Cost control
Where Electrical Change Orders Are Born
Change orders are not construction events. They are estimating events with a delay. After years on both sides of the wall — pre-construction and post-construction — the pattern is remarkably consistent.
I have spent my career on both sides of a wall that most cost professionals only see from one side: pre-construction estimating, and post-construction cost management. The single most useful thing that dual perspective taught me is this — change orders are not construction events. They are estimating events with a delay.
Almost every significant electrical change order I have reviewed was conceived months before anyone wrote it, in a decision or an omission at the estimate stage. Here are the four places they are born.
1. The coordination gap
Electrical drawings that were never truly coordinated with mechanical and structural. Every clash resolved in the field is a change order that was invisible in the estimate — unless the estimator priced coordination risk explicitly.
The honest position is that some coordination cost is inevitable at early design stages. The failure is not that it exists; it is that it is rarely named. An estimate that carries a stated coordination allowance, sized to the maturity of the design, is defensible. One that assumes perfect coordination and then absorbs the reality as "unforeseen" is not.
Price coordination risk explicitly — or inherit it as a change order with a contractor's markup attached.
2. The 'by others' orphan
Scope that every trade assumed someone else carried. Pathways for security systems. Power to mechanical equipment. Grounding for specialist systems. Small power for equipment that arrived on a schedule nobody circulated.
This is the most preventable category on the list, and it remains the most common. A rigorous scope matrix at tender — every system, every trade, an explicit owner — costs hours to produce. Its absence costs percentage points.
The warning sign is visible in the numbers: when electrical looks suspiciously thin as a share of construction cost against the benchmark family, scope is usually hiding elsewhere, or missing entirely.
3. The incomplete single-line
Estimates priced from a single-line diagram that later grew breakers, transfer switches and metering as the design matured.
This is design development, not change — but it becomes a change when the estimate carried no design-stage contingency because nobody assessed how complete the diagram actually was. The remedy is not more contingency; it is honest contingency, sized to the maturity of the electrical design specifically rather than the building's average.
4. The phasing fiction
A schedule that assumed clean, sequential access. Reality delivered occupied facilities, shared sites, restricted hours and night work.
Productivity assumptions are where this cost lives, and they are rarely revisited once set. On occupied-building work, new-build labour rates plus a modest markup is fantasy — the real factor can approach a multiple. The estimate should be built around the shutdown and access strategy, not have one appended to it afterwards.
Post-construction taught me what pre-construction should fear. Closing that feedback loop deliberately, project after project, is the highest-value habit a cost team can build.
The habit that fixes it
The practical countermeasure is unglamorous: feed the final account back into the estimate. Every project that closes should tell the estimating team something specific about what they missed and why. Most organizations do not do this — the estimators have moved on to the next bid, and the commercial team owns the outturn.
The firms that close that loop systematically get measurably better at forecasting. The ones that do not repeat the same four mistakes for decades, and call them unforeseen.
Put this into practice
I built a free electrical cost toolkit around these principles — an elemental build-up with estimate-class ranges, a named risk register, compound escalation and a $/kW density check.
Open the free toolkit →