Kaia Engineering Design (MEP)
NEWDrawing sheets, not just calculations, for every building-services discipline.
Kaia Engineering Design is built for the five disciplines an MEP consultancy delivers: HVAC, fire, plumbing, ELV and electrical. It works on your own base drawings, checks every value against your code before anything is drawn, and hands back drawing sheets with the receipt behind every number. Today it draws the electrical lighting and power on covered car-park levels and prepares the HVAC, fire, plumbing and ELV design bases for your sign-off. The engineer of record signs. Kaia never signs, stamps or submits.
Why this exists
Production is still drawn by hand.
Construction documents and tender drawings carry an estimated 30–40% of the design fee. Calculated, coordinated, checked MEP drawings are still produced sheet by sheet.1
The errors live at the interfaces.
Design errors cost about 7% of contract value. They sit between disciplines and between documents: a load with no feeder, a duct through a tray, a schedule that disagrees with its layout.2
Today’s tools stop short.
Calculation tools do one calculation each. Coordination tools find clashes after the design is drawn. Drafting services sell hours, with no calculation or check behind the sheet.
- 1 Construction Documents phase share of the design fee: 30% (DesignFee.net, “Project phase fee distribution”) and 40% (Monograph, “Guide to design phases”). Source · Source
- 2 Lopez and Love, “Design Error Costs in Construction Projects”, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management 138(5): mean design error costs of 6.85% (direct) and 7.36% (indirect) of contract value across 139 projects. Source
Available now
AVAILABLE NOWElectrical lighting and power from your own DXF. On covered car-park levels, Kaia reads your base drawing and draws the following on its own layers:
- lighting by room;
- the emergency set;
- circuits and the DB schedule on the sheet;
- small power and EV points;
- the cable-tray spine;
- a first pass of CCTV and PA.
Your layers, blocks and text come back unchanged.
Normal and escape lighting designed to the code.
- Normal lighting: room by room to the NBC 2016 Part 8 illuminance ranges.
- Escape lighting: to NBC 2016 Part 4, holding the escape route at 10 lx or more on its centreline from the emergency fittings alone. Any stair whose way out Kaia cannot read from your drawing is named for your review, never passed silently.
Design bases with sign-off for HVAC, fire, plumbing and ELV.
- Each basis has its code register and applicability, with every value sourced from you or ledgered as an assumption, and a code value shown as awaiting until it is sourced.
- The lead signs off each discipline’s freeze list in dependency order: HVAC, then fire, plumbing and ELV.
- A change to anything a freeze cites reopens it.
Checks before drawing. Every rulebook check must pass before a sheet is drawn. A failing check ends the run and releases nothing.
Your corrections change the next run. Mark up a PDF or DXF, or type a note in the room. Kaia turns each mark into a proposed correction tied to the fittings, circuits and rooms it touches. You accept or reject each one. The next run starts from what you accepted, and the compare view shows what changed.
Name protection. Confidential names never ship. Every output is swept, and if a protected name is found, every output is withheld.
Excel workbooks with live formulas. Settings, DB schedule, calculations, assumptions and quantities come as live-formula workbooks. Each one must recalculate clean before it is released.
DXF in and out; DWG stays in your CAD. Kaia reads and writes DXF. You save your DWG as DXF to send it, and save Kaia’s DXF back as DWG in your own CAD.
A receipt and an evidence page per run. Every value is traceable to an input, a rule and a calculation. Nothing is published without the design partner’s consent.
Coming soon
COMING SOONAll five disciplines drawn in full, from the architect’s drawing and a one-page brief:
- HVAC, fire, plumbing and ELV layouts per level;
- calculations, schematics and schedules for every discipline;
- single-line diagrams;
- specifications as drafts for a person.
Coordination as a release gate:
- every load has exactly one feeder;
- a clash run with heights;
- layouts, schedules, schematics and the BOQ must agree before the package releases.
Every building type and level, beyond covered car parks, including millimetre bases.
A plug-in for your own CAD that sends, pulls and saves DWG from inside it.
Quantities and a rated BOQ taken from the receipts.
Code packs side by side. NBC 2016 and SP 7:2026 with both citations per rule, then the GCC pack. The lighting rules run today.
Corrections into practice rules. Each correction becomes a rule fix, an assumption replacement or an accepted variance, and recurring corrections are proposed to you as practice defaults.
The in-product engineer-of-record signature that releases the package.
How the checks work
Checked before drawn.
Every value is computed and checked against the rulebook before a line is drawn. No number on a sheet is a model’s guess.
Traceable after.
The receipt ships with every sheet: inputs, settings version, every check and what the run did not do. No receipt, no download.
Signed by your engineer.
The engineer of record signs the package, and each discipline lead signs their own discipline. Kaia never signs, stamps or submits to an authority.
Why Kaia
All five disciplines, one engine.
Most tools cover one discipline, or start from a BIM model. Kaia is built for HVAC, fire, plumbing, ELV and electrical in one set, on the 2D base your practice already works in.
Sheets, not just numbers.
Kaia’s output is the drawing sheet on your base, with your layers and its own. The calculation behind every value comes with it.
Every correction compounds.
Your markup becomes the start of the next run. Your practice’s standards and rules grow with each project, and you approve every change.
Who it's for
MEP consultancies and construction groups — from five-engineer practices to firms running large AutoCAD and Revit teams — that deliver calculated, coordinated building-services drawings. India and the GCC first; the code packs carry it anywhere.