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In our industry, there are often obstacles put in our way that frustrate the life out of you. Architects that don’t want to see anything, but then want the best sound everywhere is one that springs to mind.  But this article isn’t about that, it’s about the wonderful world of Health and Safety. We’ve all had our grumbles about Health and Safety, but it’s a necessary evil that we all need to work with to make sure we all go home at the end of the day and, just like this case, it can sometimes yield great little ideas.

A recent project for us resulted in a discussion about safe working methods and prompted us to get our thinking caps on to come up with a solution that worked without putting anybody at risk. The site we’d inherited had a PAVA system with about 70 loudspeaker circuits divided into over 40 zones  but was there a drawing available showing what was wired to what? Of course there wasn’t!

The client asked us to map out the site for them, so a decision could be made on how to move forward and get the system up to scratch. The entire site was heavily populated with members of the public and staff, so background noise levels would be an issue if we decided to pop an impedance meter on each cable and go and find each connected loudspeaker one by one. Although this work would’ve been easier during the night, it was still going to be a tedious process so we proposed to record some digital messages simply saying ‘Circuit One’, ‘Circuit Two’ etc.

These messages would be played simultaneously to all circuits and then we could just go round the site, mark the speaker location on a plan and put a note on relating to which circuit they were connected to. The control and amplification system were capable of this doing this,so we put our proposal forward to the powers that be, but it was decided that the disruption this would cause was unacceptable for the customers using the facility.

It was then put forward that we would simply turn down the broadcast so it couldn’t be heard unless you were extremely close to the loudspeakers. This was accepted, but it also opened the can of worms about how we’d get to each loudspeaker. Our engineers were ready to go off with stepladders, ladders, scaffold and cherry picker but the site deemed this too unsafe in areas populated by the public, despite risk assessments and method statements supporting cordoned off work areas. It was during a discussion about the working method that one of us quipped “It’s a shame we can’t just put our ear on a stick and work from the ground!”.