HEAPY

HEAPY is a mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering firm founded in Dayton in 1945 as Schweiger Heapy and Associates. It now runs nine offices and around 225 people, and dropped “Engineering” from its public name in a rebrand around 2020, though the legal entity remains Heapy Engineering, Inc. The practice covers MEP design, commissioning and retro-commissioning, energy audits, whole-life carbon and sustainability consulting, fire protection and life safety, and technology and lighting design, plus an engineer-led design-build arm. Healthcare, higher education, government and commercial work make up most of the portfolio. HEAPY holds MEP engineering and energy modeling on the new terminal at John Glenn Columbus International Airport, working alongside Gensler and Moody Nolan.

Nine offices carry the work: Dayton at 1400 W Dorothy Lane, plus Cincinnati at the 1819 Innovation Hub, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Greenville in South Carolina and Tampa. That footprint runs from the Ohio Valley down the East Coast, and it is why HEAPY turns up on aviation and healthcare jobs well outside its home state.

The service list is longer than MEP design alone. Commissioning and retro-commissioning sit in their own group, tasked with proving that design and energy targets are actually met after handover. Building optimization covers intelligent building management, energy audits and studies, facility condition assessments and utility program administration. Sustainability and resiliency work includes whole life carbon analysis, decarbonization planning and energy modelling aimed at net-zero or carbon reduction targets. Fire protection and life safety, technology design and lighting design are separate practices again, and HEAPY Solutions is an engineer-led design-build arm that takes a project through construction rather than handing it off.

Markets are equally spread: aviation, healthcare, career technical and higher education, K-12, commercial and mixed use, convention centres, workplace, hospitality, civic work covering courts, corrections, police, fire and libraries, federal work for the Department of Defense, National Guard and Veterans Affairs, industrial and manufacturing, life sciences, sports and athletics, cultural arts and public utilities.

The firm is ISO 9001 certified, ranks #44 on Consulting-Specifying Engineer’s MEP Giants list, and reports that 85 percent of its business is with repeat clients — roughly $4 billion a year in total construction cost.

Its stated purpose is to build a more sustainable, well and resilient society, and its framing for that is practical: people spend around 90 percent of their time inside buildings, so how those buildings run matters more than how they look on opening day. Improving how a facility operates, the firm argues, compounds resource savings for years.

HEAPY also runs an active events calendar, including summits on high performance buildings in north east Ohio, sustainability in health care, and Indiana innovation. The Dayton office answers on 937-224-0861.