"A 14-story residential tower used to eat 11 hours of my desk time just to get pipe LF and head counts clean enough to push into hydraulic calcs. With Pilrs, I'm at the hydraulic calc screen in three hours. That means I can actually walk the site with the GC before I bid, which changes everything about how we price difficult overhead runs in post-tension decks."
Evergreen Fire Protection was founded in 2002 by three former Grinnell Fire Protection designers who saw the Pacific Northwest residential tower boom coming before most of their competitors did. The company is small by design — 62 employees total — with four NICET Level IV certified designers, a 14-person field installation crew, and a service division that handles NFPA 25-mandated inspection, testing, and maintenance on roughly 340 recurring buildings across the Portland metro and Willamette Valley.
Evergreen's bid mix is split about 55% high-rise residential (Pearl District towers, South Waterfront, and suburban mixed-use mid-rises), 30% tilt-up industrial (Gresham and Hillsboro distribution), and 15% miscellaneous commercial. The company is NFPA-13, NFPA-13R, and NFPA-13D certified, runs UL 199-listed head inventory, and specifies FM 1632-approved quick-response extended-coverage heads on residential scopes where the design allows.
Fire sprinkler estimating is bottlenecked at the interface between takeoff and hydraulic calculation. Per NFPA 13-2022, every design has to demonstrate that the most hydraulically demanding area delivers required density at the minimum permitted residual pressure — which means pipe LF, fitting counts, and head counts need to feed cleanly into HydraCAD or AutoSPRINK before any pricing is real. A 14-story residential tower runs 2,400–2,900 heads across 112–128 hydraulic calc zones. Rachel was spending 11 hours just preparing the takeoff to be calc-ready on a typical tower bid.
The second bind was seismic bracing per NFPA 13 Section 18 combined with Oregon's aggressive seismic zone enforcement. Every sway brace has to be sized against the Cp coefficient for the building zone and the weight of pipe plus water in the braced region. Manual seismic zone mapping against 40+ sheet floor plans was tedious, error-prone, and historically caused Evergreen to pad bracing quantities by 12–15% as a hedge. On tilt-up industrial buildings, that hedge was running $18,000–$30,000 per project in uncompetitive bid math.
The third was Portland's permit-rush windows. Major residential tower permits cluster in the spring and fall when city inspectors are available and AHJ review queues are shortest. Evergreen would see 6–8 qualified bid invitations land in a single week, with 10-day turnaround demands. Rachel would carry 40% of those through to submission; the rest would no-bid on capacity. Each no-bid to a repeat GC was a slow-eroding relationship problem.
Rachel piloted Pilrs on a known-quantity archival project in January 2025 — a 19-story residential tower where the installed pipe LF, head count, and fitting schedule had been reconciled to the penny post-build. Pilrs came in at 1.2% of actual pipe LF across all sizes, 0.4% on head count, and caught three sway brace locations that the original takeoff had missed. That was the pilot test Rachel needed.
The rollout kept HydraCAD as Evergreen's hydraulic calc engine and AutoSPRINK for coordinated shop drawings. Pilrs exports to HydraCAD-compatible CSV with NFPA 13-2022 occupancy classifications, pipe schedule method applied where permitted, and UL 199 head listing data already attached. Rachel's designers no longer lose a full shift to pre-calc cleanup — the takeoff exports arrive calc-ready.
Full production cut-over completed March 2025. Every residential tower and tilt-up industrial bid now runs through Pilrs first; light commercial followed in May.
Pipe LF, fitting counts, and UL 199 head data flow straight into HydraCAD or AutoSPRINK with NFPA 13 occupancy mapping applied.
Sway brace count and sizing resolve against Oregon seismic zone data without the 12–15% manual padding hedge.
Takeoffs surface in a reviewable format for Evergreen's NICET-IV designers — no black box, no blind trust.
The takeoff-time reduction is the technical headline, but the downstream effect was the bid-capacity unlock. Evergreen's submission rate on qualified tower and tilt-up invitations rose from 40% to 72%. Tower win rate rose from 26% to 36% — partly because Rachel now has time to site-walk before pricing, which historically has been the single highest-leverage hour in fire protection bidding. Revenue attributable to Pilrs-priced bids crossed $7.8M through Q3 2025.
On seismic bracing, the 12–15% manual padding hedge was replaced with NFPA 13 Section 18-aligned quantities tied to the actual Cp coefficient. Evergreen recovered roughly 14% of prior bracing cost on tilt-up bids, which translated into tighter, more competitive submissions on the industrial side — a segment where Evergreen had been gradually losing share to two larger regional firms.
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