What to Brief Your AVIT Integrator Before the Architect Finalises the Drawings

We get called into projects at every stage. Early — at concept — is best. Late — after practical completion — is expensive. The most consequential window is between design development and technical drawings: after the layout is settled but before the structural and services information is locked.

If you're working with an architect on a new build or significant renovation and AVIT is on the agenda, here's what needs to be resolved before the drawings are finalised.

The equipment room

Every integrated system needs somewhere to live. Processors, amplifiers, AV matrices, patch panels, NVRs, and UPS units all go in a rack — or more than one rack — in a dedicated space.

This room needs:

Adequate floor area (a minimum of 1.5m x 1.5m for a single rack; more for complex systems)
A door that actually opens (racks need to be accessed from the front and rear)
Air conditioning or mechanical ventilation — equipment racks generate significant heat
Dedicated electrical circuits, ideally on a UPS
Cable entry from above or below with sufficient conduit capacity

Putting the equipment rack in a cupboard under the stairs after the fact is the single most common and most avoidable mistake we see.

Conduit routing

Conduit — the tubes through which cables run — needs to be planned at structural stage. Once the slab is poured and the walls are up, retrospective conduit installation means cutting, patching, and redecorating.

For a large property, conduit runs from the equipment room to every:

Ceiling speaker location
Screen or display position
Keypad and control interface location
Camera mounting point
Door station and intercom
Network data point

The conduit doesn't need to carry cables at drawing stage — it just needs to exist. If the routes are sized correctly (a common error is under-sizing conduit for the cables that will eventually go through it), the installation is straightforward. If they're not, every cable run becomes a problem to solve.

Screen and speaker positions

These need to be decided before ceilings are boarded and walls are finished, because they determine:

Where blocking goes in the ceiling or wall (to support fixings)
Where conduit terminates
Where electrical rough-in is located (screens need power; so do in-ceiling speakers with local volume controls)
What acoustic treatment is needed (relevant for cinema rooms and dedicated listening spaces)

A screen position drawn at a desk needs to be checked against the actual sight lines in the room. Speaker positions in a distributed audio system need to account for acoustic coverage — even, predictable coverage in a rectangle is not achieved by placing speakers at regular intervals on a grid.

Power for automation

Lutron HomeWorks, Crestron, and similar systems have specific electrical requirements. Processor locations need dedicated circuits. Keypads on a HomeWorks system are typically bus-powered via Cat5, but the bus itself needs a power supply in the equipment room. Motor controllers for shading need power at the motor location.

The MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) engineers need to see the AVIT specification before their drawings are completed. If they don't, you end up with power in the wrong places — or worse, not enough circuits for what the system actually needs.

Network points

Wireless coverage is not a substitute for wired connections to infrastructure devices. Every control processor, every AV matrix, every NVR, and every managed switch should be wired. This means Cat6 or Cat6A terminating at a data outlet in every relevant location.

Network point locations need to be on the MEP drawings and coordinated with the AVIT cable schedule.

What we need from the architect

At the information stage, the most useful documents are:

Floor plans with ceiling heights noted
A reflected ceiling plan (if it exists)
The MEP schematic
Room finish and material information (relevant for speaker selection and projector throw calculations)

We don't need a complete specification to engage at this stage. A conversation early enough to influence the drawings is more valuable than a comprehensive brief that arrives after the concrete is poured.

If you're at the early stages of a project and want to understand what the AVIT brief should include, get in touch. Early involvement costs nothing and prevents a significant class of expensive problems later.