Building Energy Resilience

In business, as in life, there is risk with every complex project you begin. In retrocommissioning (RCx) projects, the main risks for commercial building owners and managers are threefold: the savings will not be realized, the scope will increase, and the savings will not be persistent after the job is complete. These issues are also on the minds of every engineer who accepts a retrocommissioning project. Managing the level of risk is complicated to say the least, but there are common sense ways to protect yourself, your partnership with the retrocommissioning engineer, and the project.

Retrocommissioning (RCx) is a great way for facilities owners and managers to improve energy efficiency and performance of existing building systems without incurring large capital costs. Some projects result in such great savings that simple payback can be less than a year. The RCx process involves assessing the operating performance of existing equipment in a facility, and then making recommendations to improve the performance based on the results of the assessment. These improvements are typically done by making adjustments to how the equipment is controlled.

A good retrocommissioning (RCx) project will result in at least one of the following:

The number one barrier to retrocommissioning is the upfront cost of the engineering study. In general, building owners cannot easily determine the potential value of such studies or understand the quality and content that is necessary to support an energy efficiency investment. This makes many customers reluctant to invest $20,000-$70,000 in an engineering study.

As a company that does a good amount of retrocommissioning (RCx) – the commissioning process applied to existing buildings – when taking on a new project we are often faced by a question asked by both ourselves and our clients: “Where do we start?”

Part of a marketing stumbling block in our commissioning field is the lack of quantifiable benefits to our work. People understand commissioning will enable their systems to work more smoothly, generating less maintenance issues and longer equipment life. People understand that commissioning will benefit their building with more comfort for their tenants and finer temperature and humidity control for their processes. But quantifying any energy reduction attributed to commissioning is usually not in the project’s budget and is all too often forgotten when everyone moves on to new projects.

Modern web-accessibility of building control systems is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing if you’re the facilities manager and you live an hour away from the building you’re responsible for and there is a problem in the middle of the night. Simply fire up the ole home computer, connect to your building, issue a few overrides, clear an alarm, go back to sleep and deal with it in the morning. So what’s the downside?

The term retrocommissioning, (commissioning for existing buildings), frequently rises in conversations when commercial building owners, operators and facility managers gather to talk about how to make their HVAC systems work better. There are many reasons why.

Proper ventilation, airflow, temperature, and humidity are needed for successful surgical operations. The design requirements for these parameters in healhtcare settings are defined by ASHRAE Standard 170, and are generally straightforward. However, OR (operating room) users often try to operate OR HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) systems at temperatures and humidity levels outside of the standard design range. A better understanding of OR HVAC parameters would help OR designers and users achieve more effective OR functionality.

The least utilized part of the building commissioning process is the act of going back to a completed project and proving the monetary value of the commissioning work. This is an added cost but is very important for the building owner as well as the commissioning agent to ensure changes were implemented correctly. Fortunately, we have many affordable options these days to measure the energy consumption of our building equipment before and after our commissioning work. Armed with this real-life performance data, we can present the owner with hard evidence of the value of fine-tuning a building’s mechanical system. We recently did such a review of two buildings which underwent building commissioning in the past 18 months. By analyzing the data, we found savings for these buildings range from 18-30% with relatively short payback periods.