I was only designing and modeling DC drive cabinets and high capacity medium voltage cablebus in those days to provide power to the huge (thousands of horsepower) electric motors that powered the machine, and I worked with engineers responsible for making the thing function, whom I’d seen on more than one occasion to be bleary-eyed after an all-nighter trying to get the control system to behave.

 You see, a paper machine, just like something as seemingly mundane as a central air conditioning system, is a complex construct trying to deliver a predictable and repeatable output in the face of an almost stochastically dynamic environment.   . . . Wha?

Not a lot of things have to line up correctly to turn on a light, for example.  Squeezable Charmin and a comfortable artificial environment are, however, an entirely different matter.  Similarly, to light a burner on a gas range, you merely turn a knob and (maybe) light a match. To light off a marine boiler is something more of an undertaking.

So who’s the rocket scientist who convinced Design Professionals that all they had to do was to produce a good set of design documents, and also convinced Installing Mechanics that all they needed to do was to ignore such documents as they were obviously prepared by persons who had no acquaintance with the real world? Or, as I have been known to cry on occasion in exasperation, Perché mé Dio? (Why me God?)

What is so bloody tough to figure out about this?  Doesn’t anybody remember that the Design Professions started out as a part of the Construction Trades?

We in the Design Professions have come to realize this of late, and have come up with a new term (Commissioning) for this old process of getting the thing to work, which Bechtel called PSI.  It was called similar things by others in the Design-Build crowd, and even we in the Design-Bid-Award crowd insist upon submittals, shop drawings, final field tests, and final testing and balancing, before we “sign off” a project.

The problem has become, as is not infrequently the case in specialized advanced society, the legal framework in which we exist has become an excuse for some to be more concerned with limiting their legal exposure by shifting responsibility to others and relying on documentation of that responsibility having been discharged, as proof of a system functioning as intended.

Years ago, I gave up on accepting balancing reports where I didn’t personally oversee the testing because I kept getting called back with end user complaints and discovered conditions in the field which made the balancing reports look like fiction.  Understand this occurred weeks after project closeout, not after the decades of poor or no maintenance which has led to the new locution “Retro-Commissioning.”   Whether such balancing report novellas were the result of incompetence, a desire to cut corners, or a desire to please and for all to get along, is unimportant.  What is important is that the thing ended up not working as intended, and everyone ended up looking bad.

And the owner/end user in all of this?  He/She still doesn’t understand why an air conditioning system shouldn’t work like a light bulb or a burner on a gas range.

Do you suppose we might have missed something?