Benefits to the Building Owner
Today, less than 5% of new buildings are being commissioned nationwide. These buildings are comfortable to the occupants on the day they move in, are saving the owners 7% to 9% in energy costs, and are well-understood and maintainable by the owner’s staff. Of the remaining 95%, three-quarters report comfort and indoor air quality complaints, are using more energy than they should, and have frustrated maintenance staffs that don’t understand the systems or how they are supposed to operate. If these owners were to build another building soon most would willingly pay for this quality control service that was left out of their last project.

It’s no surprise that the majority of the buildings that are using Commissioning services are being built by entities that build many buildings, such as universities, hospitals, and state and federal agencies, such as the GSA. They have concluded that the benefits are well worth the additional costs.

Are There Any Direct Paybacks to These Costs?
The simple answer is yes. The more involved answer concerns how much. It is much easier to document the savings from Retro-Commissioning when it is done to correct the problems that arose from a non-Commissioned project. Before and after energy costs are easy to quantify and case studies abound. Reduced maintenance costs are not as large, but are more defined in terms of improvements in staff training and system knowledge. It’s harder to measure the costs of discomfort to the building occupants, but there have been plenty of case studies that have quantified the savings in reduced employee absences and productivity increases that result from better indoor air quality and more consistent comfort control.

To document in advance how much will be saved by commissioning any given new building would require a long list of predictions about the performance of the hundreds of players that make up the building design and construction process.

It is not overly optimistic to predict that as the Commissioning process matures, its costs will also be offset by lower costs for mechanical system installations. When the mechanical contractors start to realize increased profits on projects with systems that start-up smoothly, with no callbacks, they will reduce their bid to ensure that they win the next job that hits the street with the Commissioning benefits built in.

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