There are some building types and/or organizations that are nearly always undergoing some sort of facility upgrade, modification, and/or expansion to accommodate evolving needs.

Engineering departments in today’s health care environment are tasked with an ever-growing list of responsibilities, such as emergency readiness, PMs, reactive maintenance, ensuring regulatory compliance, managing infection control, maintaining life cycle budgets, managing utility spend, and the list goes on.

This is a story about two new construction commissioning projects with similar challenges and as-yet unwritten endings. 

Last month’s column introduced the concept of giving “too much control” to the building operators through the BAS graphic.

Imagine a world where all HVAC equipment, (i.e chillers, variable frequency drives etc.), all BAS sensors, various components of the electrical systems (i.e electrical panels, meters, lighting fixtures etc.), and various components of all other infrastructure systems are connected to a shared, non-proprietary network that integrates the functionality of each system.

The idea for this month’s topic was hatched during a retro-commissioning project, but it offers lessons to be applied to new construction commissioning.

Much has been written about systems’ readiness for functional performance testing at the end of construction, and pre-functional checklists have become common elements of the commissioning process.

As demonstrated with manual winterization requirements last month (Winterization and Commissioning, January 2019), systems manuals should include more than a regurgitation of the BAS as-built documents. Not everything in a project is necessarily controlled by the BAS, and, believe it or not, some buildings are still constructed with no central BAS at all.

The industry standard commissioning process includes development of a systems manual to supplement the equipment O&M manuals provided by equipment manufacturers. The systems manual is intended to document at least the following information about each commissioned system:

With the ever-changing field of technology comes improvements in both energy and ease of use for many systems across the industry.