If there were really a big dollar savings to be gained by metricating
construction, I don't think the industry would be so incredibly resistant to
it (more resistant than any other major industry I know of)--particularly
with the federal incentives to metricate since the early 1990s.
In construction, the main use of measurements on the job is not in
calculations, but in naming products and dimensions (especially orally) and
in physically measuring lengths. (Most calculations are already done by the
designer. Workers just follow the blueprints.) Unfortunately, the inch-foot
names are usually simpler (easier to write and say) than the corresponding
hard-metric names, and, to be honest, easier to read on a tape (because the
numbers are bigger). A more serious problem is that there are thousands upon
thousands of wombat building products but virtually no hard-metric products
available. Building a metric building with inch-foot components presents all
sorts of problems. Not only do the parts not fit, causing extra labor
cutting and filling and unsightly connections, but you also have to
constantly convert back and forth.
Certainly calculations are easier in metric than wombat, and some civil
engineers and perhaps a few architects support metrication for that reason.
But calculations today are simplified by special builders' calculators and
CAD programs that automatically do fractions and inch-foot conversions, so
this is not the big advantage it once was. It is indeed unfortunate that
metrication didn't take root in the 1970s when it was supposed to, before
calculators and personal computers became common.
-----Original Message-----
From: Marcus
Well... Sometime ago when I was considering this very point in regards to
the construction industry I came with the following very rough estimate.
If one considers *only* the time workers spend with calcs in the site, this
is what we can demonstrate.
It's reasonable to assume that on average if one worker makes, say, 10 calcs
per hour of work (I'd say he does much more than this, but, just for the
sake of being conservative...) he would save at least 5 seconds per
operation, for a savings of 1 minute (rounding it up a little) per hour of
work.
A construction worker is paid at $20 or so an hour (maybe even more!). So
this represents a savings of 33 cents per worker per hour. If the building
of a house involves some, say, 8 workers full time (7.5 h/day) for about say
2 months (22 day/mo). That would be a savings of:
.33 x 8 x 7.5 x 2 x 22 =~ 870 dollars!
Now, if a contractor builds, say, 3 houses a month, there would be a savings
of:
870 x 3 x 12 =~ 30 000 dollars a year!!
Now imagine the entire construction industry...
And I'm not including in the above analysis the significant amount of
wastage that would be saved by calculation mistakes and other "intangibles".
If this does not convince a construction company to go metric I honestly
don't know what would... ;-)
Marcus
PS: And the above savings would occur *even under the current ifp
environment* as all that would be required is for information to be stated
in metric (soft or hard, it doesn't really matter!).
