Many consulting engineers will tell you that time invested in the construction phase is beyond their scope of work and, of course, the fee has been all used up and “we can’t afford to waste our time” with equipment and associated system startup.

Here are my suggestions for preparing to complete a construction administration site visit as the design engineer for the project.

In the previous installment on using your tablet to engineer buildings, we focused on design, touching upon apps used to sketch concepts, review drawings, and perform calculations.

This month and in the next three months, I will be sharing my experience pertaining to a design engineer who is responsible for the construction administration of the project he just completed the design for, with construction underway.

After a brief hiatus, we are resuming exploration of the tablet as engineering tool. In the first article, we examined the energy study and how the tablet can facilitate tasks such as annotating existing documents, taking notes, and storing and accessing documents.

HVAC systems continue to be the most challenging part of a new construction project to get right the first time, and the most challenging parts of the HVAC systems are their controls. I believe there are two root causes.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its latest report on college graduates and the correlation between their chosen majors and their start-ing salaries (and unemployment rates)

Last month, I addressed the challenge faced by new construction project teams to build faster and cheaper. In the normal project delivery process, this responsibility falls on the construction manager and/or general contractor (CMGC).

My recent columns have been puzzling through the question of why owners are accepting unfinished construction projects as substantially complete.