I've been in the A/V and security industry for the better part of 25 years. Most of my work is subcontracted from Electricians who do new construction on high rise apartment buildings and condos.
Essentially they bid on the ENTIRE electrical scope of the job... high and low voltage.. soup to nuts.. and then when they win the bid, they call me in along with a couple of other low voltage guys to divide up the CCTV, access control, and AV. They also bring in a fire alarm alarm sub.
As low voltage technicians we do all of the "technical work" while the sparkys have their crew of laborers who do all of the wire pulling and pipe running. So by the time I get on site, most of the labor intensive work is done. Typically if they did their work properly, most of my installations are "lick & stick" and I only have to come on site a few times during the course of the project.
The downside is that electricians and their unskilled laborers don't always do their part of the job the way that us low voltage guys would have wanted to do it but it's the tradeoff for the times that we are in.
So anyhow, I've been reading the threads for quite some time to get many of my issues and questions resolved and I figure it was about time that I started sharing some insight of my own.
