Better Indoor Environmental Quality by Doing Easy Things (Not Buying New Things)
by Jim Dirkes
My favorite building in over 40+ years of experience is Campau Square Plaza in downtown Grand Rapids. It's a mid-80s, “plain vanilla” HVAC design, performing at EnergyStar 87 level (pretty close to the upper stratosphere of energy performance). All credit goes to the attentive, diligent individual responsible for operations and maintenance.
As a result of COVID increasing our attention towards global health, we've heard a lot about improving Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), despite not having new standards and little new technology for IEQ. At a recent ASHRAE conference, I listened to a keynote presentation in which the presenter said, “If we just maintained our buildings as they should be maintained, we’d see a dramatic improvement in IEQ.” Many building owners upgrade filters and install UV lights or bipolar ionization systems, so they have tangible proof that they “care” about IEQ rather than simply implementing best practices for building maintenance.
Optimizing Your Existing Equipment
My (reasonably frequent) thought is, “What can be done to promote optimizing/maximizing what we have?”
As you probably agree, maintenance is not very inspiring; it's hard work, behind the scenes, and challenging to measure. Another way to consider the benefits of maintenance are costs or problems to be avoided. For some things, we assess risk and decide to be proactive. Earthquakes don't happen very often, but we design buildings to withstand them because the results could be catastrophic. Cars don't crash very often, but we use seat belts and airbags for the same reason. While less dramatic than an earthquake or car crash, lack of maintenance causes known problems with measurable, predictable costs.
Erosion of seashores and lakeshores happens every day. Machine parts wear out with frequent use. Filters get dirty. Controls drift out of calibration. Your body loses resilience as you age. The list goes on. None of these are news to you! You often do little or nothing to manage or offset these negative trends - the same is true for facility management.
Easily Avoidable Expenses
One perspective that may help is identifying the costs and problems you will incur by ignoring maintenance . Here are a few examples:
Many building HVAC “failures” do not have symptoms. Heating and cooling are oversized (often by a lot), so simultaneous heating and cooling - a controls failure - is unnoticed. That results in higher energy use, which amounts to big dollars annually! There are numerous other examples; sensors out of calibration, leaking valves, etc. that have similar results.
Outdoor dampers that don't open properly result in more stuffiness and “locker room” odor, which often happens gradually and is therefore not noticed. In this case, there's a hidden cost to the employees' health, productivity, and satisfaction.
When an air handler economizer fails, the mechanical cooling system still maintains a comfortable temperature, so who would know that you're running your cooling system instead of using free outdoor air for cooling?
Have you ever changed dirty filters? It’s a miserable job! Dirty filters, however, cause low airflow, which causes high power and, eventually, the safety limit trips, the heat exchanger is stressed and malfunctions.
When condenser coils get plugged, the same things happen as when filters plug up.
Direct-fired burners need their orifices cleaned, or combustion suffers, resulting in unpleasant odors and CO - immediate problems that cannot be ignored.
When belts for belt drive fans get loose, airflow drops, and they snap. If the fan serves a gas heat exchanger, the heat exchanger turns on, trips the high-temperature safety, and then goes OFF repeatedly, stressing the heat exchanger's metal and causing premature wear and failure.
Cooling towers are excellent at catching air-borne dirt as they do their job of cooling water. As the dirt accumulates, it goes into the sump and the piping, clogging things and decreasing efficiency.
Burner blower bearing assemblies need a few drops of lubricant regularly. Forget to do that, and you have an emergency $1,000 repair.
Is this stuff hard to do? Nope.
Does it take commitment, time, and budget? Yes.
Does it get done well? VERY rarely.
Does anyone ever highlight the root problem? Not really, it's just "the way things break."
What if we took maintenance seriously and were diligent about doing it? More reliability, less emergency repairs, noticeably lower energy costs, longer-lasting equipment, happier and healthier employees - not too shabby!
What if we stop treating maintenance as a thankless job and celebrate the people who do it for our (substantial) benefit? These jobs are absolutely essential, impossible to off-shore, tough to automate, save us more than they cost (by far), improve our health and allow our work to proceed more reliably. What's not to celebrate?