Commissioning for beginners

By Tom Dennis

When you’re an executive holding the blueprints to your new factory, and you’re out inspecting your building site in the middle of a North Dakota prairie, you’re probably not thinking about the U.S. Navy.

Maybe you should be. Because the Navy has a practice that – well, let’s put it this way: If two buildings are built side by side, and they’re identical in every respect except that one underwent this Navy-inspired practice, that latter building likely will feature higher morale among employees, fewer frustrations and, for the building’s owners, thousands of dollars in energy savings a year.

The practice is commissioning. No Navy ship gets put into service without it; and as the evidence will show, no large commercial or institutional building should, either.

Commissioning is the process of making sure that all of the systems in a structure or vessel work as designed. The testing and inspecting make a difference: “We feel comfortable telling building owners that commissioning will deliver roughly a 15 percent gain in energy efficiency,” said Bob Linder, performance group director for KargesFaulconbridge, Inc., a St. Paul-based engineering firm with offices in Fargo, Bismarck and elsewhere.

“As an organization, we went back to look at some of our larger projects, and we tried to calculate the cost of commissioning against the energy savings. We found that the projects we commissioned had a payback, on average, of just 2½ years. And that’s conservative.”