Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many commercial properties have been temporarily shut down with only key members of staff attending or visiting sites. In line with this reduction in usage and footfall, the services and equipment run times are being amended to reflect this. However, shutting down the services in a commercial building requires careful management to avoid numerous pitfalls with significant cost and safety implications for all stakeholders involved in the process. It is highly advisable to monitor systems to limit each risk, as well as ensuring that systems have responded to the changes made.
At Demand Logic, we have been acting on this; our tech was already geared up and ready for remote working, with our platform continuing to support your buildings as normal. We have been talking with our partners about the commonly occuring issues, developing our recommendations on what to look out for to help you to monitor operations and diagnose issues remotely, enabling you to plan effective remedial action. This could mean less time and/or fewer people required on site as well as ensuring compliance and appropriate operation of equipment and plant.
Here are our top five points for you to consider and how our platform detected them:
The health and safety of those within our properties is, as always, of the utmost importance.
Although you may have only skeleton staffing of each site (where there is stored hot water for domestic services), if this is to be retained for staff then the water must be stored at temperatures to limit the growth of legionella, and where necessary pasteurised periodically. There will no doubt be continued statutory maintenance on the wet systems in line with the L8 ACOPs; however given the lack of ‘flushing’ on a daily basis due to limited numbers of occupiers, this should be closely monitored and tested to ensure compliance.
If there are a small number of teams in attendance on site or in your property, it would be worthwhile considering this, and not completely shutting off all major plant. Properties without any ventilation can quickly become ‘stuffy’ with a lack of fresh air supply which could have an impact on productivity, and more importantly health and wellbeing of those individuals. It is important to ensure adequate ventilation and temperature control in the areas which are occupied, even sparsely.
Whilst ventilation may be necessary, it is important to eliminate recirculation and some other forms of heat recovery such as thermal wheels. These systems can prolong the presence of viruses in air systems inwittingly adding to the current issue. More guidance from CIBSE is here: https://www.cibsejournal.com/technical/preventing-covid-19-spreading-in-buildings/
With a large amount of major plant being shut off to avoid needless energy cost, it is worth considering the potential damage that can be caused to offline major plant assets whilst in ‘outage’, such as:
Through not monitoring the systems and their operation, several could be damaged for which replacement would cost, and potentially delay reoccupation of a building by many months.
Although it may seem tempting to completely turn every element of temperature control off to reap the savings in energy, this isn’t necessarily what is best for your building.
A sparsely occupied building will have limited internal heat gains. As we move into the hotter months, consideration should be given to controlling maximum internal temperatures, particularly in highly glazed commercial buildings to avoid increased temperatures for long periods of time which could lead to potential bacteria buildup and damage to plant/fabric.
If you are in colder climes, heating may be required to maintain minimum internal space temperatures to reduce relative humidity and the potential for mould growth and damage to equipment such as printers and photocopiers.
Ensuring that only the necessary systems are operating is essential to minimise operating costs and carbon impact of a dormant building. In our experience, thus far, no building has yet shut down to a minimum level as expected. This is often due to the Building Management System behaving unexpectedly, with potentially erroneous demands causing plant to continue to operate despite changes to calendar settings, thereby actually increasing costs.
Through major plant and associated equipment being turned off and therefore idle, without regular flushing or running of systems, this could cause damage to assets through seizure which will most likely require replacement if this is the case. Furthermore, there could be increased corrosion through poor water quality can lead to water leaks and damage to building contents and fabric.
Some buildings house business critical systems such as computer equipment and server rooms that will likely need to remain operational throughout to maintain data integrity and to ensure a quick reinstatement of the property. Through the Demand Logic platform, you can ensure that these business-critical systems are receiving the optimal environment through effective control, without having a controls override which has turned off everything.
Now that we’ve outlined the issues, here is the evidence to boot with our real life examples straight from our platform. And, yes, we solved them too.
Our next blog will provide insight and information on how you can use data to tackle these.
We fully understand and accept that there is an unknown element to the current COVID crisis and its potential duration and implications for our partners’ businesses, as a small business we feel this as keenly as anyone. However, we also believe that remote monitoring of buildings is more valuable now than ever. Many of our clients are relying on us to play a key role in their shutdown programs where we work closely with them to do a periodic review of their buildings, ensuring that considerations, such as those above, are closely monitored.