If It Were Mine

The decision for one owner is often completely different for the next owner. Even within the same sector this is common. MTN has the opportunity to serve a number of K-12 school districts in southern California. One might want full building management system on all their schools, the next may only want Title 24 compliant thermostats with remote holiday and summer scheduling capability. The next might want something completely different.

We speak for our clients every time we make a decision. Sometimes it's through picking an equipment manufacturer. Other times it's advising them on work that isn't installed properly, or a large financial decision like whether or not to replace equipment. Each of these decisions has apparent first costs, but many of them have ripple effects in the operational and maintenance budget of the Owner.

MTN's founding principal had the opportunity to work directly for both a large city and several large commercial companies prior to starting MTN. All of these entities had diverse MEP needs, operations and maintenance capabilities, and funding availability for projects. As the A/E team, we owe it to the Owner to ask as many questions as we can so that as we work through the design process, we can make the best decision for each Owner's unique needs.

MTN had the opportunity to provide design review services for a higher education client that we have served for a long time. This Owner has high sustainability goals. The project was to replace existing boilers. The mechanical engineer specified condensing boilers, seems like a reasonable choice for a client with lofty sustainability goals. We reviewed the 90% construction document set and questioned the choice. The Owner, although they have high sustainability goals, cannot currently operate their plant at temperatures that would allow the boilers to condense due to downstream equipment needs (this could have been resolved but was outside of the scope of this project). Ultimately the Owner made the decision to save the extra $60-100k required to install condensing boilers and decided to allocate those bond funds to other sustainability projects with better, more guaranteed outcomes. The design engineer may have been a little upset with us as they had to re-select the equipment and update the drawings and specifications, but the right question, early on, would have ensured the project started off from the get-go in the right direction.

Directly asking the Owner is always the best path to arriving at the right answer. However, sometimes they don't have the answer, or the right person never seems to be in the conversation. When that happens, there are subtle ways to pick up on the wants and needs of Owners. It could be simple things like how they do maintenance - is it outsourced, or do they have an in-house team? If it is in-house, do they have a healthy training budget? Understanding their maintenance team's capabilities may help you make the right decision on the complexity of equipment they could reasonably maintain or if you should include more training in the specifications for a given equipment type. Understanding their energy and/or sustainability goals may help you make the right decision for equipment efficiency or even equipment type; efficient equipment often doesn't perform well overtime if it's not maintained properly but other times it may be best to review their existing operation to make sure the higher efficiency equipment will work within their operations.

Other times the best decision the design engineer can arrive at is: "If this building were mine, and I had this Owner's maintenance team/budget, and Owner's energy goals, what would I want."