Life as a Controls Subcontractor

You’re a controls subcontractor. Your job is to take everything the mechanical engineer has specified and make it work. You will usually work for the mechanical contractor who has promised in advance that you’ll be able to make it work. Here are some things you’ll have to do and questions you’ll have to ask.

Development

Sometimes you’re a salesperson. Ideally you’d have time to learn everything there is to know about the job before you give a price, but there’s a thousand pages of specs and only two weeks before bids are due, plus you have five other projects to bid. So you figure out the most important details:

If you’re lucky you’ll be invited to an onsite pre-bid meeting. The engineers, general contractors, and trades should be there. Everyone will be writing things down on their drawings and taking photos. You might want to look around or ask about:

Look for anything that the owner might expect to be part of the project that isn’t explicitly noted. If there are old pneumatics, seized dampers, busted VFDs, etc, bring those up and ask if they should be included. If they are, make sure they get included in a bid addendum! You don’t want to price yourself out by including things other vendors don’t.

Estimating

Sometimes you’re the estimator. You open up your excel spreadsheet and start plugging in everything from the drawings and everything from your pre-bid walkthrough notes. If you’re fancy this might be a dedicated estimation webapp, but in the end it’s essentially a spreadsheet. You should look at:

After you have a base number, you should look at:

You get a number at the end. You tack on your margin, contingency, and anything else you can think of. If you have time, you sleep on it and add everything you forgot the next day. You put it on your letterhead, copy in your standard exclusions, and shoot it over.

If your price is low, you get a call grilling you to make sure you had everything included. If you’re high, they act like your best friend and ask if you remembered how easy this project is going to be.

You wait, and eventually get a contract.

Engineering

Sometimes you’re an engineer. The salesperson hands you the project and you shake your head. You divide the engineering bucket by your chargeout rate and find out you only have 20 hours, minus some for revisions and putting together closeout docs at the end.

You start by doing everything they did, but correctly this time. You find 5 heaters that weren’t on the schedule and 6 motorized dampers that were missed because they were marked as “active gravity dampers”. In general, you:

Now with all that out of the way, you can start your actual job.

Logistics

Sometimes you’re logistics. You know how much everything costs, what’s shipping from where, what parts have been coming in slow because the factory is missing a bracket, what alternate suppliers charge in overhead, and how many controllers you have stashed on a shelf. Nobody ever asks you about this. They just want everything, now.

You go through the engineer’s drawing set and put together a spreadsheet of every part in every system, where you need to order it from and where it’s going.

Project Management

Sometimes you’re the project manager. You have ten jobs going and four on deck. Schedules are a suggestion at best. You are the master juggler.

You have three to-do lists for every project:

Proactive

These items are things that will save you headaches down the road.

Recurring

You make sure you check these every week. Make yourself known, and make yourself annoying if you see a problem.

Reactive

Things will come up unexpectedly. Little problems are just as important as big problems when maintaining trust.

If you're lucky, and everything goes well, and everyone does their job right, then you get to go home.