No-Cost Proactive Building Maintenance

How do you quantify the value of your HVAC maintenance?

By: Zach Denning

How do you substantiate your HVAC preventative maintenance? What tangible results does your preventative maintenance deliver? Building technology has evolved to help you understand your equipment life-cycle costs to forecast maintenance. Performance-based, proactive maintenance can cover the cost of traditional HVAC preventative maintenance contracts and generate revenue to invest in high-priority maintenance.

How many times have you signed away thousands of dollars on preventative maintenance contracts out of necessity? Sometimes it’s due to a manufacturer warranty, while other times it’s simply due to the age of the equipment. Yet, without preventative maintenance equipment operation falls into a great unknown void.

You’re not alone – 98% of all building owners and operators happily fall in line with scheduled preventative maintenance in their buildings. Compared to reactive or “last-minute” repairs, preventative maintenance has been shown to save 10-15% on equipment life-cycle costs by ensuring proper running condition – Not optimal, just proper. But has your PM contract provider ever quantified those savings? Would you have reduced the contract amount knowing your HVAC equipment wouldn’t have failed? What if there was a quantifiable way to regularly maintain equipment?

Although preventative maintenance is good for observing and ensuring proper equipment condition, it doesn’t account for real-time operation or forecasting. Even with preventative maintenance, HVAC systems often run with 25-30% efficiency losses; compounded with mechanical degradation from the increased “wear-and-tear” and your system may incur almost 50% excess operating expense. In a recent survey, only 40% of all preventative maintenance contracts included efficiency testing, of which only 15% generated actionable intelligence!

Proactive, performance-based maintenance introduces quantifiable savings and real-time forecasting to routine HVAC maintenance. Utilizing cloud-based platforms, proactive maintenance discovers and quantifies issues while tracking life-cycle costs – Amounting to increased HVAC awareness and better, financially driven decisions. Proactive maintenance can generate operational savings 15-30% over traditional preventative maintenance while decreasing tenant complaints 40-50% through intuitive problem detection.

Armed with these new platforms, contractors can now offer performance based routine maintenance (PM) contracts where everyone benefits from increased building savings – Rather than defaulting to a fixed upfront cost. Performance-based routine maintenance  allows building owners to free up annual budgets and invest savings in sustainability efforts and high priority maintenance.  Before you sign your next preventative maintenance contract ensure that you can substantiate the costs!

My name is Zach Denning and I’m the CEO and owner of EnerDapt, Inc. We’re an HVAC engineering firm that utilizes cloud-based technology to bridge the technical and financial gaps commonly found in HVAC management strategies. Our OCMS EnerVise platform keeps customers knowledgeable about their building from life-cycle costs to forecasted maintenance, upgrades, andequipment replacements.   You can reach me at zdenning@enerdapt.com or visit our website at www.enerdapt.com