Commissioning Specialists

Commissioning as a commodity is just checking a box.

When you entrust a professional design and construction team to deliver your unique building with properly functioning equipment and systems; you deserve more than a checkbox and a quality of service that has not been commoditized.

McCownGordon has a proven and unique approach. We work to ensure that your building has proper system maintainability, functionality, performance optimized, and that your building’s staff has the tools to properly maintain and operate your building for it’s life.

Take the building lifecycle; the Design & Construction phase is a relatively short period, which often leads to operations & maintenance practices being overlooked. Operations & maintenance relate to the majority of the building’s lifecycle and arguably have the greatest impact on the life span of the building, its equipment, and systems.  Properly optimized, maintained & operated equipment and systems prolong their lifespan, and reduce capital and maintenance expenses.

Our Commissioning Department offers various Commissioning and Energy Consulting services. We are able to support not only our construction teams, but also independently as a stand-alone entity on projects with the goal of providing properly operating buildings. Our proven and unique perspectives of the life cycle of a building are applied, combined with understanding from an Engineering and Maintenance differentiates McCownGordon from typical commissioning.

OWNERS PROJECT REQUIREMENTS (OPR):

As part of the team, we are involved early in the process. A Commissioning Authority works with the Owner to document project requirements. Since the Commissioning Authority is involved through the design, construction, and acceptance phase they serve alongside as the Owners Technical Advocate and ensure their best interests are served.

DESIGN INTENT:

After the OPR document is created, the Commissioning Authority works with the design teams to ensure design meets the Owners’ requirements and ensure the maintainability of the designed systems. Typically, as the project proceeds into the construction phase, the design team is less involved, and the design intent lost. As design engineers, we fully understand the value of a good Commissioning Authority and can identify potential issues. The Commissioning Authority is there to validate design, ensure that the prescribed sequence of operations have been implemented and that the systems are performing as the engineer intended. During functional testing and system optimization, our commissioning team maintains a dialogue with the engineer to be the eyes and ears to collaborate, troubleshoot and problem solve together to protect the owner and design engineers vested interest.

LONG TERM MAINTENANCE:

The duration of a building’s life cycle may vary; but an often-overlooked critical factor is proper operations and maintenance. We offer five (5) services that set the Operations & Maintenance staff up to succeed for the long term through either McCownGordon’s Commissioning approach or through Monitoring-Based Commissioning and/or Optimization Services:

• PROPER BUILDING OPTIMIZATION: Our Optimization services learn and tune the building systems to meet the buildings personality. By taking the time to fine-tune the automation systems schedule and operational setpoints to match the building’s personality not only reduces the utility consumption, seasonally validates equipment functionality and performance, and minimizes excessive equipment wear by reducing operational runtimes.

• WARRANTY SUPPORT: Monitoring-Based commissioning and Optimization services verify functionality through all seasons and tune performance beyond a snapshot in time.  This begins during the warranty period providing additional support to the operations & maintenance staff to document & correct as many issues as possible while under warranty to save the owner from spending out of pocket.

• TECHNICAL ADVOCATE: After the building is turned over the operations & maintenance staff are expected to provide proper maintenance and keep the building operating optimally.  Often times unexpected things crop up that the staff hasn’t been trained on. Having intricate knowledge of the systems and their functionality we remain a resource to ensure system performance.

• TOOLS & PRO-ACTIVE MAINTENANCE: Through Monitoring-Based commissioning we not only verify functional performance year-round. We also provide and calibrate Fault Detection Diagnostic (FDD) rules to be proactive when equipment or system performance is out of range as well as put the equipment and systems through the paces by verifying peak performance quarterly during off hours to ensure the systems are prepared for seasonal extremes before the happen.