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A building has to be handed over
Most of the commercial HVAC we inherit in Abilene has no written record at all. Somebody knew it once. Then they left.
What we write down before quoting anything
Every unit gets an entry: what it is, where it sits, roughly how old, what condition the curb and the roof penetration are in, whether the economiser works, what the filters actually are, and what the gas section looks like. Readings go against the unit, so next year’s figures mean something.
That record is yours. If you move on, it goes to whoever takes the building — which is the entire point of writing it down.
Two visits a year, and what is in them
Spring, before the cooling load
- Condenser coils cleaned properly, not rinsed
- Refrigerant charge verified by superheat and subcooling, not by gauge pressure alone
- Belts, bearings and drive alignment
- Economiser dampers proved to travel, and their linkages checked
- Drain pans and condensate routes cleared
- Electrical connections torqued, contactors inspected
Autumn, before the first cold night
- Combustion tested on gas sections and the figures recorded
- Heat exchangers inspected
- Flue and combustion air paths checked as installed, not as designed
- Defrost proved on any heat pump
- Auxiliary heat checked for running when it should not be
- The freeze walk-round, if you want one
Negative pressure, and the economiser nobody has opened
The door that will not shut
A restaurant with a big hood and no make-up air is a vacuum cleaner with tables in it. The front door pulls hard, the pilot lights misbehave, the dining room is never warm and every degree of heating you buy is dragged straight out of the roof.
We measure it rather than guess. Sometimes the answer is a make-up air unit, sometimes it is balancing the extract you already have, and occasionally it is telling you that the hood is bigger than the cooking under it.
The economiser
On a rooftop unit the economiser is free cooling — outside air used directly when the weather allows it. In Abilene the weather allows it a great deal of the year, at night especially.
It is also the part that seizes, and because the unit still cools nobody notices. We open and prove them on every planned visit, and where the actuator is dead we will tell you what it costs to make it work instead of quietly leaving it.
The written walk-round
Before the first hard night we walk the building with whoever will be there when it happens, and we write one page: which units stay running, which get isolated, where the water is that can freeze, where the isolation valves are, what temperature the building is held at overnight, and who rings whom.
It is not a service contract and it is not clever. It is the thing that is missing at two in the morning when the person who knew the building is not answering their phone.
Most of them are small
Retail units and strip centres, restaurants and coffee shops, dental and medical suites, offices, churches, self-storage, small manufacturing and warehousing. Occasionally a multi-tenant building where the awkward part is not the equipment but who owns which piece of it.
Where a building is beyond what we should take on — a chiller plant, a complex control system on a proprietary protocol, anything asking for a controls engineer rather than a mechanical one — we will say so at the survey rather than after the second visit.