malachi constant
Senior Member
- Location
- Minneapolis
I'm an engineer in the consulting field. Have a client considering purchasing their own service transformers for a commercial/residential development property. It's two transformers, located in the same spot, maybe exterior or maybe in an internal vault, feeding one property. I've never done medium voltage design (beyond replacing a transformer on a campus MV loop). I consider myself pretty sharp and resourceful, and have already started researching design considerations from a manufacturer's and code perspective (well..."started" is deceiving...I printed out some materials to read while traveling next week).
However this is certainly not my area of expertise, and I'd appreciate your thoughts as to whether it is a sufficiently different enough beast that I would be better off subbing it out to another engineer, or specifying it as "design-build" as I possibly can.
From what I know it isn't that complicated, but aside from this forum I don't have anyone around to check my thoughts vs reality before I get too far into it. Thanks!
PS - The economic problems of owning your own service transformer are not lost on me - namely that if it fails, it's not the utility's problem, so the Owner would need a contingency plan. That is an issue that is still being considered by the project team. I'm just trying to get ahead of the game in case this does turn into my design problem.
However this is certainly not my area of expertise, and I'd appreciate your thoughts as to whether it is a sufficiently different enough beast that I would be better off subbing it out to another engineer, or specifying it as "design-build" as I possibly can.
From what I know it isn't that complicated, but aside from this forum I don't have anyone around to check my thoughts vs reality before I get too far into it. Thanks!
PS - The economic problems of owning your own service transformer are not lost on me - namely that if it fails, it's not the utility's problem, so the Owner would need a contingency plan. That is an issue that is still being considered by the project team. I'm just trying to get ahead of the game in case this does turn into my design problem.
