Riverside Public Utilities paid $2,254,387.50 for one 15 kV metal-clad switchgear lineup in May 2025. The median public award for a 5 to 15 kV metal-clad lineup in the Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book is $1,481,321 across 12 awards from five utilities dated December 2016 to May 2025, so the Riverside price is 52% above the median and $63,669 under the 75th percentile. That one sentence, with its n and its dates, is what Quote Check exists to print, and it took a board four months and a 20% contingency to get to a worse version of it. This piece runs three real public quotes through the tool the way a reader would: a 15 kV lineup from Riverside, a 2,500 kVA pad-mount from Fayetteville, a 500 kW genset from a federal award; what the band says, what the Lead-Time Monitor says, how to read the gap, what the tool cannot see, when a quote above p75 is still the right buy, and the script for each position in the band.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book 0.1 (compiled from public procurement awards and bid tabulations; as of October 2025)
The Riverside lineup sits at 152 on a scale where the band median is 100 and the 75th percentile is 156; the Fayetteville pad-mount sits at 94 against a band that runs 96 to 109; the Army genset sits at 138 against a band that runs 76 to 137. One inside, one just under, one just over; the story is the number next to each: n=12, n=15, n=10.
What Quote Check Reads
The tool takes five inputs: class, size, voltage, region, and the quote if you have one. It finds the class and size band in the Price Book, prints the 25th to 75th percentile with n, the number of buyers, the award-date range and the share of rows from the largest single buyer, then places your quote against the median and prints the Monitor’s published lead time for the class with its publisher and date. Every input is mirrored to the URL so the scenario can be sent to the vendor as a link.
Source: Open Factory Quote Check (tool logic as published); Open Factory compilation
Five steps, two of which can end the run: a band with fewer than five awards prints “insufficient public awards yet” and a link to the Equipment Price Benchmark contribution form instead of a number, and a region with no cell falls back to the US band with a note saying so. The Price Book’s September launch set both rules; nothing below relaxes them. The Lead-Time Monitor launch the same month set the third rule the tool inherits: a lead time prints only with the OEM or survey that published it and the date it was published.
Quote One: A 15 kV Lineup at +52%
Riverside’s Bid SUB-876 opened on January 21, 2025 with four bids for one 15 kV metal-clad lineup at the La Colina Substation: Switchgear Power Systems of Winneconne, Wisconsin at $2,254,387.50, Avail Switchgear Systems at $2,403,320.63, Crown Technical Systems at $2,567,340.62 and Myers Power Products at $3,205,870.61, all including California sales tax, against an engineer’s estimate of $2,600,000. The board memo of May 12, 2025 approved the low bid with a 20% contingency of $450,507 and put delivery in the fourth quarter of 2027. In Quote Check: class MV metal-clad, 15 kV, region West, quote $2,254,388.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book (compiled from Riverside Board of Public Utilities Bid Award Recommendation SUB-876 and 11 other public awards; as of October 2025)
The band is 12 lineups: $838,234 at p25, $1,481,321 at the median, $2,318,056 at p75, from Clark Public Utilities in Washington (five awards, 42% of the band), Riverside (four), Snohomish County PUD, the City of Mesa, and Naperville in Illinois. The Riverside low bid is the ninth highest of the 12, +52% on the median and 2.7% under p75; the tool prints “inside the band”. Myers’ high bid at $3.21M would print “above the 75th percentile” at +116% on the median, with only Naperville’s $3.83M Tollway Substation lineup above it. The recent window, awards dated 2024 on, holds four lineups and prints nothing: the tool refuses to publish a 2024-on metal-clad band because n=4, and a reader who wants one will have to wait for the fifth public award.
The lead time line is where the two models disagree, and the tool prints both sides. The Monitor’s published figure for MV switchgear is 44 weeks on average, Wood Mackenzie’s Q2 2025 survey, published October 15, 2025, down from the prior quarter. Riverside’s document says fourth quarter 2027 from a May 2025 award, about 131 weeks, and the utility’s own June 2024 board presentation called switchgear “long lead-time (Average 70 weeks)”. Both are true: the survey is the industry, the calendar is one 15 kV substation lineup with drawings, a control house and a utility’s approval loop inside it. The line-by-line walk of what sits inside that calendar is in Reading a Switchgear Quote; the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule takes the 131, not the 44, when it dates your energization.
Quote Two: A 2,500 kVA Pad-Mount Under p25
Fayetteville Public Works Commission opened bid PWC2324061 on March 19, 2024 for a year of three-phase pad-mounts. On stock code 1-295-786, a 2,500 kVA 12470GrdY/7200 to 480Y/277 unit, quantity four, the awarded bidder Alpha Plotter LLC of Greenville, North Carolina (Eaglerise) priced $65,530.50 a unit, $26.21/kVA, with an 18 to 20 week lead time; the Commission approved the award on April 10, 2024 at $767,188.10 across all lines, 13 bidders received of 14 solicited. In Quote Check: pad-mount transformer, 2,500 kVA, 12.47 kV, Southeast, quote $65,531.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book (compiled from Fayetteville PWC bid tabulation 2324061 and Commission minutes of 10 April 2024; as of October 2025)
Twelve vendors priced the line, from PulseMac Solution at $64,285 with no lead time stated to Technology International at $219,000 and 10 to 15 months; WEG Transformers USA bid $148,650, 2.3 times the winner, at 48 to 50 weeks. The band the tool reaches for is pad-mount 3-phase 1,500 to 2,500 kVA, 2024 on: 15 awards, five buyers in four states, $26.88/kVA at p25, $27.86 at the median, $30.36 at p75, with Austin Energy’s contract price as 8 of the 15 rows. At 2,500 kVA that is $67,200 to $75,900 around a median of $69,650, and the Fayetteville unit lands 6% under the median and $1,670 under p25: the tool prints “below the 25th percentile, check the spec matches and the lead time is real.” Switch the window to all years and the same $26.21/kVA is +30% on a median of $20.13 across 72 awards back to 2019, 65% of them Austin’s. The window moves a 2,500 kVA pad-mount from 6% cheap to 30% dear without changing the quote, which is why the tool prints the window and the dates next to every band. The Transformer Sizing and Cost tool carries the same bands by kVA for budgeting before a quote exists.
The Monitor’s published lead time for a pad-mount is the one figure here with no OEM behind it: “more than two years” per the NRECA coalition letter of January 4, 2024, printed as 104+ weeks, with Wood Mackenzie’s October 2025 note adding that pad-mount lead times “recorded steady increases” in Q2 2025. The Fayetteville tab holds twelve lead times from 10 to 12 weeks to 10 to 15 months for the same drawing on the same day. The tool does not know which of those twelve vendors you asked, so it prints the survey figure and the source, and leaves the tab for you to open.
Quote Three: A 500 kW Genset in Its Own Band
The Army’s Mission and Installation Contracting Command at Fort Drum signed W911S225PB065 on September 19, 2025: one 500 kW standby generator set for Cleveland, Ohio, awarded to Veterans Electrical Group LLC at $247,403.09 under a total small-business set-aside with nine offers received, period of performance September 20, 2025 to June 17, 2026. That is $494.81/kW. In Quote Check: diesel generator set, 500 kW, 480 V, Midwest, quote $247,403.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book (compiled from USAspending.gov awards, Tacoma, Pinellas County and MWRD Chicago records; as of October 2025)
The stationary 500 to 999 kW band is ten awards from seven buyers in six states, 2019 to 2025: $271.85/kW at p25, $359.55 at the median, $491.45 at p75. The Fort Drum quote is +38% on the median and $3.36/kW over p75, so the tool prints “above the 75th percentile, ask for the bid tab behind the band before accepting.” Two things to know before acting on that. First, the quote is in its own band twice: Fort Drum signed a twin award, W911S225PB078, to the same vendor at the same $247,403.09 the same day under a second solicitation with 13 offers, and both rows count. Without the twins the band is eight awards with a p75 of $408.67/kW and the quote is 21% above it, not 0.7%. Second, federal rows are obligations at award, not invoices; seven of the ten rows come from USAspending descriptions typed by contracting officers, and the Price Book flags every one. The portable 500 to 999 kW band next to it, also n=10, has a median of $527.72/kW, 47% above the stationary median for the same rating on a trailer.
The lead time line for this class is honest and empty: as of October 2025 no OEM guide or survey the Monitor tracks publishes a lead time for a 500 kW genset, so the tool prints “no published lead time in our sources.” The award itself does: a period of performance of 39 weeks. The context is in Cummins and Caterpillar Are Sold Out Through 2028, which in September put Caterpillar’s firm backlog at $37.5 billion at the end of Q2 2025 with $10.3 billion beyond twelve months; the Genset TCO tool prices what 39 weeks of rented power costs while you wait.
The Band Table and the n >= 5 Rule
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book
Data: data/02-band-table.csv
Seven cells, five published. The rule is five awards per cell, and the reason is arithmetic: with four values a 25th percentile is a point between the two lowest, and one utility’s stock order can be half the band. The metal-clad 2024-on cell has four lineups from three buyers and says nothing; the stationary genset 2024-on cell has two rows from one buyer, the Fort Drum twins, and says nothing. The all-years cells that do publish carry their own warning in the last column: 42% of the metal-clad band is Clark PUD, 65% of the all-years pad-mount band is Austin Energy, 40% of the genset band is the Army. A band with a top-buyer share above 80% is one utility’s price history, not a market, and the tool prints the share so you can see which you are looking at.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book
Coverage as of October 18, 2025: 2,504 award lines dated to that day, 44 class and size cells in the all-years window, 30 published and 14 insufficient. Pad-mount and pole-mount transformers hold 19 cells (15 published), chillers and gensets 8 each (5 published each), MV switchgear 3 (all published), power transformers 4 (1 published), CNC machining centers 1 (published), LV switchgear 1 (insufficient). A reader who types a 20 MVA 115 kV substation transformer or a 3,000 A switchboard gets the contribute state today, and the $2,850 category report would have given a PPI chart instead. The empty state is the more useful answer, because it names the count it needs.
What the Tool Does Not Know
Quote Check compares a lump sum to a distribution of lump sums, and six things live inside a lump sum that the band cannot see. The worked table shows the three quotes as the tool prints them.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book; Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor (compiled from Wood Mackenzie T&D note Oct 2025, NRECA coalition letter Jan 2024, award documents; as of October 2025)
Data: data/03-worked-gap-table.csv
Three positions, and a lead-time column that reads 44 against 131, 104+ against 18 to 20, and none against 39. Installation is the first blind spot: the Price Book excludes any award whose document bundles construction (includes_install = Y) and keeps rows where freight, startup or permits sit inside the price with a note, so a contractor’s furnish-and-install quote will always read high against an equipment-only band. Options are the second: a 15 kV lineup with arc-resistant construction, a control house and spare breakers is one lump sum in the Riverside record and a different lump sum in Clark’s, and the band treats them as the same product. Tax and freight are the third: Riverside’s $2.25M includes California sales tax, Austin’s PO lines are tax-exempt, and federal awards usually include delivery, so a single-digit gap can be tax and freight before any negotiation begins.
Region is the fourth. Version 0.1 has no regional cells that clear n=5, so every region falls back to the US band with a note; the Southeast pad-mount buyer is compared with Texas and Florida prices whether or not the freight matches. Sections are the fifth: the tool asks for a section count because that is how a switchgear quote is built, but the metal-clad cell is per lineup, since none of the 12 public awards states how many sections it bought, so the tool compares the total and says so. Time is the sixth: the all-years window mixes 2019 pad-mount prices with 2025 prices across a period when the transformer PPI rose 81%, April 2019 to September 2025, which is why the recent window exists and why the Tariff Exposure Calculator and the Copper and Wire Price Sheet sit next to the band rather than inside it.
When Above p75 Is Still Fair
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book (compiled from Ocala procurement exception and vendor quotes, March 2024; Fayetteville PWC Commission minutes, January 2023; as of October 2025)
Data: data/09-above-p75-and-fair.csv
Ocala Electric Utility’s procurement exception of March 28, 2024 is the cleanest public record of a buyer paying above p75 on purpose. Its contract price for a 2,500 kVA pad-mount was $69,647.39, and its distributor had told it the unit carried “a placeholder of 156 weeks, with no guarantee of slot availability.” Irby quoted an in-stock GE/Prolec unit at $163,750 with 4 to 6 weeks; Wesco quoted a Hitachi unit at $159,905 with 156 to 158 weeks. Ocala paid $65.50/kVA, 2.16 times the band’s p75, for the same steel and copper as the $27.86 median, and bought 150 weeks with the difference. Fayetteville did the same in January 2023: it awarded JST Power Equipment at $102,000 a unit and 28 weeks over WEG’s lower total at 85 to 94 weeks, and two lower bidders withdrew after opening because they could not honor their prices.
A quote above p75 is fair when the vendor is selling a delivery week the band cannot see, and unfair when it is not; the way to tell is to ask for the week in writing with a liquidated damages clause behind it. Ocala’s exception form gives the reason in one line, “Electric does not have the option to wait,” and names the customer it would have lost. Liquidated Damages at 0.5% a Week prices the week; a vendor who accepts LDs against an in-stock date is telling you the premium is real.
What Contributing a Quote Changes
Every cell that prints “insufficient” today is waiting for public awards, which arrive at the speed of board meetings. The Equipment Price Benchmark is the second source: contributed quotes and invoices, normalized to the same $/kVA, $/section and $/kW conventions, that merge into the Price Book bands once a cell holds five or more contributors and eight or more quotes, no contributor above 40% of the cell, every quote at least three months old. The threshold is stricter than the public rule because the rows are private, and it is why the Benchmark page prints a contribution count of zero rather than a band. A reader who types a 3,000 A switchboard into Quote Check today sees the contribute link; the same reader, three months after uploading the quote that made the cell, sees the band first.
What changes is the n behind the opening sentence. The 15 kV metal-clad band is 12 awards over nine years because that is how many public utilities posted a bid tab with a price on it. The datacenter EPCs, developers and contractors who buy most of the lineups in the country post nothing, and the RFQ template in this series asks them to write a bid form that could. Until they do, the band is a public buyer’s band, and the tool says so on every line.
What to Do Monday
Run the quote before the meeting, not after. Type the spec as the vendor wrote it, read the position before the percent, and if the cell says insufficient, carry the unit price the tool prints into the RFQ as your own reference. Open the bid tab behind the band, which the Price Book links on every row, and find the award closest to your spec and year; the Fayetteville tab’s twelve lead times are worth more than the band’s median. Put the lead time the Monitor prints and the week the vendor quoted on the same page of the PO, so the gap between 44 weeks and 131 is a number the vendor has signed rather than a surprise the board reads about in 2027. Pull the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule with the quoted week, not the survey week, and read off which month the PO must leave for the plant to energize on time.
Behind the paywall: the negotiation script keyed to where the quote sits in the band, below p25, inside the interquartile range, above p75, with the one clause to add in each case and the numbers filled in for the $2,254,388 Riverside lineup, the $65,531 pad-mount and the $247,403 genset, calibrated to the Public Bid-Tab Price Book’s bands.