“No offense, but plumbing [engineering] isn’t that hard.”
The above quote is what a colleague said to me during a leadership meeting. This phrase was uttered in response to my argument that the budget needed to be moved from HVAC design to plumbing design on a certain project due to the complexity of the plumbing design. But in essence, this leader said the quiet part out loud: MEP firms and engineers believe that plumbing design is “easy.” This even manifested itself on a recent plumbing engineering thread, where one plumbing design professional indicated to another that design of hot water return systems was “simple stuff” by just using rules-of-thumb for design.