To achieve a well-constructed building, all components and systems must work together as intended to optimize energy consumption.
Before a new ship is turned over to the US Navy, it goes on a sea trial. During this shakedown cruise, the contractors who built it teach the officers and crew how to sail it, verify that all of its systems work properly, and make sure that it meets the Navy’s performance requirements.
After the ship returns to port, any deficiencies discovered at sea are resolved, construction documents and operational manuals are finalized, and a punch list is checked off. When at last it is deemed totally seaworthy, a commissioning ceremony takes place, and the ship officially joins the fleet.
In recent years, the concept of commissioning has made its way into the building industry, where it refers not to a ceremony at the end of the process, but to the process itself. Its focus is on quality, to achieve a well-constructed building in which all components and systems work together as intended to optimize energy consumption and operational costs, as well as indoor air quality, light levels, and other measures of occupant comfort, productivity, and safety.
“Building commissioning is a means of confirming and documenting that a facility satisfies the owner’s functional requirements,” explains Kent Barber, P.E., a founding member of the Building Commissioning Association (BCA), an organization of commissioning professionals. “Sometimes part of the commissioning process involves helping an owner determine what his requirements are.”
Edward E. Faircloth, president of the BCA’s board of directors, says commissioning ideally should start at the inception of design for a new building. “The commissioning provider should be on board as one of the first people, along with the architects and engineers, to ask important questions that bring out details of the design,” he advises.
Commissioning isn’t just for new construction. Laurie L. Catey, P.E., the BCA’s vice president, says a previously commissioned building may be recommissioned—tested and given a “tune-up” several years later—to adjust or update equipment and systems that may no longer work as they did when new, and adapt to changes that may have been made to the building itself.
A building never-before commissioned may be retro-commissioned—analyzed long after it was built to determine how it should work and to make appropriate adjustments.
The Commissioning Process
Professionals who perform building commissioning services may call themselves commissioning providers, commissioning agents, or commissioning authorities. All are in wide use today, but the BCA officially prefers the designation “authority,” because “provider” seems too neutral and “agent” inappropriately suggests that the commissioning practitioner is empowered to act on the owner or developer’s behalf and assume the owner or developer’s legal liability.
Whatever they may call themselves, building commissioning professionals carry out a custom process tailored to each project. “Step one,” says Barber, “is to state the owner’s intent in an ‘owner’s project requirements’ document. Step two is to document the design process in a commissioning plan—what we need to accomplish, the role of the architect and engineer, what we want the contractors to do, and what we want the commissioning agent to do.”
The commissioning plan also includes “commissioning process procedures, construction checklists, and test procedures,” says Catey. “It’s the big road map for how the process will be performed, and the repository for all the information that is gathered. It’s a living document that keeps getting added to.”
“The commissioning agent reviews the designers’ work—sometimes midway through creation of the construction documents, sometimes at every stage—to confirm that everything is consistent with the owner’s functional requirements,” says Barber. “The commissioning agent adds a lot. He’s not an adversary to the architect and engineer, he’s a participant on the team, confirming consistency and providing input.”
As construction begins, the commissioning authority conducts a kickoff meeting attended by the owner, architect, engineer, contractor, and major subcontractors to review the specifications and answer any questions. If the owner intends to submit the building to the US Green Building Council for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, a LEED manager also participates in this review.
“The commissioning agent provides specifications for the contractor and subs,” says Barber. “In a design-bid or design-build project, the commissioning agent also attends pre-bid meetings to underscore that commissioning is a key part of the project. Near the tail end of design, but more often after contractor submittals are approved, the commissioning agent writes test procedures in enough detail so anybody could do the same procedures and get the same results. What validates the testing is the repeatability. These procedures are written and distributed to the design team and contractors for review.”
Instrumentation and Ingenuity
As construction proceeds, the commissioning authority reviews specific pieces of equipment that the contractor has selected and the architect and engineer have approved, to confirm their key operational specifications—such as a particular hot water pump’s flow rate and electrical load. The commissioning authority also observes these items visually to ensure that they have been installed correctly. “Near the end of construction, he spends substantial time field-testing the systems. He may help the contractors make them work, or note details that don’t work and suggest revisions,” says Barber.
In new construction, the design should include sensors that will enable monitoring of equipment and systems once the building is completed. Before those sensors are in place—or in their absence, if an older building is being retro-commissioned—the commissioning authority must use instrumentation and ingenuity.
Useful gadgets include data-loggers, sensors, and meters to record air temperature and humidity, insertion probes, surface probes, and devices to measure pressure and velocity. “It’s the typical instrumentation that a test-and-balance contractor would use,” says Catey. “Often, you have to fake out a system to cause it to go into different modes of operation. I carry a hairdryer, an instant icepack like you get at a drugstore, inspection mirrors, a tape measure, and an assortment of hand tools. For some projects, we have an expert bring in an oscilloscope to monitor the variable-frequency drives for harmonics, and we witness the test and review the results.
“I also carry a thermal-imaging camera to find leakage in buildings, and to see which equipment in existing buildings is on and which is not on,” she goes on to say. “For example, a prep school dining hall was cold and, through thermal imaging, I found that no steam was entering the coil. In the sub-basement, I would have had to crawl under pipes and ducts where rats and mice like to be. Instead, I was able to take thermal images of the ducts to see where the heat was being stopped. I found that the condensate trap had failed at the coil, so no heat was getting through on either duct branch.”
For new construction, the contractor usually performs his own tests without the commissioning authority present, Faircloth says. “If the results don’t meet the requirements, the designer and contractor can find the problem, and fix it. They make sure everything is ready, so, when the commissioning provider comes out to do the final test, it goes smoothly.
“Once the final numbers are filled out on the commissioning plan, the plan is given to the owner and his maintenance people,” he adds. “Then, if a pump motor burns out in the future, they will know how to set the new pump to its maximum efficiency.”
Expectations of Time
The entire process of commissioning a building takes as long as designing and constructing the building takes, plus about a year—long enough for a complete annual cycle of seasonal cooling and heating to disclose any problems which might not have been evident at the time of completion, Catey says.
The actual testing of an average 120,000–square-foot building of moderate complexity may take two to four weeks, but Barber notes that it doesn’t all have to happen at one time. It can occur in a phased sequence as individual systems reach completion.
“Most office buildings take 12 to 24 months to build, depending on the size of the building, the urgency involved, the labor force, material availability, contractors, and the weather,” says Faircloth. “Then the commissioning provider typically will come back about 10 months after the owner takes over, and go back through the process again to verify that the building is still functioning as commissioned. If it’s not, he will try to determine what happened, whether something changed, or whether the maintenance staff didn’t receive enough training.”
Ideally, a commissioned building should be recommissioned every three or four years throughout its useful life to see if anything has changed, and to make any adjustments that may be necessary. Faircloth says recommissioning a building can take anywhere from a day to a week.
Barber uses the term “ongoing commissioning” to describe constant monitoring of certain parameters to confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of specific systems, especially climate control. “If we’re serious about reducing a building’s carbon footprint on a long-term basis, we should provide for constant monitoring,” he says. “When we put in the building’s automation system, we should build in sensors in strategic places to monitor electrical power consumption on certain circuits, and natural gas input to the chiller and output in Btus.
“The trick is to have someone knowledgeable who can review printouts periodically and say the chiller isn’t as efficient as it used to be—we have trouble keeping the air handlers and the end of the piping run cool like we used to,” he continues. “Some facilities have sophisticated staff that can do this in-house.
“For others, there are firms that specialize in downloading this information periodically and sending you reports,” he says. “Then, if something is wrong, you can call the commissioning agent to test the chiller to find the problems, or look at the building to see what has changed.”
Sometimes those changes are obvious. An open retail store becomes an office building in which an owner or tenant erects interior walls without considering their effect on airflows. An office building adds computers, servers, and other heat-generating equipment over time, increasing the building’s cooling requirements.
And sometimes the changes are subtler. Perhaps a pump has failed and has been replaced, but the maintenance staff wasn’t sure how to set the replacement for optimum performance. Perhaps the schedules of people using the building have changed, increasing demand on the lighting and climate-control systems at times when the building originally was supposed to be empty. “When I’ve come back as little as three years after commissioning a building, I’m amazed at how much can change,” says Barber.
Retro-commissioning may take between a day and several weeks, depending on the availability of a building’s original construction documents and their level of detail, the availability or lack of built-in monitoring systems, and the amount of testing that may be necessary.
Cost and Payback
In general, Faircloth says, the cost of commissioning ranges from 0.5% to 1.5% of construction costs, with the percentage higher for small buildings than for large ones.
The most definitive analysis of the costs and benefits of commissioning comes from a 2004 study, The Cost-Effectiveness of Commercial-Buildings Commissioning, prepared for the US Department of Energy by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA; an Oregon-based non-profit organization, Portland Energy Conservation, Inc. (PECI); and the Energy Systems Laboratory at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX.
For existing buildings in the study, the median commissioning cost was 27 cents a square foot, median whole-building energy savings were 15%, and the median payback time was 0.7 years.
The new buildings had a median commissioning cost of $1 a square foot (0.6% of total construction costs) and a median payback time of 4.8 years.
Trying to calculate the energy saved by commissioning a new building is problematic, requiring a hypothetical estimate of how much more energy the building would have consumed if built without commissioning. Also difficult to calculate in new construction, the research says, are “significant first-cost and ongoing non-energy benefits,” such as “reduced change-orders thanks to early detection of problems during design and construction, rather than after the fact, or correcting causes of premature equipment breakdown.”
If such information were available, including it in the calculations could “drastically reduce these payback times, to or below zero in many cases.”
According to a more recent Department of Energy study, commissioning costs now range from 50 cents to $2 a square foot. “Most are in the 50-cent to $1.70 range, with schools and offices in the lower third, higher education in the middle third, and medical office buildings, labs, and hospitals in the upper third,” says Barber.
Contracts that Barber’s firm wrote in 2008 ranged from 30 cents to $6.86 a square foot. “The 30 cents was for a large kindergarten through twelfth grade school that used the same simple systems over and over again, while the $6.86 involved cutting-edge systems for a sophisticated biotech client, and the cost of installing those systems,” he explains.
Also affecting payback is the premium a LEED-certified building can command. “Developers are getting $1 to $2.50 a square foot more for a LEED-certified building because of the building’s air quality and energy savings,” says Faircloth. “Sophisticated developers and owners are very well-informed about LEED and commissioning.”
LEED Boosts Commissioning
Building commissioning is a young profession. Its first documented use, by Public Works Canada, occurred in 1977. In 1981, the Walt Disney Company commissioned Epcot Center. In 1984, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) formed a committee to develop the HVAC Commissioning Guideline, which was published in 1988. By the early 1990s, electric utilities were beginning to require commissioning for their energy construction projects.
At that time, PECI was conducting demonstration-commissioning projects for the US and Oregon energy departments. In 1989, PECI wrote the first edition of a basic how-to document, Building Commissioning Guidelines, that the Bonneville Power Authority (BPA) published. A more expansive second edition followed in 1992.
Then, the BPA and other major utilities in the northwest joined with the state energy offices for Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, forming the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) to promote regional energy conservation. “The NEEA became an advocate for building commissioning, and for an association of commissioning professionals to set standards and train commissioning agents,” recounts Barber. The NEEA put out a “request for interest” to which PECI and several engineering firms with commissioning capability responded. Together they formed the Building Commissioning Association, which incorporated in 1998 with PECI providing management and staff—as it still does today.
Also in 1998, the US Green Building Council gave the fledgling profession a major boost by including commissioning in its requirements for LEED certification. Now, as demand for LEED-certified “green” buildings grows in response to energy shortages and climate change, so grows the demand for commissioning.
Education and Experience
Because the commissioning profession is so young, practitioners are finding their way into it through various kinds of education and experience. “I like to tell people that the perfect commissioning provider would have a degree in mechanical engineering with five years of experience, plus degrees in architecture and in electrical, structural, and civil engineering, plus five years of field experience with each one,” says Faircloth. “Of course, by that time he’d be ready to retire. That’s why most firms have a staff or contacts in the engineering and architectural world to provide job-specific support.”
Faircloth has more than 40 years of industry experience. He completed a steamfitter apprentice school conducted by a pipefitters’ union local in Houston, TX; took several years of college courses at Rice University and the University of Houston; and worked for mechanical contractors before joining Gilbane Building Company about 20 years ago.
Gilbane is based in Providence, RI, and has a southwest regional office in Houston, TX, from which Faircloth works. The company manages construction projects at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. As a senior project manager, Faircloth oversees quality-assurance inspectors and documentation control for seven LEED projects.
Barber and Catey both earned Bachelor of Science degrees in mechanical engineering. Barber graduated from the University of Colorado in Denver. He is managing principal of Keithly Barber Associates in Burien, WA, a successor to Keithly Welsh Associates and Team Mechanical, one of the original commissioning firms that helped to organize the BCA.
Catey’s engineering degree is from Michigan Technological University in Houghton, MI. She also earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Baker College in Flint, MI, which she says “filled in my people skills and administrative background.” She heads her own consulting engineering firm that specializes in building commissioning, L. L. Catey Engineering Services LLC, in Royal Oak, MI. Earlier, she worked as a commissioning practitioner for a larger company, and spent more than 15 years in design, construction administration, and project troubleshooting.
Certification and Accreditation
Although Faircloth lacks a college degree, he has earned the LEED-Accredited Professional designation, one of the commissioning industry’s two most respected credentials. The other is the BCA’s Certified Commissioning Professional (CCP). “They deal with different things,” explains Faircloth. “The CCP covers commissioning procedures—the checklists, testing, and documentation trail for commissioning a building or facility, while LEED accreditation covers the procedures, protocols, and intent of the LEED program.”
The CCP is among the more difficult certifications offered in any professional field. It is administered by an independent testing body, the Building Commissioning Certification Board, comprised of experts who are themselves CCPs. Before a provider can apply to take the exam, he or she must have commissioned at least a million square feet of building space by working for a commissioning firm or as an independent consultant. “A lot of providers are in areas where they don’t have the magnitude of square footage that CCP requires,” says Faircloth. “We’re developing a certification now that has lesser square-foot requirements.”
Other certifications relevant to commissioning also exist:
- The Associated Air Balance Council (AABC) has a commissioning certification program open to licensed architects, professional engineers, and certified test and balance engineers. The program, administered by the AABC Commissioning Group, offers workshops and examinations.
- ASHRAE has developed the Commissioning Process Management Professional (CPMP) program for professionals who seek to work with a building’s owner to manage the entire building commissioning process. This new program will launch in June 2009, in conjunction with ASHRAE’s Annual Conference in Louisville, KY, where the first CPMP exam will be given.
- The National Environmental Balancing Bureau (NEBB) offers certifications in building systems commissioning for HVAC and plumbing systems; and in retro-commissioning. NEBB also offers specialized certifications in testing, adjusting, and balancing; sound and vibration measurement; clean-room performance testing; and fume-hood testing.
- The Department of Engineering Professional Development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers three different professional certifications: for providers who serve as a primary commissioning authority, those who manage in-house commissioning activities, and those who work on small projects or on discrete parts of projects. The program involves five days of classes and an exam.
Faircloth cautions that some of these certifications relate to a specific discipline, rather than an entire project. “The BCA’s certification is the only one I know that embodies the whole realm of commissioning, the total package, from the building envelope to the mechanical and electrical systems,” he says.
“No one certification has established itself in the marketplace as the clear front- runner,” adds Barber. “Building owners can’t rely solely on certification when choosing a commissioning provider. I’m not certified by anybody.”
Choosing a Commissioning Authority
Selecting a commissioning authority is like selecting any other building professional, Barber says. A good place to look is the BCA’s online directory, which lists about 250 corporate provider members. “Also, contact your state’s department of general administration,” he suggests. “Washington state and some others have lists of pre-qualified building commissioning providers.”
After identifying some likely candidates, issue a request for qualifications or a request for proposals. “Look for someone who has an experience level with your type of building and project, new or existing, whether it’s in health care, education, or whatever,” advises Catey.
Should a commissioning authority be an engineer? “There’s a huge debate about that in the industry,” says Catey. “Being an engineer helps because of knowledge of theoretical principles, but that’s not exclusive to engineers. Many good technicians are out there.
“A commissioning authority must know how control systems operate and understand testing and balancing,” she adds. “A lot of engineers and technicians are good at these analytical things, but not so good at communication skills. Part of it is bringing together the owner’s people and the design and construction people, and helping them work together. They all have different language sets, terminologies, and areas of expertise.
“Even with construction people from different disciplines, if you sit them down in a room, they talk differently with each other,” she continues. “Communication also involves good written skills. A lot of commissioning is written documentation.”
Barber also emphasizes the importance of working with other professionals. “If your commissioning agent is a good team builder, you may have few, or no, unresolved issues at the end,” he says. “Require references and check them, and when you interview, make sure you’re interviewing the individual who is going to commission your project. You could get a proposal from a big, impressive firm that will assign someone who doesn’t have the right skill set for your project—or the right chemistry. You need someone with good people skills as well as an understanding of design and construction.”