The Exhibition Hall in June
AIA Expo 2022, Chicago. June, so the city is warm and humid. The convention hall is freezing. Within thirty seconds of walking in from the street you are cold. Not refreshed. Cold. In a jacket, in summer, in a room the size of an aircraft carrier running air conditioning at a scale you can hear.
Nobody inside is suffering. Nobody is complaining. The energy consumption implied by that temperature differential, applied to that volume of air, across a multi-day conference, is almost certainly never discussed when the system is being specified. The brief said "comfort." The engineer designed to the standard. The system was built accordingly.
Davis Muxlow, co-founder and COO of HVAKR, posted something earlier this month that is the direct question behind that memory:
Everyone wants to talk about reducing energy and cost, but no one wants to talk about reducing comfort. When budgets are tight and value engineering starts, you should have a real conversation about reducing comfort requirements.
"Comfort" is a design input, not a fixed fact. The conversation about what level of comfort this building, this occupancy, and this budget actually requires gets skipped. The engineer specifies to a standard. The standard rarely gets questioned. The cost follows.
Why the ME Is Always Last in the Room
I shared a draft of this post with Davis. His response reframed how I was thinking about the product.
The mechanical engineer typically comes in late. Not because they are slow, but because it is not economically viable to run loads on a napkin sketch that will change three times before the scheme is fixed. So they stall. All the engineering disciplines stall. Everyone scrambles at the last minute. Coordination suffers. Safety factors get layered on to absorb the uncertainty, which leads to oversized systems, higher energy consumption, and higher first cost. That pattern is not anyone's failure. It is a rational response to an economic constraint.
HVAKR's answer is to remove that constraint. Throw in the rough floor plans, the schematic layout, the early sketch. Run the numbers. Give the architect useful feedback while there is still time to act on it. Keep updating those numbers as the design evolves.
When the architect decides to swap a low-e glazing specification for something cheaper, the ME can say in thirty seconds what that does to the mechanical budget. It might cost more on the mechanical side than it saves on the glazing. That conversation currently does not happen at early stage, because the numbers are not available until far too late. HVAKR is building the tool that makes it available from day one.
Davis was direct about where the value sits. Drawing duct runs is work that is already largely outsourced. It is drafting, not engineering. The analytical piece, the judgement about what the system should do and how early-stage decisions affect it, is what carries professional value. That is what HVAKR is trying to put at the start of the project.
Squarely in the 20%
HVAKR sits in Martin Fischer's 20% bucket: faster, better analytics on the existing delivery process. That is not a small thing. The convention hall in Chicago is running at that temperature because the ME had neither the time nor the economic incentive to model the question early enough for anyone to answer it differently. That is what HVAKR is fixing.
The 80% question, what the brief should have asked for in the first place, is still upstream of all of this. But that conversation only becomes possible once the analytical piece is fast enough to be present when it matters. Right now, for most projects, it is not.