Still Around, Still Working

Eleven months since the last post...not the best of effort. Still working at the same place and haven't yet had a review. Not even the annual one. I did get a 3.75% raise in November so something must be going right.

However, my first project to construction had the Mechanical Contractor (MC) replaced after some ductwork installation occurred. The replacement MC failed to install required accessories on the fan coils and condensing units which resulted in two systems failing miserably. It also didn't help they piped the steam coils as if they were heating water coils and they didn't even do that correctly. Things are fixed and the systems are fine now but because I asked for a rebalance of the air systems to a maximum air flow, the company is having to cough up some minor money to pay for that work. Crap.

Another project, now under construction, had a plumbing designer show incorrect waste line invert elevations, missed plumbing fixtures, routed fixtures to the grease waste instead of the sanitary waste and spec'd fixtures not complying with the Owner standards.

On that second project, I found that during submittal review by others in the office there are apparent standards required by the Construction Adminstrative staff that somehow do not appear in the Design Standards. Of course, the Design Standards are incomplete and out of date. Frustrating at best, waking me up at 2am freaking out about failure. Sent updated info off to the architect for their acoustical consultant to review everything. Better if we have a change now before things are installed, not afterwards when the building is occupied and people are complaining.

I've done a number of updates and reorganization on the Mechanical Sequences of Control but none have been put into the Master version. The Master is 13 pages. I have 63 pages covering about half of what has been requested. Of that, only the first 10 pages or so have been reviewed, commented, corrected but not having final approval. Portions of what I have written get used since coworkers stop by for advice.

I've put together a list of Top Peer Review items that are frequently found on plans I check. I've also have a list of general review items to check and need to review/expand it. Both need to be passed out to the staff, probably at a luncheon presentation. In general my project review effort has caught a number of items on several projects that  would have been aggravating to embarassing to fix. Likely costly, too, given the issues would not have been found until during construction.

I had Revit MEP 2012 and Navisworks installed on my office PC which meant it got a second much larger hard drive for file storage. I use Revit Viewer to look at designs on-screen for MEP, Architectural and Structural while I'm looking at the printed documents. The info on paper doesn't show everything used for the design. Besides, I've seen strange looking building sections on the printed architectural plans that I know are not correctly shown. It also helps to zoom in on a screen image when reviewing half-size plans.

Considering I'm likely past some irritations with mhy projects I'm hoping to post more frequently. Obviously, time will tell if I fail or succeed.