Commissioning gets (and gives) a boost

Building Operating Management, Nov 1998

Every building owner who decides to take environmental factors into consideration when a facility is being designed sets out down a road paved with good intentions- a path that can lead somewhere other than the owner expected.

The problem isn't the goal. Buildings can be designed, constructed and operated to save energy and water, use recycled materials, provide good indoor air quality, and achieve a variety of other environmentally beneficial results. The real question is whether the noble ideals behind a sustainable design are properly executed in the sometimes rough-and-tumble real world of design and construction.

One way to assure that they are is to use commissioning, not just at the end of construction, but all the way through the design process. Commissioning can help building owners avoid some of the pitfalls that can compromise sustainable designs.

Consider one perennial threat: the danger that the green elements of the design will be slowly picked apart as the project proceeds from concept to construction. "Until recently, green architecture has been seen as an extra first cost," says Adrienne Jackson, chair of the sustainable design committee at Kling Lindquist. That perception has made green features prime targets for overzealous value-engineering efforts and ill-advised contractor substitutions.

"Commissioning can be a way to assure that value-engineering is just that - a way of increasing value, not a retreat from the original goals," Jackson says. "It protects the integrity of the original design.

That's essential in a carefully integrated design, where a lineitem-veto approach to individual products can be disastrous, Jackson says: "When you replace one item with another that doesn't meet the original criteria, you can throw off the whole building."

But commissioning can do more than assure that specific products survive sharpened pencils.

The field of sustainable architecture is fairly new, and not everyone who sets out to design an environmentally friendly building has the expertise to pull it off. Some mistakes can undermine a critical element of the design. For example, variable speed drives or air-side economizers with the wrong settings can reduce energy savings, notes Carl Stum of Portland Energy Conservation, Inc. (PECI).

What's more, products selected because they are friendly to the environment can turn out to be less hospitable to the people in the building, says Stum. He cites acoustics, light levels and maintenance as areas where problems can arise.

Commissioning can help prevent problems like those by assuring that someone either the commissioning agent or a specialized consultant--plays devil's advocate during the design process. That means asking questions like these, Stum says: "Is the product reasonable in concept, practicality and cost? Does it pose any obvious or hidden problems that will counteract its apparent value?" It also means looking at factors like the product's track record, cost, availability and useful life, as well as at competing products.

That's a broader strategy than is usually associated with commissioning, which is often seen as a way to assure that the HVAC and other energy-related building systems have been properly installed. But starting early can pay off. "You can catch a lot of problems before they become reality," says Carolyn Dasher, a project manager at PECI.

Getting a head start on commissioning is a good idea even if the scope is limited to the HVAC system, but it's crucial for sustainable designs, in part because the field is so new. On some projects, there may be more interest in green buildings than experience. And the complexity of integrated designs makes an expert review indispensable.

A sustainable design requires a somewhat different approach to commissioning than the HVAC system. One reason, says PECI's Stum, is that, once some green products have been installed, there's really nothing to commission. Consider ceramic tile with a high recycledglass content. After it has been selected and installed correctly, there's no testing or tweaking to be done, as there is with the HVAC system. To be effective, commissioning of products like that has to focus on the specification phase.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to the wider use of commissioning is that it increases the initial cost of a project. Concerns about first cost, of course, are also an obstacle to sustainable design. And even though commissioning will add to the cost of the sustainable design, the two approaches are complementary. "They fit well together because they both share a building-lifecycle cost perspective," says Dasher.

What's more, each can support, and even help sell, the other. The increased interest in sustainable architecture can give commissioning a boost. In turn, commissioning can help assure that the owner receives the promised benefits of environmental design. And the two strategies can join forces in the larger effort to turn building owners from a narrow focus on first cost to a broader understanding of the bottom-line importance of life-cycle cost.