You found it. You are the one standing there with a tape in your hand looking at a beam that is exactly where your duct is supposed to go.
So you tell your foreman. And then the problem leaves your hands and you do not see it again for three weeks, and when it comes back somebody tells you what to do and nobody tells you what happened in between.
Here is what happened in between.
This one sits alongside how to read HVAC drawings on a commercial job and who owns the duct design.
Where your question actually goes
I have been on both ends of this. I hung duct, and now I am a project manager for a general contractor. The chain looks like this.
- You bring it to your foreman.
- Foreman takes it to your superintendent.
- Super takes it to your company’s project manager.
- Your PM calls me, the PM for the general contractor.
- I try to answer it myself, with my project engineer.
- If we cannot, I tell your PM to write an RFI.
- Your PM writes it, himself or through his project engineer.
- My project engineer reviews it before it goes anywhere.
- I send it to the architect.
- Architect reviews it with his consultants.
- A response comes back to me.
- I send it to your company.
- Your PM pushes it out to your team.
- We update the drawings with the answer.
Fourteen steps, and look at where the RFI actually starts. Step seven.
By the time an RFI exists, two people already tried to answer your question and could not. A general contractor’s PM and his project engineer sat with it first. That is step five, and nobody tells the field it happens.
I always do that check. Ten or fifteen minutes to understand the problem and try to solve it. Partly because if the answer is sitting right there on a sheet and I sent it up the chain anyway, I look like an idiot, and I have looked like an idiot before. Mostly because it is not right to spend somebody else’s time on information that already exists. The design team already did that work.
It matters because it tells you what an RFI is. It is not how you ask a question. It is what is left after the people closest to the job ran out of answers.
Why anybody has to answer it at all
Here is the part worth knowing, and it is the reason this whole thing exists.
An RFI has to be answered. An email does not.
An email can be ignored. It can be answered halfway. It can be read and set down and never thought about again, and there is nothing you can do about that. On the contracts I work under, an RFI is different. A response is required, and the answer becomes part of the contract documents.
I am not an architect and I am not going to quote you article numbers I have not read. What I can tell you is what the forms do. They are written to protect the design side, which is what they are for. They can be modified for a project. Contractors could negotiate better representation in them up front, and mostly we do not, and the honest reason is that it is a lot of reading and it happens at the worst possible time.
That is worth knowing before you get frustrated at an architect. The shape of this thing was set long before either of you got to the job.
This is not an HVAC thing, either. Every trade uses RFIs the same way, for the same reason.
The clock
The architect’s review time is set by the contract specifications. It is a defined number, not a mood.
- Fourteen calendar days is typical.
- Ten shows up sometimes.
- Seven, rarely.
Calendar days. Not working days. Your weekend is in there.
In thirteen years in management, two architects have come back sooner than the contract required. Two.
That is not a character flaw. If somebody handed you float, you would use it too.
The number of people who have to look at it is what actually drives the speed. One engineer is fast. A question that has to go to the mechanical engineer, then the structural engineer, then back, takes the whole window and takes follow-up and pushing to land inside it.
And sometimes the person who has to decide is the owner. Then it is not a technical question anymore, it is a dollars question, and the answer depends on whether it is in the budget.
How two weeks becomes four
If the architect does not know how to answer, he can say so. That is a response. It satisfies the requirement.
Now you have to submit a clarification RFI to get a better answer.
And the clock starts over. The full window, again.
Two review periods burned on one question, and not one person in that chain broke a rule. That is the thing nobody explains to the guy who found the beam. He thinks somebody is sitting on it. Nobody is sitting on it. It is working exactly the way it was written.
So here is the part you control.
Most of the time, the architect answered the question
He answered the one that got asked.
Generally architects do try to answer. If what came back was useless, the first place to look is the question, before you look at the man who answered it. A question that can only be answered one useless way is going to be.
Word of the day: actionable. An answer you can do something with. Not an opinion, not a maybe, not a promise of an answer later. Something a man can take to the floor and build. If a response is not actionable it has cost you the full review period and bought you nothing.
The bad question
What is the height of the duct?
The answer to that is “which duct,” and you just spent two weeks to get it.
Nobody wrote that question to be lazy. They wrote it because they knew exactly which duct they meant. Everybody standing near them knew. The architect, two hundred miles away with forty sheets, did not.
The good question
On sheet M101 at gridline 14 and B, the EF-1 duct is in conflict with the plumbing line. The perpendicular beam obstructs it from passing in that area. Identify a route to take the duct as shown, or provide an alternate exhaust location.
Sheet. Grid. Equipment tag. What is in the way. What you need.
They have to give an answer to that. There is nothing to ask back. Every piece of information a person needs to stand at that spot in his head is already in the question, and the last sentence hands him two doors and no third option.
That is a good contractor. That is the RFI that comes back usable in one cycle.
The great question
Take the same RFI and change the last sentence.
See attached drawing noting a path to get the duct through the beam. The height is going to impact the finished ceiling locations. Is this acceptable? If not, identify an alternate route, as there is not enough clearance to get past the beam with the duct size noted.
Look at what that does.
You brought an idea, and an idea commands an answer. Yes or no is faster to give than a solution is, and you have made yes the easy door.
You also flagged the consequence before he found it himself. The ceiling moves. He was going to catch that on his own and send it back, and now he does not have to.
And you stayed on your side of the line. If he does not like your route, the alternate is not yours to pick. You are not the designer and you did not appoint yourself one. You proposed, you did not decide, and the last sentence puts it back where it belongs.
That is the difference between a good subcontractor and a great one, and it is one sentence.
When they say no to your idea
It happens, and it is not uncommon. There are usually factors in it you did not have. That is what it is.
Other times you are right. The sub is the professional on what can actually get built, and a humble architect will take that critique. One who knows better takes longer, and usually concedes anyway if it is the right thing to do.
Either way, you proposed and he decided. That is the arrangement and it is not a bad one.
Before you write one at all
Now the uncomfortable part, and I am saying it about my own trade.
A lot of the time a sub will not do much research to find an answer. He sees there is not good information on the page in front of him and he comes and asks.
In many cases the question is field coordination that got missed on a review of the drawings. The answer was in the set. It was just not on that page.
One sheet is not the drawing set. The plan, the sections, the details, the schedules, the structural sheets, the plumbing and electrical sheets that show you what else is living up there. Duct loses most of those fights, and knowing which fight you are in usually takes more than one page.
When all the sheets have been referenced and the information still cannot be gleaned, that is the point to take it to the architect.
Not before. Before that, you are spending two weeks of somebody’s schedule to be told to read page forty.
The confirming RFI
There is a second kind, and it does something different.
A field walk happens. The architect, or the engineer, or the owner tells you to do something. Move it over. Use this instead. Drop it four inches. Everybody nods and everybody goes back to work.
Nothing about that conversation is in the contract documents.
A confirming RFI is the recap. On the management side we say it memorializes the direction. In plain words, it writes down what somebody already told you to do, in the place where writing it down counts. It does not have to come off a field walk either. An email, a meeting, a phone call. Anywhere somebody with the authority told you to do something other than what the drawings show.
It does three things. Track the deviation, monetize it, and implement it.
The middle one is the one that pays you. A change somebody told you to make is still a change to your work. If it is not written down it did not happen, and you did it for free.
These do not usually eat the full review period, because you are not asking a question. You are confirming an answer. Unless it turns out the direction needs a design consultant to weigh in, and then you are back in the normal window like everybody else.
This is the one you send before you fabricate
Do not cut metal off a conversation.
Somebody told you to move it. Fine. Paper it first. If you fabricate to a verbal instruction and the person who gave it did not have the authority, or remembers it differently a month later, or the owner will not pay for it, the material is already cut and it is your material. This is my general rule. I have worked with owners that I am comfortable moving forward with field direction on and I know they will honor the outcome of the conversation in dollars.
What it costs once metal is cut
This is why timing matters more than anything else in this post.
Before fabrication, a route change is a line on a drawing.
After fabrication, an alternate route means additional material. Somebody has to measure it. Somebody has to travel to deliver it. It has to be stocked and staged. And then it has to be installed.
If the piece is already hung, add taking it back down. A change to something already in place has to be clarified, responded to and then changed, and every one of those three steps costs money.
Labor, material and equipment, and none of it was in anybody’s number.
Which is why “ask earlier” is not honest advice
Most RFIs happen after fabrication. That is not a failure. That is how buildings get built.
A job goes in phases. Excavation and underground. Pour the slab. Framing, then roughing in the walls and ceilings. Nobody is going to catch every conflict while there is still a hole in the ground.
Material moves the same way. Things get released through the submittal process and delivered when the building is ready for them. A whole building’s material shows up when the building is ready for it, and that is when you find the issues and need the clarifications. Not before.
So the lesson is not ask sooner. Most of the time you cannot.
The lesson is that you only get one cheap cycle. The review period you cannot afford is the second one, and the second one is caused by the question, not by the calendar.
What the answer looks like when it comes
There is no standard shape to it. I have seen all of these.
- An updated drawing or detail.
- Comments marked on the photo you attached.
- A written direction with no drawing at all.
- A sketch. A real one, on whatever was handy.
- Build both versions and we will decide. A mockup.
All of those are fine. Any of them can be actionable. A napkin sketch that tells you where to put the duct is worth more than a beautiful sheet that does not.
Answer forthcoming
Then there is the one nobody can use.
A response that says an answer is coming is not an answer. Nobody can do anything with it. It closes the obligation and delivers nothing, and the field is exactly where it was two weeks ago except now the schedule has moved.
Usually there is a real reason behind it:
- A drawing is needed to clarify it and has not been produced yet.
- The owner has to approve the cost and has not.
- Or it is a lazy response, and those exist too.
Either way it needs to be called out. Not angrily. A response has to be actionable, and that is a reasonable thing to say out loud to an architect. We have had that argument and it is worth having, because the alternative is a crew standing around waiting on a sentence.
The short version
- An RFI has to be answered. An email does not. That is what it is for, and the answer becomes part of the contract documents.
- Two people already tried to answer your question before an RFI ever got written.
- Fourteen calendar days is typical. Fewer reviewers, faster answer. An owner decision rides on the budget.
- A bad question burns the clock twice, because the clarification gets the full window again.
- Sheet, grid, tag, what is in the way, what you need. That is a question that has to be answered.
- Bring an idea and ask if it is acceptable. Yes is faster to give than a solution, and the alternate is still not yours to pick.
- Read every sheet first. Most of these are coordination that got missed, not information that is missing.
- Most RFIs happen after fabrication. That is phasing, not failure. What you cannot afford is a second cycle.
- Given direction in the field? Write a confirming RFI before you cut. Track it, monetize it, implement it. If you can trust the process, I say it is okay to move forward but I am not your boss.
I am not an engineer or an architect. Contract terms and review periods vary by project, and the documents on your job govern.