Why we left the enzymes out of our grease trap conditioner, why the digesting culture carries them instead, and why we rejected a powder on engineering grounds rather than manufacturing ones.
Two design-only quotations, fifty times apart in plant size, came out about 1.5x apart in fee. Why delivering a sealed design set is near-flat work, what the external seal now costs, why a percentage of the works is the wrong shape, and the unflattering part: neither quotation sold.
Where IWSI's free advice stops and the invoice starts ā tank volumes, process flow and an unsigned layout for nothing; sealed drawings, engineers' time and site attendance paid. Field notes on a line that moved this year.
A client had a routine DENR inspection and asked us to file a corrective action plan. Nothing had been cited. Field notes on establishing what the event actually is, what a submission should say, and the things we put in writing anyway.
An owner sent us both quotations and asked us to explain the gap. Most of it was scope, not margin ā and we will not tell him the cheap plant must be imported junk.
A small job came back from our own drafting as a six-page itemised quotation. Here is why we cut it to two pages and one price, what we never cut at any length, and the times we got it wrong in the other direction.
A drawing arrived already finished, with a request for a price. Here is the six-section answer we now send back to any design somebody else has already drawn, and what we keep finding when we read one.
I deleted a paragraph from one of our own quotations because it warned a client at length about a problem we had already fixed inside the price. Here is the line we now draw between a risk he has to decide on and a warning that only damages the job.
A client asked for the best water we could make. His building's end goal was a Class C discharge and a yard washdown. Here is how we decide how clean is clean enough, and where we put margin instead.
Screening, grit and the grease interceptor are the three chambers at the front of an STP that we do not supply as equipment ā we pour them in concrete with the rest of the civil works. Field notes on why, what each chamber actually is, and where the approach does not transfer.
A new plant is switched on weeks before it can pass a test. Field notes on why the commissioning period is a contract item, what we write into it, and the design decisions that decide it months earlier.
