Why Splitting Low Voltage Across Six Subcontractors Costs More Than It Saves

On a typical commercial or multifamily project, the general contractor puts low voltage out to bid the same way they bid plumbing or electrical, one line item, one scope, one price. Except low voltage rarely stays one line item. Structured cabling gets bid separately from IP video. IP video gets bid separately from access control. Access control gets bid separately from the intercom. The intercom gets bid separately from the intrusion alarm. By the time the building is under construction there can be four, five, even six different companies pulling cable, mounting hardware and programming systems that are all supposed to work together on day one.

On paper, splitting the work looks competitive. Each trade gets its own low bid, and the owner assumes the total comes out lower than paying one integrator for everything. In practice, the savings on the bid sheet get eaten by the coordination that nobody priced in, and the gaps do not show up until commissioning, when it is expensive to fix them.

Where the gaps actually show up

A camera contractor pulls its own cable because it is faster than waiting on the cabling crew's schedule. Nobody tells the cabling contractor, so the pathway and conduit sized for the original scope now has extra runs nobody accounted for. An access control vendor adds a door mid project and needs a Cat6A drop to it, but the cabling contract already closed out. Each company documents its own work, if it documents at all, and nobody owns a single set of as built drawings for the whole building. When the owner asks for rack elevations six months after occupancy, there are six partial answers and no complete one.

Who owns commissioning when nobody owns the whole system

Access control, video and intrusion detection are supposed to talk to each other. A forced door should trigger a camera call up. An alarm event should trigger a lock down sequence and a notification cascade. That integration only gets tested if someone tests it end to end, not system by system. When six contractors each sign off on their own scope, every individual piece can pass and the building can still not work as one system, because nobody tested the handoffs between them.

When something does fail during commissioning, whoever gets the service call first has to figure out whose fault it is before they can even start troubleshooting. The card reader company blames the electrical contractor. The electrical contractor blames the low voltage cabling. The cabling company blames how the camera company configured the recorder. The general contractor ends up running a meeting that was never in anyone's budget, just to establish which company owes the fix.

The warranty question nobody asks until something breaks

A year after occupancy, a door strike stops firing reliably. The property manager calls the number on the invoice, and the company that answers is whichever one still has a working phone number and still wants the account. If the failure sits at the boundary between two systems, cabling terminated by one company feeding hardware installed by another, both companies have a case for it being the other one's problem. The property manager is the one stuck in the middle, not because the systems were badly designed, but because six separate warranties do not add up to one.

What one contract actually looks like

Protection Technologies runs structured cabling, IP video, access control, intercom, intrusion detection and audio visual as a single scope, with one in house crew and one warranty covering the finished system. The company is self funded and operates without debt, which is part of why it can staff and run its own crews rather than subbing pieces of the job out to whoever is available that month. The process looks the same on every project:

• Single scope review. One conversation covers everything. Full building plans get reviewed and every system mapped in a single pass, no separate bids and no fragmented scopes.
• Integrated system design. Every system is engineered to work together before a single cable is pulled, so there are zero conflicts to discover at installation.
• In house installation. One crew handles every system. No subcontractor hand offs, and direct coordination with the general contractor to hold the schedule.
• Testing and commissioning. Every system gets tested, documented and commissioned to spec, with training provided and a single warranty covering the whole thing.

Mike Singer, the company's president, puts it simply: "We do not cut corners. We make sure it's done correctly and can last. We try to future proof the building, making sure that the parts we use and the direction we go are still current five or 10 years down the line. I go by my word, so if I say I'm going to do it, it will get done." That is a harder standard to hold when six companies are each answering for a sixth of the building. It is a much easier one to hold when one company is answering for all of it.