Well, I've had plenty of trouble calls where I go down to the jobsite and find that the electrician decided he knew more than me and had a "better" way of doing it, and ran into the exact problem I had forseen and designed around... No, sorry, you can NOT notch the flange and I'm not authorizing an impingement of shock clearance on the waveguide- I didn't spend 3 weeks working on that drawing so you could toss it aside, rip it out and do it like I told you!

Sometimes the electrian does know the better way- he/she certainly spends a lot more time on-site working than the engineer- but very often, the engineer has a very good reason for the design decisions made. Maybe there's a planned upgrade, maybe the "easy" conduit run is reserved for some HVAC ducting to be installed down the road. My name is on all the drawings, I have a phone, I have an email address, and have always been very willing to work with the electricians doing the install. 9 times out of 10, I'm not going to care if you pull 2 big cables or 4 smaller ones, so long as the [derated] ampacity matches- normally, I'll make a call based on the price sheets and go with that. That 1 time out of 10 though, I really do want you to install it like I asked- maybe we intend to splice it with some other cables down the road, maybe it's to suit the lugs on some proprietary equipment that's not on the jobsite yet. I try to usually notate cases like that on the drawing explitely for this reason. Either way, if we all communicate a little better, I think there would be a lot less bad blood and jobs would go up a lot smoother [Linked Image]

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As for overruling the code, my experience is all at the federal level where the engineer is the AHJ and is the law; the codes are guidance, but I can overrule them as I wish. I can't speak so much for the city, but NEC and IBC give a lot of authority to the AHJs to deviate, and AHJs seems a lot more willing to allow an engineer who's assuming all liability to deviate than sign off work on their own authority.

[This message has been edited by SteveFehr (edited 02-09-2007).]