MECHANICAL PLANS,
REVIEWED & SEALED.
Loads, ventilation, equipment and controls — a licensed mechanical PE reviews your HVAC package against the mechanical and energy codes your jurisdiction actually enforces.
Mechanical review and sealing means a professional engineer licensed in the project jurisdiction checks your HVAC design — load calculations, ventilation rates, equipment selection and schedules, duct and piping layouts — against the adopted mechanical and energy codes. Packages that meet code and standard of care are signed and sealed by the responsible PE; packages that don't come back with a written correction list.
What a mechanical review actually covers
Mechanical reviewers start where mechanical permits die: the load calculation. The reviewer verifies the heating and cooling loads against the building as drawn — envelope, orientation, occupancy, internal gains — and checks that the selected equipment actually serves those loads at the jurisdiction's design conditions. Ventilation is checked against the adopted mechanical code's outdoor-air requirements for the occupancy, because under-ventilated buildings fail inspection and over-ventilated buildings fail their owners on energy bills for decades.
From there the review moves through duct and piping layouts, equipment schedules, refrigerant and combustion-air provisions where they apply, exhaust systems (commercial kitchen, laboratory, parking garage), controls sequences at the level the jurisdiction requires, and the energy-code compliance path — prescriptive or performance — with its documentation. In jurisdictions with aggressive energy codes, the energy forms are where packages stall; a reviewer who knows the local compliance software and envelope trade-off rules saves cycles.
On the checklist
- Load calculations vs. the building as drawn
- Ventilation and outdoor-air rates by occupancy
- Equipment schedules and capacities at design conditions
- Duct, piping and refrigerant system layouts
- Exhaust systems — kitchen, lab, garage, process
- Energy-code compliance path and documentation
- Combustion air and venting for fuel-fired equipment
- Controls sequences required by the jurisdiction
Who sends us mechanical plans
Mechanical packages typically arrive from design-build mechanical contractors engineering their own installations, from architects carrying tenant-improvement work at volume, and from engineers whose license map doesn't cover the project state. Kitchen ventilation for restaurants, rooftop-unit replacements that trigger code upgrades, and multifamily ventilation are the recurring themes — work that is engineered, buildable, and stuck behind a sealing requirement in a jurisdiction where the designer isn't licensed.
The review standard doesn't bend for familiarity. A mechanical PE sealing your package is certifying it as their own work product under their license; they will verify the loads, the ventilation math and the equipment selections as if their name were on the title block — because once sealed, it is.
Corrections we see most
Ventilation rates carried from a template instead of calculated for the actual occupancy. Equipment scheduled at nominal tonnage that doesn't meet the calculated load at local design conditions. Energy compliance forms for the wrong code edition. Kitchen exhaust and makeup air that were designed by two different people and never reconciled. Every one of these is a one-cycle fix when it's caught in review — and a multi-week fight when the plans examiner catches it first.
Cost & timeline
Mechanical review is scoped per package. Price drivers: system count and type, whether load calculations are included or must be verified from scratch, energy-code documentation depth in your jurisdiction, and the number of exhaust/process systems in play. A complete set earns a written scoped quote before review begins — the quote names the review effort, not a guess.
Every engagement is quoted in writing with its own timeline before work starts — an estimate built from your package's actual scope, stated per engagement rather than promised by slogan. A complete, review-ready set moves first; incomplete sets get a completeness note, so nobody pays to review half a package.