Damage by Electrical Contractors
Damage by Electrical Contractors
(OP)
The picture below is a recent repair job that I worked on. Single story commercial building in a 155 mph (ult) wind zone. Over 60% of the gable end wall was compromised. The fix was both presciptive and engineered. Any thoughts on what you might do?

I guess this is a good example of "What not to do as an electrician" or any other trades person for that matter.

I guess this is a good example of "What not to do as an electrician" or any other trades person for that matter.






RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
Maine EIT, Civil/Structural.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
Mike McCann, PE, SE (WA)
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
just a thought.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
What did the PE who signed off think was going to happen?
Not that I'm all that happy with a certain type of get-it-done tradesmen. The ones who no matter what job they have to do create far more damage to the surroundings than justifies anything they were supposed to do.
Take down a tree? Sure. Lawn destroyed with skid-steer for free.
Replace a clutch? Sure. Body destroyed at bad lift location.
Fix some plumbing? Sure. Slop in some concrete to patch the floor.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
I can envision the RFIs now....
Electrical Contractor - "wall is not large enough to run all required circuits, please provide chase."
Architect - "Chase is not permitted ,room is at ADA minimums"
Electrical Contractor - "Submitting extra for additional wire needed to go around wall"
Architect - Reject extra..
Electrical Contractor - gets out the drill...
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
That will resist the vertical loads, and the twisting loads as well.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
Mike McCann, PE, SE (WA)
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
Problem solved.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
It's poor engineering, to stick your head in the sand and issue out drawings you know cannot be built,or maybe it's worse, when you really have no idea if it can be built.
This is a fairly small project, but these problems tend to scale up with the size of a building ,at which point ,it's next to impossible to get direction on how to proceed with a fix ,to such a poor design. The endless stream of RFIs that get shuffled from one office to another, with no one willing to admit culpability. " Have the electrical contractor stand there and hold up the wall for the life of the building." Typical... "have the contractor pay for my piss-poor design...he should've seen this at bid. I spent 6 months designing the thing, hell, he's got two weeks to put a price together, and find all my mistakes".
I just reviewed a set of plans, quarter billion dollar range. There must be at least 18 months and a few hundred thousand spent to get to this bid set.15 minutes into the drawings. Hey, the column enclosures are so tight, the specified fireproofing won't fit behind the drywall, let alone the piping that is shown in there too. Call the MEP engineer ..."well, the architect has my revit file"...Call the architect....."Submit RFI's on a case by case basis"....So now the contractor has to spend his resources to get the engineer and architect to communicate with each other. Whatever happened to the AIA guidelines.
Put out an incomplete design and call it coordination for the contractors.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
Install a flat 2x4 on each side of the 2x6. 90 degrees to the stud.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
So why is it the architects still get paid magnitudes more than the engineers that figure out the nuts and bolts? hmm, I think we engineers need to work on our branding. :)
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
We had a long skinny two story school building with the electrical and IT rooms on one end. Contractor elected (no guidance on the drawings) to run 40 conduits under the slab and then up the nearest interior transverse shear wall. The sill plates and double top plates looked worse that this picture because he spaced the damned things out, thinking that was better. The holes in the sill plate were large just to make sure they fit over the electrical stubs coming through the footing. Of course the sill plate split and don't even think about having effective end distance on the sill bolts. Oh, did i mention it was supposed to be a double sheathed shear wall. Now I insist on a seperate electrical chase on the structural drawings and make sure the architect does the same.
Plumbing and mechanical can do similar things. Make sure you see the ducting drawings before plan check.
Mistakes/screw-ups are the worst/best teachers. Murphy's law - If it can happen, it will.
LonnieP
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
I was going to work for a company about a year ago that designed timber trusses for high end homes and commercial projects, mostly what they were going to hire me for was my artistic/design ability. However, I also mentioned that I was a licensed PE and that as an added bonus I could also do the structural analysis of the trusses and eventually write some software that would automate this process for them for the most common truss types.
Their response was, "We're not really concerned with the engineering of our timber trusses, we just need them to look nice. We can pay any engineer a couple hundred bucks to make sure they actually work". I was a little surprised at the lack of respect towards the engineering discipline, needless to say I did not end up working for these guys.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
That being said, it sure seems like building design has taken on a much more linear progression lately... Architect-> Structural-> MEP -> Out to bid. Without cycling the design through the chain once or twice, these conflicts are bound to be there.I think it's unfair to dump all the responsibility on the contractor. They just do what the drawings tell them to..
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
Star for you!
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
Our company does the engineering for a precast concrete company now and I see consultant drawings from all over the province. Some of them I look at and wonder in dismay how they expect the contractor to complete the project. One project that was tendered in our area years ago mimicked the shape of an eagle. There were endless curves in the project. The architectural drawings had some limited dimensions on the plans and a ton of generic details that they expected the contractor to interpret and figure out the appropriate material quantities for bidding. The engineers drawings only had gridline dimensions and some key dimensions in the sections. How that design team hoped to avoid endless RFI's was beyond me. It came in way over budget and was re-designed....shocking.
The question that puzzles me, is how can we fix it? Projects are getting more and more complex and the bottom line is more and more important for growing companies. The other reality is extra's are big business for many contractors. I know of contractors that have a senior staff member that go thru bid documents to find all of the loop holes and reduce their price knowing full well they will charge an inflated extra later. Some may say BIM will solve this, and it can to a degree, but I see many are using this largely as a dog and pony show. This is not always helpful. There are endless ways to add generic details with BIM if you are working with traditional firms that have specific 2D detailing teams. Another question I wonder about is how do we get our clients to go thru the boring, but important questions during the design process? Increasing fees to allow for additional review time might help, but many firms simply do not have the staff that can find these type of problems. Our insurance company has reported that the most common cause of fault in claims has been traced back to under qualified staff in most cases. Then there is the inevitable problem convincing an owner they should pay more. Many owners do not appreciate the complexity of a building project, and it is difficult to convince them of the importance of these type of questions until we end up debating the "who pays" question. We have not worked for an architect in years, and work mainly for design/build contractors that we have cherry picked. Even though they are the builders I still struggle at times to get them to want to look thru documents and try to anticipate problems. I have elected to ask them endless questions one by one. Not too many questions at once or you will not get an appropriate level of review. The problem with this method is it is tedious and only works for projects up to about $15mil in value.
medeek, I understand your truss interest more now. I recall talking with a truss engineer years ago. He was paid $75 to seal each truss sheet. On the topic of owner interest, our insurer polled owners and engineers separately on the most important aspects of any building project they undertook. I forget all of the questions, but what did stick in my mind was how dissimilar the owners interests were compared to the engineers. I seem to recall almost 90% of the owners put cost and on-time first. I suspect most of those owners simply assume that engineers cannot make mistakes or would ever miss something.
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
RE: Damage by Electrical Contractors
Mostly for passive or low footprint reasons: they are much more thermally isolated than classis (= brick) houses.