Power distribution and containment

Brings electrical supply to every position that needs it, in a way that can be isolated, maintained and inspected without dismantling the bar.

The property that makes a bar unusual is not how much power it uses but WHEN. Most electrical estimation assumes diversity — that the connected loads in a space will not all draw at once, so the supply can be smaller than their sum. A bar breaks that assumption at exactly the wrong moment: the espresso machine's boilers, the grinders, the batch brewer, the hot-water system, the blender, the ice machine and every refrigeration compressor in the room are all at maximum demand during the same morning peak, and the refrigeration is working hardest precisely because everything else is rejecting heat into the room. A supply sized on a diversity assumption that does not hold is a supply that is adequate on the day it is commissioned and marginal on the day it matters. Two further mechanisms decide whether the installation survives. The first is that a bar is a wet environment with a hard floor and metal equipment, which is why the position of every outlet relative to a wet zone, and the protective measures applied, are regulated matters rather than preferences. The second is CONTAINMENT AND ISOLATION as a maintenance property: cables have to travel a defined route that can be inspected and does not cross a working surface or a wash-down zone, and every appliance needs an isolation point somebody can reach without moving the appliance — because the moment isolation is needed is never a calm one. When the installed provision falls short of what the bar actually does, the gap is closed on the floor with adaptors and extension leads, and that improvisation is the real risk this entry exists to prevent. TOTAL CONNECTED LOAD, THE SUPPLY REQUIRED TO SERVE IT, WHETHER THE SITE NEEDS SINGLE OR THREE PHASE, HOW CIRCUITS ARE ARRANGED, WHAT PROTECTION APPLIES AND WHERE AN OUTLET MAY SIT ARE ALL DETERMINED BY A LICENSED ELECTRICIAN AGAINST LOCAL CODE, AND CONFIRMED BY THE AUTHORITY BEFORE COMMISSIONING. This site states no rating, no phase, no circuit count and no protection device. It states what to hand the electrician, and when.

• Hand the electrician a complete equipment schedule — every appliance, its own electrical data from its own documentation, and where it will physically stand — before first fix. Total connected load, the supply required, whether the site needs single or three phase, the circuit arrangement and the protection are all theirs to determine against local code and the authority's to confirm.
• Say explicitly that a bar's loads are NOT diverse. Tell them that the espresso machine, the grinders, the brewer, the hot-water system, the blender, the ice machine and every refrigeration compressor peak together in the same morning hour, because a diversity assumption that does not hold is the mechanism by which a correctly commissioned supply becomes marginal at peak.
• Ask the question before you select the equipment, not after. What the site's existing supply can serve is a constraint on the machine you are allowed to buy, and discovering it after delivery is the most common single cause of a delayed opening in the whole equipment section.
• Specify an isolation point per appliance that is reachable without moving the appliance, and check it physically at handover with the appliance in place. This is the defect that passes every drawing review and fails on the first service visit.
• Plan containment on the same drawing as the joinery, because cable routes and drawer boxes want the same void. Containment loses that argument on site every time, and what it loses to is a cable run somewhere it should not be.
• Count the outlets against the appliances the bar will actually run, including the seasonal, the temporary and the ones somebody will bring in later — a phone charger, a fan, a second blender for a promotion. Provision that is exactly adequate on opening day becomes adaptors within a month.
• Treat any extension lead or multi-way adaptor found in use as a finding about the installation and record it as one. It is a symptom with a cause, and the cause is that the provision does not match the operation.
• Keep the commissioning certification and the electrician's confirmation with the site records, and know who signed it. Somebody will ask, and the person who asks will not accept a recollection.