What is Going On!!!??

Status
Not open for further replies.
B

bgelectric

Senior Member
I have been estimating for a little while now and the more estimating I do the poorer the electrical drawings get.
I do more guess work and design than estimating.
What is going on? After bid time the #'s are further apart than before.
Why are these jobs designed so poorly! Specs and plans dont match up! Key information left out that is necesarry to furnish an accurate quote.
Sorry about this rant but I needed to get it out.:rant:
Are there others that can relate?
 
I can relate on the residential end. Homeowner's don't want to pay the architect to do a full drawing until the have an idea what the job will cost. I get plans with no electrical- remo, additions and new and we are suppose to give a price. They actually hire the builder based on the price-- then the real plans come out and we have to re bid and explain why we were too low.

Builders are finally learning that they need to give an unrealistic price to get the job and then explain it later. In the past we always gave a realistic bid and didn't get the jobs.
 
bgelectric said:
I have been estimating for a little while now and the more estimating I do the poorer the electrical drawings get.
I do more guess work and design than estimating.
What is going on? After bid time the #'s are further apart than before.
Why are these jobs designed so poorly! Specs and plans dont match up! Key information left out that is necesarry to furnish an accurate quote.
Sorry about this rant but I needed to get it out.:rant:
Are there others that can relate?
Click to expand...

I'm speaking commercial here, but it's very common for EE's to put 50% drawings out for budget pricing and let the bidding EC's to flush out or expose omissions and errors (free design advise)
When drawings and specs are put out to bid that are supposed to be permit drawings, but are crap, usually the EE's are on a low budget design and again, they let the bidding EC's flush all of that out.

I either case, it's up to you to RFI as much as possible, but don't expect any answers prior to bid date.
At that point it is up to you to qualify the crap out of exactly what you are including and excluding, and explain any and all assumptions you are making.

If you are bidding though a GC, the GC probably has the same problem with all trades and will appreciate efforts to identify these deficiencies.
Depending on the job, I use this as a sales tool. If the GC thinks you are taking the time to address these issues, he will communicate with you because he can't possibly talk to every bidding EC.
If he gets the job, he will remember your help. I have got awarded more jobs using this method than straight up hard bid on a good set of documents.
However, a lousy GC doesn't care and just wants a number
 
A lot of times we are bidding on stuff that has not been designed yet. People need some kind of price to put in for the capital equipment even if they don't know what the heck it is yet.

some of our stuff is 2 to 3 years out anyway, but they need some idea what it will cost.

we do not give firm numbers unless we have a firm idea of what it is we are proposing.
 
How do your electrician's figure it out

How do your electrician's figure it out

Putting together those poorly planned jobs is tough too. What is an electrician supposed to do when the prints are wrong? Worse yet the AHJ rejects the work! If the prints are stamped by a PE then build what the prints say, even if it is wrong.
 
Common failure modes in engineering firms include (but are not limited to) the following;

  1. Work done by draftsmen or designers instead of engineeers.
  2. Work not checked thoroughly by the engineer.
  3. Engineers who don't survey existing conditions.
  4. Engineers who survey but don't know what they're looking at.
  5. Lack of coordination between mechanical and electrical departments.
  6. Lack of interest or understanding of the work of the mechanical department.
  7. Designers who try to do nutty stuff because the architect asked them to.
  8. Designers and engineers who don't know the Codes.
  9. Work that goes out because its time to send it out, not because its done or checked.
  10. Specs are edited by someone who is afraid to take out stuff that he doesn't understand.
  11. Specs that are written by salesmen.
  12. master Specs are not edited at all, just used over and over.

Engineers are business men too. They're trying to get work done at the lowest possible level consistent with quality. It takes some time to learn how low you can go and still get away with it. The best engineers are not trying to "get away" with anything. I wish I knew more of them.
 
I love this quote in the specs/drawings Quote "its is the responisbility of the EC to install a complete and operable system"
Here is point A here is Point B, there is no info on either, space is non accesible, You figure it out.
 
I think it comes down to budget. We have to do more with less. Sometimes we don't have the budget to develop detailed drawings. If something is ambigious or wrong, you've got an obligation to ask a question and get some resolution.

On some jobs, the costs of change orders don't exceed the cost of further developing the drawings, so it keeps on happening...
 
lakee911 said:
I think it comes down to budget. We have to do more with less. Sometimes we don't have the budget to develop detailed drawings. If something is ambigious or wrong, you've got an obligation to ask a question and get some resolution.

On some jobs, the costs of change orders don't exceed the cost of further developing the drawings, so it keeps on happening...
Click to expand...

I think a lot of people just do not get how expensive it can be to make the drawings "perfect".

It is not unusual for engineering time to be billed at $200/hour, and even more. But the real killer is delaying a project. Even a few weeks delay can add a ton of expense to a project.
 
bgelectric said:
I have been estimating for a little while now and the more estimating I do the poorer the electrical drawings get.
I do more guess work and design than estimating.
What is going on? After bid time the #'s are further apart than before.
Why are these jobs designed so poorly! Specs and plans dont match up! Key information left out that is necesarry to furnish an accurate quote.
Sorry about this rant but I needed to get it out.:rant:
Are there others that can relate?
Click to expand...

It is a multi directional problem. One of the contributors I didn't see put out yet is the major shift toward Construction Managers instead of GC's. CM's work for the owner, often the design team works for them, and every subcontractor is an independent entity. The CM's in our area put together budgets by asking us to do electrical budgets. But when bid time comes, the owner, requires 3 bids from the trade. Since I have spent a lot of time up to this, I usually know all of the pitfalls of the project, and I have asked questions that I can't deny in a change order fight later on. Someone else comes in low and they end up doing the project. There are times when the CM deals more fairly, but most often that is the way it happens. Why should they pay for an Engineer when they can get an Electrical sucker to flesh out the plans for free?
 
Strathead said:
It is a multi directional problem. One of the contributors I didn't see put out yet is the major shift toward Construction Managers instead of GC's. CM's work for the owner, often the design team works for them, and every subcontractor is an independent entity. The CM's in our area put together budgets by asking us to do electrical budgets. But when bid time comes, the owner, requires 3 bids from the trade. Since I have spent a lot of time up to this, I usually know all of the pitfalls of the project, and I have asked questions that I can't deny in a change order fight later on. Someone else comes in low and they end up doing the project. There are times when the CM deals more fairly, but most often that is the way it happens. Why should they pay for an Engineer when they can get an Electrical sucker to flesh out the plans for free?
Click to expand...

We are seeing more and more end users more or less acting as their own GC to save money. In some cases it has worked a whole lot better than I would ever have expected. in others cases not so well, but not so bad either. I fully expected major league screw ups but so far I have not seen anything worse than when there is a GC involved.

I am seeing a lot of stuff designed on the fly too. We seem to be constantly shuffling things around. For some reason though, in the end it seems to be working out pretty well despite some frustrations with the process.

We are also seeing a lot of stuff no longer being bid out. That seems to be working out to everyone's advantage too. Negotiated pricing seems to make everyone more or less happy and we can shift things to ways that we can do them in a more cost effective way.
 
bgelectric said:
I have been estimating for a little while now and the more estimating I do the poorer the electrical drawings get.
I do more guess work and design than estimating.
What is going on? After bid time the #'s are further apart than before.
Why are these jobs designed so poorly! Specs and plans dont match up! Key information left out that is necesarry to furnish an accurate quote.
Sorry about this rant but I needed to get it out.:rant:
Are there others that can relate?
Click to expand...

I hope you passed the word along so it gets back to the owner. He is probably not qualified to know the plans are weak. He won't find out until the change orders start rolling in.
 
JoeStillman said:
I hope you passed the word along so it gets back to the owner. He is probably not qualified to know the plans are weak. He won't find out until the change orders start rolling in.
Click to expand...

I have found that owners who agree to this type of arrangement both understand the consequences of doing it this way and expect their subs to deal with it as best they can and in an honest way. The guys that use it to nickle and dime them to death will not be invited to future work.

We usually have at least some contingency money in stuff like this because you know going in that there will be some things that are not going to be covered.
 
I get tired of being handed a floor layout plan, and no other plans. Then owner wants a price of what it will take to wire it. I may ask a few questions come up with a price that is purely an estimate, then later find out someone else got the job because my price was too high.

Nothing like trying to cover the price of a whole lot of unknowns. I can probably cut out a lot of cost, then they will get upset later on about what my price did not all include:(

Funny thing is sometimes they do get upset with what was not included by whoever they did hire and end up calling me for future work.
 
bgelectric said:
I have been estimating for a little while now and the more estimating I do the poorer the electrical drawings get.
I do more guess work and design than estimating.
What is going on? After bid time the #'s are further apart than before.
Why are these jobs designed so poorly! Specs and plans dont match up! Key information left out that is necesarry to furnish an accurate quote.
Sorry about this rant but I needed to get it out.:rant:
Are there others that can relate?
Click to expand...


I thought about some of the earlier plans (before the 60's) that I have seen and I wonder how things were built back then. I think the construction plans today show a lot more information than those in the past. Namely because the user, and by extension, the architect is expecting much more level of detail and coordination from their consultants.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top