An Open Letter to Building Owners
Dear Building Owners, Managers and Supervisors,
What makes a great building experience for occupants, guest and tenants? Is it nice furnishings, lighting, cleanliness, tall ceilings? I think it is all of those things. But you must have one more attribute just about perfect year round or nothing else matters.
What am I talking about? Comfort.
Comfort is the most important, and difficult, item to perfect consistently without the right combination of design and a specific planned maintenance approach. This “system” must keep track of tasks that fall in both the preventative and predictive stages of the HVAC system life cycle.
During the design stage, you will spend a significant amount of time discussing how a building will look, how it sits on the property and what kind of parking and landscaping it will have when finished. You make sure it has an HVAC system, engineers will handle the projected loads and then design a system based on your areas weather criteria. All sounds good and it makes for a great start to building occupancy. Many times that is all done perfectly and the building is comfortable for several years.
Once the building is built and occupied, you are dealing with a mechanical system (which has thousands of moving parts) and things do not stay static for very long. Mechanical equipment starts to get out of calibration, then things start to wear prematurely. If not looked after, the beginning of a major component failure is starting to occur. During this time, more energy is required to run the systems than ideal and failure is more likely during peak times of year when equipment is running longer...
You get the picture. If you do not budget for a planned maintenance agreement or use in house maintenance personnel with an HVAC maintenance background, all those beautiful, meticulously designed attributes of a building go out the window - literally in the case of energy. Because when people are too hot or too cold, they do not care what the building looks like! At the end of the day, people want to be comfortable.
Next time you are dealing with comfort issues and energy bills that are growing, talk with an experienced HVAC service provider than has planned maintenance as part of its core focus!