Why we specify leak detection at design stage

Picture a bath overflowing on the fourth floor at two in the morning. It is an illustrative case rather than a single incident, but every element of it is familiar to anyone who has run a hotel. By the time housekeeping finds it, water has tracked through three floors of ceiling void, into the corridor lighting, and into eleven bedrooms. Those rooms are out of service for six weeks. The insurance excess is the small part. The lost room nights, the displaced guests, the relocated groups and the online reviews are the expensive part.

Water level detection in baths and showers, and flow monitoring on riser branches, costs a small amount at design stage. Retrofitted after opening it costs many times more, because you are opening ceilings in a trading hotel. It is easy for it to fall out of a capex budget, because the cost is immediate and the consequence lands two years after the development team has demobilised.

We argue for it because we have paid for the alternative. That is the whole difference between development thinking and owner thinking, and it shows up in a hundred decisions of exactly this size.

The same logic applies to riser access panels, back-of-house floor drainage, dedicated linen chute maintenance access and the position of the plant room relative to the guest lift core. None of it is glamorous. All of it is felt every day for twenty years.