New Build Commissioning

Remember playing the passing game as a child?

You’d say something to one person, who would pass it on to another and then a few others.  It was always surprising to hear what the last person understood.  Ever feel like your ideas end up that way when your executing your plan?

Too often what you want isn’t what you end up with. Often times, its too late or too expensive to change it.

Between you, your engineering staff, the refrigeration crew and the Energy Management System (EMS) installers misunderstandings easily happen.  Shortcuts are also big problems and often times are done to improve the job profit by one or more groups in your team.  The question is, will anyone ever find out?

Commissioning services are meant to assure that you got what you paid for.  It’s important to have a third party review this work, to make sure the engineered plans are being followed.  If you have an installer final inspect his own work, you shouldn’t be surprised when you find out later it wasn’t done the way you expected it.

AtSingh360, new build commissioning is a step by step process of testing each component installed on the job site. Just because it’s new, doesn’t mean it was installed correctly and doesn’t mean it operates the way you had intended it to. Below is an example of one commissioning experience:

A customer implemented CPCs PMAC for door heater optimization.  The thought was to scale the door heaters based on store humidity for maximum energy savings. When its dry in the store, turn them off and when a certain store humidity is hit have them run 100% of the time. In between the two settings, scale the on time.

Overall this was to bring in about $4,000 in savings.  Everything seemed to be running great, but during the commissioning of the store, we detected that the store humidity probe was off some 20%, which was causing the heaters to run almost non-stop.  The Grocer had no idea and thought it was working well, because none of his doors had condensation on them, but in reality it wasn’t. 

Correcting this alone created a wonderful payback for our customer. Left alone, it would have wasted a lot of money and created dissatisfaction down the line.

At Singh360, we feel a proper commissioning job requires the right people on the job, the right processes that are proven to show results and the right tools to do the job right. We bring people with 20+ years of experience in the industry to do the work.

Our staff has the experience to understand you requirements, understand the equipment and know your EMS.  Our people study your site before coming on-site to make most efficient use of everyone’s time.

We use cloud based software for the on-site commissioning job so things are not missed.  Our self-developed cloud software contains PT charts, integrates weather conditions and will soon include computer modeling as well.

When an item such as an HVAC unit is selected, a check list will appear to assure that filters, condenser coil, evaporator coil, supply fan, etc. are installed properly and are clean.  We make also sure that the commissioning person checks for things like your curb, condensation drainage, oil leakage, abnormal vibrations, etc.  When we are done, the item has undergone a full test and reports become available. These will include an automatically generated issue list

Having the right tools are also very important to do the job right and is not to be underestimated. Coming with a proper set, to the job, is the difference between being effective and doing a good job for you. You need more than a screw driver and thermometer.

The picture to the left shows a sampling of the tools our people take to the job site. If your team isn’t coming with these, you should be asking yourself if they’re up to doing a good job for you? Outside of making sure everything was installed properly, you should ask it your EMS was programmed properly?

Singh360 supports many different brands of EMS and can help uncover shortcuts or simple programming that won’t lead to energy efficiencies. In one example of this…

One contact thought they didn’t need our services. To counter this we proposed to check what was programmed in their system to make sure they were being energy efficient. This turned into a real eye-opener.

All HVAC were set to run 24 hrs/day, no suction float was implemented, alarms were almost non-existent, etc. The system was clearly programmed to create as few problems for the servicing contractor and no consideration was made for energy efficiency.

Click on this link to see the different control systems that Singh360 is familiar with.

Things to consider:

  • Are you confident your current commissioning team is doing a complete job for you?
  • Is your building and mechanical systems installed according to specifications?
  • Are you using the same vendor to find problems with their installations? Do they call this, “The pot calling the kettle black”?
  • Do you know if your control system is set with energy efficiency parameters in mind?
  • Do the settings meet with your expectation?

Singh360’s Commissioning Services is different than others providing commissioning services. Put us to the test to see the difference and to see what you’ve been missing.