Strategies for Improving Persistence of Commissioning Benefits: Making Lasting Improvements in Building Operations

Tudi Haasl, Hannah Friedman, and Amanda Potter, Portland Energy Conservation, Inc.

Keywords

Abstract

More and more building owners are turning to commissioning (Cx) and retrocommissioning (RCx) as cost-effective, quality assurance strategies for their building operations and maintenance. Commissioning ensures that a new building works correctly from day one, and retrocommissioning gets existing buildings’ systems back on track. Although the building’s systems may be well tuned at the end of the commissioning process, buildings may change over time, drifting away from their intended design and operating requirements. What can an owner, building manager, or operator do to avoid these problems and improve the long-term operations of their building? This paper describes a recently published set of strategies to improve persistence of benefits from commissioning. Based on California Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) completed in 2002, the following strategies that improve persistence are discussed: