Prefabricated Digital Washroom Cassettes
Streamlining construction, reducing costs, and easing pressure on B.C.’s skilled labour shortage in the housing sector.
Project Overview
Updated December 15, 2025.
The Problem
Rising construction costs and a skilled labour shortage are compounding British Columbia’s urgent demand for housing units. While prefabrication can speed up project timelines, current hybrid models that combine on-site and off-site construction methods are failing to deliver the full efficiency benefits needed.
Washrooms present a particular challenge. Their complex mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems concentrated in a compact space, as well as their design variability, make them difficult to prefabricate. To address this challenge, the province needs a fully prefabricated solution that delivers faster washroom construction at lower costs.
How We Are Solving It
ETRO Construction, in collaboration with BC Housing, Scius Advisory, Iredale Architecture, TINO Mechanical and Fettback & Heesterman, is prototyping a washroom panel equipped with standard mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems that can be readily incorporated into prefabricated houses.
The panel, also known as a “cassette”, will be flat-packed and specifically designed for typical washroom layouts in residential homes. The project partners will develop the prototype so it can be manufactured off-site, as opposed to traditional on-site construction. This “blueprint” will significantly reduce labour and time, with construction schedules expected to compress by as much as 15%.
Designed in compliance with the BC Building Code, the washroom panels will also leverage the BC Housing Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing (DASH) platform. Once finalized, the project partners will make the prototype available as an open-source 3D digital product so other manufacturers can fabricate the panels themselves.
A key outcome of the project will be quantifying efficiencies in cost, schedule and quality for the prefabricated units—and defining the economies of scale at which these construction methods become advantageous.
By standardizing this crucial construction component, and sharing the results with industry, this project will catalyze industrialization of the housing process. It will stimulate contractors and suppliers to invest in training, digital tools and equipment—all while reducing design and coordination time and lessening the burden of approval review and inspections by building officials. The result will be an accelerated building process, so that more houses can be built in B.C.
