Project · Hospitality
Paddy’s Irish Pub: twice the floor, open for St Patrick’s Day
Paddy’s took over the empty retail space next door and doubled its floor area. The deadline was St Patrick’s Day 2018, which is not a date anyone in an Irish pub negotiates with.
The job
- Client
- Paddy’s Irish Pub
- Where
- Port Douglas
- Sector
- Hospitality
- Builder
- Darren Heatley
- Year
- 2018
Two tenancies, one pub, one switchboard
Knocking through into the tenancy next door is the cheapest way to double a venue and the most demanding thing you can ask of its electrical supply. The new floor area brought a dining room, a dedicated band space, an extended front bar and an exterior deck, and none of that was in the load the building was originally wired for.
So the job started at the switchboard rather than at the fit-out. A new distribution switchboard went in, with a sub-board for the rooftop refrigeration and air conditioning plant, and the rest of the work hung off a supply that had been sized for the pub Paddy’s was about to become rather than the one it had been.
What the electrical scope covered
- Main bar extension with new cabinetry and LED lighting throughout
- Feature LED lighting built into the bespoke joinery
- Point of sale and appliance installation and commissioning
- Two new data racks carrying all new data, audio and visual cabling and equipment
- New distribution switchboard, plus a sub-board for the rooftop plant
- Kitchen and back of house alterations
- New bathroom fit-out
- Emergency and exit lighting
- Audio visual installation through the venue
Why two data racks in a pub
It looks like a lot of infrastructure for a bar until you count what runs on it. Point of sale at two serving points, the audio system for a live band space, screens, and the back of house. Putting all of it on properly terminated structured cabling in racks, rather than letting it accumulate as a knot behind a bar, is the difference between a fault that takes ten minutes to find and one that takes an evening.
That is a decision made once, at fit-out, at a cost that never comes up again. It is also the first thing to get cut when a fit-out budget tightens, and the decision is hard to reverse.
The result
Old building, new half, and a finish that reads as one room rather than two joined together. Local builder Darren Heatley ran the works with Paddy’s management, and the pub opened for the 2018 St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
The trades involved
What this job drew on
Straight answers
Questions this job answers
What happens electrically when a venue expands into the shop next door?
The two tenancies almost always have separate supplies, separate boards and no shared earth arrangement, so they cannot simply be joined. In practice it means a new distribution switchboard for the combined venue, a maximum demand calculation for the load the new floor area will actually draw, and often a sub-board for plant such as rooftop refrigeration. That work sits at the front of the programme, because every circuit in the fit-out depends on it.
Should a bar fit-out include structured data cabling?
If there is point of sale, audio, screens or a booking system, yes. Racked, terminated and labelled cabling costs very little more at fit-out than cable run loose, and it is the thing that makes a fault traceable later. At Paddy’s it was two racks carrying data, audio and visual for the whole venue. The alternative is finding out, on a Friday night, which of forty unlabelled cables feeds the till.
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