Return on Recommissioning

This isn’t the way your building was supposed to work. The thing is an energy hog, costing you a fortune to heat and cool. Or maybe you’re barraged with complaints from employees or tenants, who gripe that certain areas are too hot or too cold, or that the whole place is too stuffy—or even that the facility is making them sick. Or maybe the interior air pressure is so great that when you open a door, you are blown out into the street as if through a wind tunnel. Maybe you have heard about the trend toward “green” construction of environmentally friendly buildings, and you wish you had one of those instead of this energy-gobbling monstrosity. Save money, save the Earth, reap a public-relations windfall—why not?

But then again, maybe your building’s existing climate-control mechanisms—its heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems—would work much better if only they got a relatively inexpensive tune-up. That’s the idea behind a process that in new construction is called commissioning and in existing buildings is referred to as retro-commissioning or recommissioning.

It is not uncommon to find that a new building does not work the way it is supposed to from the beginning.

“People have a lot of fancy ideas about new equipment and add-ons that will make a building green,” says Martha Hewett, director of research for the Center for Energy and Environment in Minneapolis, a nonprofit energy-efficiency organization. “But a building isn’t green until it works. Often the trick to making it work is to get the basic stuff right.” That is the purpose of recommissioning, which she defines as a “systematic process for optimizing existing systems.”

Hewett notes that recommissioning is “the first thing recommended” by the U.S. Energy Department’s Energy Star program as a way to reduce power consumption in large buildings.

Commissioning (or recommissioning) also is a requirement for a facility to receive the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. On average, LEED-certified buildings save 10 percent on annual utility costs, bring 3 percent higher rents, and increase a building’s value by 7.5 percent, according  to the 2006 McGraw-Hill Construction’s Green Building SmartMarket report.

Hewett cites a 2004 study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, an engineering-research organization in Berkeley, California, which found that recommissioning projects cut energy costs by an average of 18 percent. Of the 74 projects studied, three-quarters paid for themselves in less than two years.