While all of the benefits of commissioning accrue to colleges and universities, some of the reasons why commissioning is particularly important for their facility owners include the following: campuses with central utilities; buildings that need to last; and transient populations.
Technically, it is more difficult to "make buildings work" when they are part of a larger campus/network of buildings. Most large campuses have some type of central plant with boilers, chillers, and/or electric generators. Each facility built or renovated on such a campus needs to fit into the larger system of buildings and utility distribution networks. Facility owners know the challenges involved in getting systems within standalone buildings to function properly, and those challenges expand exponentially when the design and construction team needs to take into account external system interactions and coordination. There is rarely such a thing as an individual building project; each project needs to be considered an "addition" or "renovation" to the campus.
Notes from the campus underground
Without commissioning looking after the design intent and performance criteria of the college or university, we have seen buildings that do not function because they aren't equipped to properly utilize the chilled water or steam provided by the central plant. The problems discovered include incorrect assumptions regarding pressures, pressure drops, and/or temperatures available to the building. A building designed with AHU cooling coils requiring 42 degrees F entering water temperatures is going to be out of luck if served by a chiller plant operated with 45 degrees leaving water temperatures.In it for the long haul
When colleges and universities build new buildings, we typically see them asking for 75- or 100-yr buildings, i.e., buildings that are expected to be around and be useful for 75 to 100 years. This is so different from commercial/industrial buildings, which are often built to be "disposable." The longer a building is intended to last, the more important commissioning is, because commissioning is fundamentally a process to improve building performance and reduce building operating costs over the life of the building. The longer a building operates inefficiently or ineffectively, the longer the inherent costs of the poorly performing systems will add up.
System documentation, which should be a product of the commissioning process for future reference by building operators, is the main tool on which facilities managers rely for training, troubleshooting, and maintaining the systems in its as-commissioned/as-intended operational states. This documentation does represent an additional cost to prepare during the design and construction process, but its value is directly proportional to the expected life of the building. At the same time, the cost per year for this documentation decreases as the expected life of the building increases.
Changing all the time
System documentation is especially important for colleges and universities, because these facilities are constantly in a state of flux. Students come and go, faculty changes periodically, and programs are added, eliminated, or modified as each institution evolves and tries to remain viable and competitive. This means that the facilities supporting the mission of the college or university need to change, and that means new design and construction teams are introduced to each building numerous times over its long life.Without accurate, understandable, and available system documentation, these new teams will either proceed on the basis of their best assumption regarding the existing systems they are modifying, or they will charge the facility owner extra fees to research, test, and confirm how the systems are intended to operate. As most large institutional owners know, neither of these approaches have very desirable outcomes with respect to maintaining the integrity of the original system design intent. Ironically, the most frequent culprit projects are very small renovations which "can't afford" a lot of upfront systems research and analysis. Small projects can cause huge problems if not properly integrated into the central building systems.
All of this adds up to colleges and universities being way out ahead on the commissioning curve. A number of major universities have created full time positions to oversee their commissioning programs (University of Washington, Emory University, University of Minnesota, to name a few), and some academic architectural, engineering, and construction management departments are including commissioning in their curriculum. Looking at colleges and universities may be a way of seeing into the future of commissioning for the mainstream. ES
