Inside the house it becomes laborious without conduits – then existing routes such as shafts, chimneys or suspended ceilings help. In refurbishments we look first at what is already there. Anyone building new avoids the problem entirely: with conduits that cost little and keep everything open.
Ideally where your network cabinet stands, or where there is a direct cable link to it – usually the technical room or the service entry room. If the handover point sits in the wrong place, the result is a makeshift run right across the house. We agree the position with the provider early and plan the link to your structured cabling at the same time.
Specific figures depend on the house – but the proportion is unambiguous: in the open shell a conduit is a matter of a little material and minutes of work. Afterwards, chasing, cutting and decorating come on top, often in several rooms. Hence our principle: better three conduits too many in the shell than one too few in the finished house.
Tell us about your project — we will tell you which routes and spare capacity it needs.
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