Here's What Your MEP Peer Review Should Be Catching

Too many MEP peer reviews measure value by comment count. The result is a spreadsheet of hundreds of redlines flagging typos and keynotes, while the problems that actually cost money go unaddressed—and still surface in the field.

Power Design's award-winning Design Division takes a different approach. Our reviews don't count redlines; they target the strategic decisions that move budgets. We bring seasoned expertise and a contractor's instinct for what it takes to build, going beyond code and coordination to ensure every square foot earns its place—and every detail works for the people who use it.

More Than a Markup

Plenty of reviewers can mark up a drawing. Few can tell you what a fix will cost or how it gets built. We can, because we see design from every angle: across trades, markets nationwide, and hundreds of projects a year. And the teams that price and build those projects are part of our review process:

• Construction, VDC, and field input. Our construction and VDC teams, along with former field superintendents on our quality assurance team, check design for constructability and multi-trade coordination.
  
• Experience at scale. We run 350+ projects a year across scopes, and every one feeds back into our design and coordination best practices.
• Real cost data. Our in-house estimating team prices the true cost impact of design decisions—not a cost-book average.
• National reach. We know regional standards, like each utility's own requirements.
  

Where the Money Is

The biggest savings live in units, distribution, and building programming. Unit errors multiply. Miss one $150 receptacle in a unit repeated 400 times, and that's $60,000. Distribution and programming decisions scale even further—on one project, correcting overdesigned distribution, risers, and building programming saved $4.5 million on a $17 million electrical budget.

From a Recent Review

On a luxury hospitality high-rise in Florida, our team reviewed the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design at 50% and 100% design development. Three catches stood out:

• Plumbing: Balconies above the pool deck drained straight over the edge into the pool below, a health code violation. The design team added a capture system for every balcony.
• Mechanical: Life-safety fans required long runs of two-hour fire-rated duct. Relocating fans and rerouting cut ~500 linear feet of rated ductwork.
• Electrical: The transformer vault didn't meet the utility's requirements. The drawings also referenced the wrong utility, errors that would have fed bad numbers into early budgets.

Every one of these costly problems would have surfaced eventually. We made sure it happened on paper—not on the jobsite.

Bring Us in Early

The best time for a peer review is before the design budget is spent. Talk to our team about an MEP peer review while every fix is still a revision.