Articles by Rebecca T. Ellis, P.E.

Whether it’s new construction commissioning or existing building retro-commissioning, “commissioning” is about entire systems and their performance.

There are some building types and/or organizations that are nearly always undergoing some sort of facility upgrade, modification, and/or expansion to accommodate evolving needs.

This is a story about two new construction commissioning projects with similar challenges and as-yet unwritten endings. 

Last month’s column introduced the concept of giving “too much control” to the building operators through the BAS graphic.

The idea for this month’s topic was hatched during a retro-commissioning project, but it offers lessons to be applied to new construction commissioning.

Much has been written about systems’ readiness for functional performance testing at the end of construction, and pre-functional checklists have become common elements of the commissioning process.

As demonstrated with manual winterization requirements last month (Winterization and Commissioning, January 2019), systems manuals should include more than a regurgitation of the BAS as-built documents. Not everything in a project is necessarily controlled by the BAS, and, believe it or not, some buildings are still constructed with no central BAS at all.

The industry standard commissioning process includes development of a systems manual to supplement the equipment O&M manuals provided by equipment manufacturers. The systems manual is intended to document at least the following information about each commissioned system:

Documentation is a constant throughout the commissioning process, theoretically starting with the owner’s project requirements and ending with the commissioning report.

Last month, this column presented monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) as a subset of ongoing commissioning of buildings that have previously been commissioned or retro-commissioned.