Office pod installation requirements: lift access, floor loading and delivery day checklist
The office pod installation requirements that decide a project are rarely the ones on the quote. A pod is a heavy, rigid, pre-engineered product that has to travel from a lorry to a specific square metre of a specific floor, and the lift, the doorways, the turns and the slab either allow that or they do not. Establish those six constraints before you order and installation is a day's work. Establish them afterwards and you have a pallet in a loading bay and a supplier asking where you would like it left.
The six things that decide whether a pod can be installed
The tightest point on the route
Not the doorway into the room — the narrowest aperture anywhere between the lorry and the final position, including the lift car, the lift doors and every corridor turn.
Goods lift capacity
Rated load in kilograms, internal car dimensions and door aperture. A four- or six-person pod can clear all three individually and still fail on the heaviest single panel.
Floor loading
Both the distributed load in kg/m² and the point load under each foot or castor — the second is what raised access floors and older slabs actually fail on.
Power within reach
A pod needs a socket it can plug into, at a distance the supplied lead covers, on a circuit with capacity for ventilation, lighting and whatever goes inside it.
A window to build in
Assembly is noisy and takes floor space. Whether it can happen during trading hours, and who has to be present if it cannot, is a building question, not a supplier one.
The exit route
If the pod is rented, leased or likely to move with the team, the route in is also the route out — and it has to still exist at the end of the term.
The office pod site survey: measure the route, not the room
Most people measure the space the pod will stand in and stop there. That number matters for the floor plan, but it never blocks an installation. What blocks an installation is a 90-degree turn in a corridor, a fire door with a fixed leaf, or a lift car six centimetres too shallow. An office pod site survey walks the delivery route backwards — from the final position out to the kerb — and records the worst number at every stage.
| Measure | Why it decides the job | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Narrowest clear door width | Measured leaf-open, not frame-to-frame. Door stops, closers and handles eat the aperture the drawing shows. | Tape measure, on the day, with the door held open |
| Lowest clear height | Bulkheads, door heads, ducting and sprinkler drops set the ceiling on what can be carried upright. | Site walk; ceiling voids are rarely on the drawings |
| Corridor width at every turn | A panel longer than the corridor is wide cannot round the corner, whatever the door measures. | Measured at the turn itself, both approaches |
| Lift car depth, width, door aperture | The single hardest constraint in a multi-storey building, and the one with no workaround. | Lift car plate and a physical measure of the car |
| Lift rated load (kg) | Decides how many panels travel per trip, and whether the heaviest single panel travels at all. | Lift capacity plate inside the car |
| Stair width and turn radius | The fallback when the lift fails — and the reason some upper-floor installs are simply not possible. | Measured on the half-landings, where stairs are tightest |
| Loading bay and kerb-to-door distance | Sets the vehicle size that can deliver and how far panels are handled before they are inside. | Building manager or landlord's fit-out guide |
| Floor construction at the final position | Solid slab, raised access floor or timber deck — each carries load completely differently. | Lift a floor tile; confirm against structural drawings |
Record the number, the location and a photograph for every row. A survey that says "lift is fine" is not a survey; a survey that says "car is 1,400 × 2,100 mm, doors 1,100 mm, plate reads 1,600 kg" is something a supplier can plan against without a second visit.
Goods lift capacity and door aperture limits
Pods ship as flat panels, glazing, a roof unit and a base, then get assembled in position. That is what makes them installable at all — no assembled pod would fit through a normal office door. It also means meeting pod delivery access is never a question about the pod's finished dimensions. It is a question about the largest single panel and the heaviest single panel, and those two are usually not the same component.
Three lift limits, not one
A goods lift imposes a rated load in kilograms, an internal car footprint, and a door aperture that is always smaller than the car behind it. A panel can be light enough, and fit the car, and still not pass the doors. Check all three, and check the door aperture last, because it is the one people assume.
Diagonal loading buys you very little
Panels can often be tilted or carried on the diagonal, which is how most tight installations actually get done. Treat that as the installer's margin rather than yours: glazing units have handling limits, and a panel that only fits at an angle needs the clear height to be tilted in the first place. Survey to the flat dimension and let the installer tell you where they can be clever.
When the lift is out, the stairs decide
Some buildings have no goods lift, restrict passenger lifts to people, or take the lift out of service for the works. The fallback is a stair carry, which is limited by the half-landing turn rather than the flight width, and which raises the labour on site sharply. It is a fair answer for a single-person booth on the first floor. It is rarely a sensible answer for a six-person room on the fifth.
Larger pods fail access more often than they fail budget
The pattern repeats across rollouts: the single and 1.5-person booths on our size comparison go almost anywhere, and the four- and six-person rooms are where access surveys start returning no. If a floor cannot take the larger unit, two smaller pods in the same total footprint often can — a substitution worth knowing about before you have committed to a model rather than after.
Office pod floor loading, raised floors and point loads
Office pod floor loading is checked in two units, and only one of them is the one people quote. The distributed load — the pod's total weight spread over its footprint, in kg/m² — is the easy check and the pod usually passes it. The point load is the weight concentrated under each individual foot or castor, and it is where raised access floors, timber decks and older slabs actually fail.
How to run the distributed check
Take the pod's total installed weight from the manufacturer's datasheet, divide it by its external footprint in square metres, and compare the result with the floor's design loading. Purely to show the arithmetic: a unit weighing 600 kg standing on 2.0 m² works out at 300 kg/m². Use your own model's published figures rather than that illustration — weights vary widely between brands and between glazed and solid configurations of the same model.
Why the point load is the real test
That same pod does not rest on 2 m² of floor. It rests on a handful of feet, each a few centimetres across, and the load under each one is the total weight divided by the number of contact points — not by the footprint. A raised access floor is a grid of removable panels on pedestals, and its published limit is a concentrated load applied at the weakest part of a panel, usually its centre. A pod foot landing mid-panel is exactly that load case.
Raised floors: spread the load or move the feet
Two remedies, both ordinary. Either the installer fits load-spreading plates under the feet so the load reaches several panels and their pedestals instead of one panel's middle, or the pod is positioned so its feet sit over pedestal intersections rather than panel centres. Both need to be decided before delivery, because the first needs plates on the lorry and the second needs the grid measured in advance.
Where to get the building's number
Never estimate it. The floor's design loading is in the building's structural drawings, and the landlord's fit-out guide usually restates it alongside any restrictions on where heavy items may be placed. For a raised access floor, the panel manufacturer's concentrated-load rating is the figure that matters. If neither exists — common in older buildings and in converted space — a structural engineer's sign-off is the only honest answer, and it is far cheaper before an order than after one.
Upper floors, mezzanines and timber
Ground floors on a solid slab almost never present a problem. Upper floors, mezzanines, and any timber-joisted structure are where the check earns its keep, because their capacity varies with where on the span the load lands. Near a column or a load-bearing wall is structurally very different from mid-span, even inside the same room — which is one reason the survey records the intended position rather than just the room.
Power supply, sockets and data cabling
A pod arrives with its own lighting, ventilation and internal power already built in and wired. What it does not arrive with is somewhere to plug in. That single fact is the whole services question, and it is simpler than most buyers expect — but it still has three ways of going wrong on the day.
Distance to the socket
The pod is supplied with a lead of a fixed length. Measure from the pod's own outlet position — not its nearest corner — to the socket, and confirm the lead covers it. Trailing an extension across a walkway is a trip hazard your facilities team will refuse.
Circuit capacity
Ventilation runs continuously, lighting is usually presence-triggered, and whatever people bring inside — laptops, a monitor, a screen for video calls — adds to it. Adding several pods to one already-loaded ring is a conversation with an electrician, not an assumption.
Getting the cable there neatly
On a raised access floor the supply comes up through a floor box, which is the tidiest result and needs the box positioned before the pod stands on it. On a solid floor it is a floor plate, dado trunking or a drop from above — decided with the building, not on delivery day.
Data, if you need it
Most pods are used on Wi-Fi and need no data cabling at all. Check coverage inside the shell rather than outside it — an acoustic enclosure is a lot of mass between a device and an access point. Where a wired drop is wanted, it is ordinary structured cabling, and it is far easier to pull before the pod is built than after.
Assembly time and out-of-hours access
Assembly is a controlled, repeatable job: panels are carried in, the base is levelled, walls and glazing go up, the roof unit with ventilation and lighting is fitted, and the unit is powered and checked. A single booth is typically a few hours and a larger room longer, which is why a straightforward install is usually described as a day's work. The variable is almost never the pod. It is the building.
What the installers need from you on the day
A clear route, a cleared footprint plus working space around it, the lift booked if there is one, a parking or loading slot that matches the delivery window, and someone on site who can make a decision if the position needs to move by half a metre. Missing any one of those turns a day into two, and the second day is charged.
Why out-of-hours is so often mandatory
Assembly is noisy, occupies a walkway, and involves carrying heavy panels past people working. Multi-tenant buildings frequently restrict deliveries and works to evenings or weekends as a matter of policy, and a shared reception may require notice, insurance documents and named personnel before anyone is let in with a pallet truck. None of that is unusual — it just has a lead time, and it is the lead time people forget to start.
Paperwork the building will ask for
Expect a request for a method statement and risk assessment, proof of public liability insurance, and sometimes a permit to work. These come from the installer, not from you, but somebody has to ask for them early enough for the building to approve them. On a multi-site rollout this is the single most common cause of a slipped date.
Sequence multiple pods rather than stacking them
Installing several units in one visit sounds efficient and often is not: the lift, the route and the working space are shared, so the second pod waits for the first regardless of how many people are on site. Where a rollout spans floors or buildings, we cover how that is coordinated on the business solutions page.
Relocation: what moving a pod later involves
Being movable is the point of a pod — it is furniture rather than construction, so it can be taken down and rebuilt when the floor plan changes, with no building work to undo. That is genuinely true, and it is still not the same as pushing a desk across a room. Knowing what a move actually involves changes what you should record at the first installation.
A move is an install in reverse, then an install
Within a floor, some units can be shifted on castors or skates over a short, level distance. Between floors or buildings, the pod is dismantled to the same panels it arrived as, moved, and rebuilt — which means the access survey runs again, this time at the destination, and the lift and out-of-hours questions all come back.
Keep the survey; you will need it twice
The route that got the pod in is the route that gets it out, and buildings change: a corridor gets partitioned, a lift is replaced, a fire door is added. Filing the original survey with the purchase record is a five-minute habit that saves repeating the whole exercise at the end of a lease.
Rented and leased pods have a removal built in
If you rent or lease, the unit is collected at the end of the term, so removal access is not optional — it is contractual. That is worth weighing while you are still choosing between routes on our buy, lease or rent comparison, because a building with difficult access makes a short commitment more attractive, not less.
Reinstatement is usually trivial, but check
Because a pod is freestanding, taking it out normally leaves the floor as it was — no partition to remove, no reinstatement clause triggered. The exceptions are anything that was added for the pod rather than to it: a new floor box, a dedicated circuit, altered trunking. Note those at installation so the end-of-lease conversation is about a socket, not a surprise.
Survey first, then shortlist
Almost every access problem is cheap to solve before an order and expensive afterwards. Walk the route, write down the eight measurements above, and ask for the installed weight and largest panel dimensions of anything you shortlist — any manufacturer publishes both. Then compare models knowing which ones can actually reach the floor you want them on.
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More reading: find the right footprint first, or browse all guides.