Carlaw Park Student Village is Auckland University's most extensive purpose-built self-catered student accommodation. The village is comprised of Carlaw Park Stanley and Carlaw Park Nicholls. Carlaw Park Nicholls is home to 697 residents across seven blocks and was completed by DGE in 2019.

Due to our long-standing relationship with the university, DGE was trusted to take on the full scope of electrical work for Carlaw Park’s largest project to date, Carlaw Park Stanley. 

The University of Auckland engaged DGE to do the complete fit-out of Carlaw Park – Stanley, providing safe and warm housing for 907 students.

We were enlisted to provide the full range of electrical services to a large construction project in downtown Auckland throughout a pandemic within a deadline set in stone. 

The client required the building be designed in such a way that the individual apartments could be split up and individually powered and metered if the building was to be sold in the future.

Three-phase power was also required to power the instant hot water units installed in each apartment. 

On top of this, we had to squeeze ourselves into incredibly tight rises and corridors in order to run hundreds of large cables around the building.

The scale of the Carlaw Park Stanley construction project was massive and included two hundred, three to five-bedroom apartments with retail and communal spaces on the ground floor.

DGE was tasked with wiring and connecting all the electrical requirements of the building, including lights and fire alarms and security and data systems. We also installed a building maintenance system, a computer-based system used for tracking and managing construction, to control the building and ensure all systems work together. This was all amid a global pandemic and meant a lot of time off-site for our team.

The sheer scale and size of the project meant we had up to 25 of our team and three subcontractors on-site. 

Given our prior knowledge of the project and our experience working with the University, we could communicate and establish a solution that allowed us to deliver the project within the deadline and budget for the client. 

Due to supply chain issues and other factors like inflation, our first priority was securing the supply chain and ensuring we had all the materials we needed before starting the project. This meant building a new floor in our warehouse to store over 900 heaters and tens of thousands of metres of cabling.

For the power requirements of the building, we installed a main switchboard on the ground floor. We then ran a connection between the main board and an 11 KW transformer underground that rose to two main switchboards on each of the nine floors.

Three-phase power was installed in each apartment to allow the capacity for them to be individually powered if need be. 

Thanks to our strong relationship with the contractors, open communication and dedication to quality, we completed the project on time and within the budget. 

We managed to secure our supply chain early, meaning we could provide security and cut costs for the client. 

We pride ourselves on our attention to detail and delivered the project defect-free, sticking to time frames in a challenging environment.

The village now has more than twice the capacity for housing students in close convenience to the University in busy downtown Auckland.

DGE we always get the job done!