[HenryKissinger]

> Personally, I'm more annoyed by the fact that electrical systems in buildings are still too hard to modify. As you say, you cannot really tweak much once the wall is done. In a day and age where electrical devices continue to multiply, it's sadistic to bang on about extender-cords being "fire hazards" while not providing alternatives. You don't want fire hazards? Give me a way to safely upgrade the energy distribution of my home that is as easy as plugging in an extender cord.

Glad someone else is sharing my views. Burying cables into physical fixtures that cannot be accessed any other way than brute force is, I find, completely archaic. The solution is modular home design. Houses should be built more like gaming PCs in a way. Every wall would be 4-5ft thick, be mostly empty on the inside, and have a special door to allow a human to go inside. This "closet inside a wall" would contain standardized plugs/hooks/supports for electrical cables (along with plumbing and gas lines and internet fiber and any kind of wire or pipe that passes through the home). Load bearing would still be assumed by columns and other hard elements, but hidden inside these 5ft thick walls.

[starky]

I would more picture a system where you install standardized wall panels on the load bearing structure with a DIN rail like system. You buy panels that are some standard width (say 16 inches) and come in standardized heights (e.g. 2ft, 4ft, 8ft) with whatever connections running through them. If you want to re-configure your house, you just buy replacement panels.

Now I see significant technical drawbacks to such a system, but it is an interesting idea to think about and would be way more space efficient than the one you are talking about.

[TeMPOraL]

Seconded. I already told my wife that if and when we'll be moving to a country house, I want to have walls made like on starships in Star Trek - with space in the walls through which cabling runs, covered by disguised access panels that can be taken off.

(I'm not sure she fully understands how serious I'm about it, and the extent to which I want to push it. I want them across the whole wall, i.e. so I could, if need be, reroute any cabling throughought the entire floor.)

[jldugger]

It seems far more likely that you'd just install conduit correctly, and do cable routing in the attic.

[yellowapple]

I remember reading about some construction bricks with removable access panels along these same lines, but apparently I was hallucinating because I cannot for the life of me find these regardless of any combination of search terms on both DDG and Google. I also remember them still being in the design/prototype stage, so they're probably vaporware.