Raised Access Flooring - October 2012

By Brian Hamilton

Raised access flooring has been around since the early 1960s but the niche commercial flooring category may be finally hitting its stride. It began as a solution for data centers, but that all started to change when companies put a computer on every employee’s desk and needed to hide the cabling, and as companies moved to open office plans. Since then the flooring is being used to house a building’s heating and cooling systems, as well as modular electrical power systems for cubicles, offices and other areas. Some of the earliest significant users were financial institutions, call centers and trading floors.

Tate Access Floors of Jessup, Maryland is easily the largest company in the business. The firm estimates that it has about a 65% marketshare. A distant second is Haworth, the Holland, Michigan-based company known more for its office furniture. Those two are competitors for nearly every large project. Beyond them are a handful of small firms.

Reliable industry statistics are hard to come by—there isn’t even an industry trade association in the U.S. although there is one in the United Kingdom. The closest thing to an association is the Ceiling and Interior Systems Construction Association, which developed the test protocol for raised floors.

Scott Alwine, marketing manager for Tate, said McGraw Hill had the 2011 office and bank market at 50.7 million square feet. “According to our calculations the raised floor market penetration was between 24% and 25% last year,” he says, which is about double from two years ago but well below the 60% market penetration in the U.K. “The market penetration number is a good indicator of the strength of the raised floor market, as the percentage of the whole market has been on a steady increase over the last three or four years.”

Growth in the industry is getting a push from several fronts, including the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification program.

Raised access flooring is being increasingly used in office buildings, although mostly in large urban centers. Data centers, libraries, Indian casinos, education and government buildings are also prime users as buildings use more electronics for networking and powered furniture, and try to save money on heating, cooling, and even general construction. Casinos also like it for superior ventilation of smoke.

One thing holding the industry back, according to Scott Alwine, Tate’s marketing manager, is the perception that it costs more than typical office flooring.

“It’s not more expensive,” he says. “It’s close to break even. The reason is that you’re using that space as your duct and there are speed of construction advantages in that cabling is installed faster than it is overhead.” He says the use of power system furniture, which can greatly simplify electrical cabling to, for instance, large rooms of cubicles, can nearly pay for the cost of access flooring. Electrical cabling, as well as communications and network wiring, doesn’t have to run to the ceiling and back down for every receptacle, which can save a huge amount of wire costs, given the cost of copper.

Haworth’s associate product manager Laura Stadler says there’s still a lot of mystery about the amount of money companies save in energy costs. “It’s a continually developing area,” she says. “A lot of architects don’t understand it and don’t buy the concept.” She says some Haworth customers claim savings as high as 50%.

Another advantage is that slab-to-slab construction height can be shortened because ductwork under the floor typically takes about 14” of space while typical overhead construction might require two feet. That might not make much difference in the average suburban office building but it’s a different calculation in a 40-story high rise where there are considerable contruction savings. Alwine says that every high rise in New York City in the last ten years has used raised access flooring.