How Drawing Review Caught Schedule Gaps on a Charleston Hotel
- Mechanical ducts did not sit in the same bay from plan to riser to ceiling, and rooms used in the area calculations were missing from the plans.
- Helonic checked the Charleston hotel PDFs for duct locations and for rooms the schedule counted that the plan did not draw.
- The engineers confirmed 164 issues on 118 pages before submittal.
Charleston, SC. 164 issues on 118 pages.
Issues Detected
164 on 118 pages
Lead Findings
Ducts and missing rooms
Pages Reviewed
118-page hotel set
Mechanical Ducts That Did Not Match From Sheet to Sheet
A mechanical and fire-protection engineering firm was sealing a Charleston hotel. The area schedule used guest rooms and back-of-house rooms to total the floor. Several of those rooms were not on the plan.
Mechanical ducts on the floor plan sat in a different bay than the same ducts on the riser and the reflected ceiling plan. Fire-rating tags did not match either. Moving a duct after the ceiling is closed is the change order. A rating tag is a note.
A room that exists only in the schedule also throws off the exhaust and the area math the mechanical design used.
Helonic Flagged the Ducts and the Missing Schedule Rooms
They uploaded the architectural and mechanical PDFs. Helonic compared the duct centerline from plan to riser to ceiling, and every room named in the schedule with the plan.
The list was 164 issues on 118 pages. The ones that cost money were discrepancies between mechanical duct locations and missing rooms still used in the schedule calculations.
The missing rooms were grouped by floor so one schedule edit covered every sheet that had counted them.
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164 Issues Found on 118 Pages
The engineers dropped the missing rooms from the area math, aligned the fire ratings, and moved the ducts so the plan, riser, and ceiling agreed.
A schedule the building department would have sent back, plus rated walls and ducts fixed after inspection, is the cost of leaving those 164 items on the set.
The review comments that followed were about the pool barrier. The room schedule and the duct locations were not sent back.
“The ducts were in a different bay on every sheet, and rooms in the schedule were not on the plan. Helonic caught both before we sealed the hotel set.”
Frequently asked questions
What did the Charleston hotel check cover?
Mechanical ducts that did not line up from plan to riser to ceiling, and rooms the schedule counted that the plan did not draw.
How is this different from the Nashville hotel story?
Nashville was a roof condenser, a condensing-unit electrical conflict, and an undersized generator pad. This page is duct locations and missing schedule rooms on a Charleston hotel.
Where did the 164 issues come from?
A completed Helonic review of that 118-page Charleston hotel set.
Does this replace a South Carolina plan review?
No. It caught schedule and duct mismatches before submittal. The building department still reviews the set.
Manas Gandhi
Co-founder & CTO, HelonicManas is the co-founder and CTO of Helonic, where he leads engineering and AI research for construction drawing analysis. He works directly with structural, MEP, civil, and fire protection engineers to translate the way they review drawings into AI systems that flag the issues that actually matter in the field. Before Helonic, he built machine learning pipelines for technical document understanding and has spent the last several years interviewing licensed design engineers and discipline leads to ground product decisions in real practice rather than industry assumptions.
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How this page was researched: Reviewed against Helonic's 2026 drawing-analysis categories, RFI workflow, and product capabilities.
Last reviewed by Manas Gandhi · September 14, 2026