Independent Peer Review & Proof Checking
Genuinely independent checking of another engineer's design, for lenders, insurers, authorities and owners who need certainty before committing.
Peer review is commissioned when the consequence of the design being wrong exceeds someone’s appetite for trusting it — a lender before drawdown, an insurer before cover, an authority before permit, an owner before the first concrete pour on a structure they cannot easily undo.
The value is entirely in the independence. A review that starts from the original engineer’s model, uses their load take-down, and accepts their design basis will confirm their answer, because it is their answer being restated.
How we structure a review
We start with the design basis, not the calculations. Most significant findings are not arithmetic errors — they are an incorrect importance factor, a wind exposure category that does not match the site, a soil bearing capacity carried forward from an adjacent plot, a seismic zone read off the wrong map edition. These are assumption errors, and no amount of checking sums will find them.
We then build an independent model, sized from the architecture and the agreed design basis, and compare global results first: total base shear, base reactions, fundamental period, storey drifts, overall reinforcement quantity. Global agreement means the two engineers understand the building the same way. Global disagreement is where the real finding usually is.
Only after that do we check members, connections and details, sampled by risk rather than uniformly — transfer structures, cantilevers, connections carrying disproportionate load, and anything the original engineer flagged as unusual.
Comments that can be acted on
Every comment carries a category, a clause reference and a proposed resolution path. Critical means it must change before construction. Significant means it must be resolved but the fix may be documentary. Advisory means we would have done it differently and we are telling you so without implying non-compliance.
We track every comment to close-out in a register that the client, the design team and the authority can all read. The review ends when the register is closed, not when our report is issued.
Questions