Recommissioning
What is Recommissioning?
“Commissioning” a new building helps ensure that its major systems – HVAC, compressed air, refrigeration and Energy Management Systems (EMS) – operate correctly when they are first installed. Over time, controls that aren’t functioning, faulty equipment and deferred maintenance can cause these and other systems to work inefficiently. Maybe a compressed air system leaks or the HVAC system is not optimized to operate efficiently. These inefficiencies may not be readily noticeable, but they can easily drive up energy use and costs.
“Recommissioning” (also referred to as Retrocommissioning) existing commercial and industrial facilities helps restore the original intended operating performance of their major electricity-using systems. Recommissioning targets savings opportunities by evaluating these systems, then identifying no-cost and low-cost measures. If your facility has not been recommissioned, or wasn’t properly commissioned in the first place, you could be spending more money than you need to on energy costs.
Common issues that create the need to Recommission
- Interior space may have been reconfigured; keeping the ventilation from working the way it was intended.
- Plumbing changes will have been made; pipe configurations will be suboptimal. Pipe insulation may have been removed (and only sometimes replaced), resulting in heat loss.
- Other buildings will have been erected nearby; may result in a change of the lighting needs.
- Facility Staff changes; this process will give operators an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of overall system operation and the cost consequences of operating and maintenance decisions they make on a daily basis.
What can Recommissioning do for your facility?
Recommissioning your facility can result in:
- Improved System Operation and Lower Energy Costs
- Reduced Maintenance and Repair Costs and Extended Equipment Life
- Improved Occupant Comfort and Productivity for Tenants and Employees
In most Recommissioning projects, Payback is in Less Than a Year
but can range from 1 – 3 years.
How can we help?
System WorCx provides expert building analysis to help lower energy costs by as much as 15 percent by identifying ways to optimize your building’s energy use.
Our Recommissioning program provides an opportunity for your staff to work hand-in-hand with expert engineers to increase their knowledge of the efficient and effective operation of building systems.
Examples of typical Recommissioning measures include:
- Improving outside air control
- Decreasing supply air pressure setpoint and system rebalancing
- Reducing supply air temperature and fan speed in air handling units
- Calibration of control system instrumentation;
- Resetting supply air temperature set point;
- Resetting duct static pressure set point;
- Replacing bad inlet guide vanes with VFDs;
- Calibration of VAV terminal boxes;
- Improving economizer operation;
- Optimizing the chiller and chilled water pump operation;
- Performing hot water and chilled water balance;
- Optimizing heating water temperature reset schedule and on/off sequence;
- Calibration of thermostats;
- Performing air balance;
- Determining the minimum outside air damper position; and
- Repairing kinked flex ducts and leaky reheat control valves