r/MEPEngineering

I know this sounds like a generalization but why does it seem like the worst MEP drawing sets are prepared by the biggest firms with the highest fees?

Generally, when you pay more for something you usually get more to justify the higher cost. In this industry though, it seems as though you get something that is more non-practical, less economical, comically over-designed & engineered - and includes way too much detail for the smallest things but zero detail for major components.

This is a genuine question, and an honest observation.

Curious to hear from others in MEP (electrical) — what’s been your experience with recruiters vs applying directly?

I’ve been speaking with a number of recruiters recently, and I’m not sure if it’s just my experience, but many roles being presented don’t seem well aligned — either geographically (I am in NYC metro area) or in terms of level.

For context, I have ~10 years of experience, strong Revit expertise, and am sitting for my PE this summer, so I’m fairly clear on the type of roles I’m targeting.

Would love to hear what’s worked best for you — recruiters or applying directly?

Disclosure up front: I work as a product development engineer at an HVAC manufacturer (air movement side), so I sit on the other end of the table from most of you. I'm not here to sell anything. I want to share a few observations that might be useful, and ask a question I genuinely don't know the answer to.

I've spent years watching what happens to specs and submittals after they leave a design engineer's hands — how contractors interpret them, where substitutions get pushed, how equipment schedules get translated into purchase orders, and how often the basis-of-design gets honored vs. quietly swapped. From my seat, the gap between what gets specified and what gets installed is wider and more procedural than I expected when I first got into this side of the industry.

A few honest observations from where I sit, without naming names:

1. Specs are often written for a model that won't be available by the time the project bids. Lead times have stretched, product lines get reshuffled, and the basis-of-design that made sense in DD can be discontinued or 16 weeks out by the time submittals come in. The "or equal" clause exists for a reason, but it puts contractors in a position of making technical judgment calls they're not really equipped to make — and the only people who can validate those judgment calls (you all) are usually too busy with the next project to give it real attention.

2. Submittal review is where most of the engineering value happens, and most of it is invisible. From the manufacturer side, I see a huge variance in how rigorously submittals get reviewed. Some firms catch substitutions that don't actually meet the spec on day one. Others let things slide that probably shouldn't slide. The firms that do it well are usually the ones whose engineers get personally burned by callbacks two years later. That's a hell of a feedback loop.

3. The "performance vs prescriptive" spec debate is real and contractors notice. Performance specs give contractors more flexibility but more responsibility for interpretation. Prescriptive specs lock in design intent but get pushed back on hard during VE rounds. I don't think there's a right answer here, but I've watched both fail in different ways depending on the project delivery method.

4. Equipment data quality from manufacturers is, frankly, often bad. I know this because I'm partly responsible for it on my end. Cut sheets that don't match the actual unit shipped, performance curves that assume conditions you'd never see in the field, missing data on accessories, inconsistent naming between the catalog and the AHRI listing. I'd be embarrassed to defend most of it. Genuine question for the engineers here: how much do you compensate for this in your selection process, and how much do you just take the manufacturer's word for it?

The question I'm actually asking:

When the design hands off to construction — when your spec book and your drawings land on a contractor's desk and they start building takeoffs and procurement lists — how much fidelity do you think survives that handoff? In your experience, are contractors actually reading the spec sections, or are they primarily working from the schedules on the drawings and treating the spec as a fallback?

I ask because I've been working on a side project that tries to help contractors extract equipment data from bid documents more reliably, and the more I dig into it, the more I realize that the design intent behind a spec often gets stripped away the moment the document moves from the design phase into the bid phase. I'm curious whether design engineers feel that loss too, or whether it's just a downstream problem you don't have visibility into.

Not posting a link — happy to talk about the side project in DMs if anyone is curious, but it's not the point of this post. The point is the question above. I'd genuinely like to hear how design-side engineers think about this handoff, because the people I usually talk to (contractors, estimators, distributors) have a very different vantage point and I want to triangulate.

— VJ, HVAC Engineer, Manufacturer Side

The senior EE PE at my firm has several Excel spreadsheets to calculate electrical loads.

One sheet we select the utility company and the electrical load categories populate. Then we manually enter various loads, HVAC equipment, square feet, number of apartments, etc. and get values. This sheet does the standard and optional load calcs.

Then we have another sheet that does loads on each panel.

Then we have another sheet for voltage drop based on distances.

Then we have another sheet that does something else I can't remember.

And each of these sheets has several tabs. It get a bit confusing to be honest. What is everyone else using? My firm designs various size buildings from apartments, hotels, spas, community centers, townhouses, big houses, retail, etc.