CIEL Spen Farm, University of Leeds

Not every job is a solar job. At CIEL Spen Farm — the University of Leeds’ research farm, part of the Centre for Innovation Excellence in Livestock — the work was pure electrical contracting: the infrastructure a working research and teaching facility runs on.

G Smith delivered the electrical distribution throughout the site — the boards, submains and distribution that feed a facility with a lot of moving parts. Alongside that, the team wired the power and lighting to the visitor centre, the public-facing part of the farm where the work is shown to visitors.

There is no solar array on this one, and we are not going to invent one. It is on this page because it is the sort of job that underpins everything else: get the distribution right, and every other system — including any array added later — has something solid to connect to.

It also shows the breadth of what G Smith does. Solar is a big part of the work, but the firm is an electrical contractor first — and the electrical infrastructure for a Russell Group university’s research farm is a fair test of that.

A research farm is not a simple building to wire: teaching spaces, working agricultural facilities and a public visitor centre all draw from the same site, and the distribution has to serve every one of them reliably. Delivering that groundwork — the boards and submains a place like this depends on — is the kind of unglamorous, get-it-right electrical work a university estate can build on for years.