Soft Landings
We offer a best practice framework for building handover.
Called ‘Soft Landings’, it begins during the design process, involving future Facilities Management staff, and continues through the first year of operation.
This approach communicates the design intent to the contractor, right through to building users, and monitors building performance to pre-empt any problems that may arise.
Following the first year of operation, we can carry out Post Occupancy Evaluations (POE). This surveys building users' opinions of their environment or workplace, which forms a vital feedback loop. We use the standard Building Use Studies format, which allows your building to be compared with others of its type.
Peer Reviews
“Peer review is a powerful tool in maintaining and enhancing the quality of engineering work. It’s an important check in a self-regulating profession like engineering. A peer review is a professional opinion based on sound engineering analysis and assumptions, good practice, appropriate regulations and unbiased judgement.” - Engineering NZ
Independent Commissioning Agent
The commissioning of a building normally requires careful management.
As an Independent Commissioning Agent, we can work alongside a design team and contractor in a separate and objective role, to ensure the building’s systems are functioning as designed and intended.
This role typically includes the ongoing monitoring of a building for the first 12 or 24 months of its life, to test it in all four seasons. Our expertise across all facets of building services design enables us to pinpoint issues efficiently and communicate with all parties involved on a project, advising from the broadest to the most technical aspects, seeing it through to construction, and ensuring a building lives up to its full potential once occupied.
When managing these organisations and projects, we are eligible for EECA funding, based on energy savings achieved by the building over time.
Building Tuning
Just as we give our cars regular tune-ups, we need to do the same for our buildings.
This extends beyond standard maintenance and reactive repairs, into proactive monitoring and management of operations and building performance.
A complete tuning process can assist in finding problems early, trouble-shooting and improving a building’s energy efficiency, the quality of the internal environment and user satisfaction. Often, faults or errors in operation can go undetected, and a simple change can result in significant improvements. In projects we have worked on previously, simple changes to BMS programming have resulted in reductions in energy consumption and reduced tenant complaints.
Building Fine Tuning & 1yr/2yr Performance Analysis
Rather than commissioning a building solely at the time of completion, which could be any time of the year, we can manage a commissioning process which examines systems during the height of summer and the depths of winter – the most appropriate conditions for testing cooling and heating systems.