Designing for the Life of Your Building

Considering that operating the nation’s building stock consumes greater than 70 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S., high-performance building teams have a responsibility to select design options that make sustainable operations more likely. Planning for maintenance and operations during design helps building owners think through all the steps they need to take to ensure long-term sustainable operations.
Considering the Life of the Building
It’s essential to use a robust tool, such as a total cost of ownership (TCO) or lifecycle cost analysis (LCCA) approach, to quantify decision-making values and evaluate the true lifecycle costs of any given decision. Building owners use budget, lifetime costs, public demonstrations of sustainability, aesthetics and expected tenant desires to make construction and design decisions. Each owner weighs these values differently. Some are laser-focused on maximizing energy efficiency, while others may be willing to spend more to have a cutting-edge demonstration technology. However, you can’t make an informed long-term decision without all of the information, including both annual maintenance costs and expected replacement costs.
Many high-performance building design teams are incorporating lifecycle energy costs into design decisions and are moving away from the low-bid construction world where first cost is king. These high-performance building systems may or may not have significant maintenance requirements. However, design teams often ignore maintenance and repair costs, the third element of a lifecycle cost analysis, when making design decisions.
Considering all the Options
When considering the 30-year lifecycle cost of a building, maintenance and replacement of equipment can be upward of 30 percent of the total costs. How do you incorporate this significant, but often hidden, cost into the design?
The first step is brainstorming several systems that the team believes would be a good fit for the project. The design team should create thumbnail energy models, preliminary budgets and equipment selections with an open mind. Then, run each of these permutations through a rigorous lifecycle cost analysis tool. It’s important to note this analysis often offers unexpected answers. The building’s geographical location, shape and orientation, and how it is occupied and used can cause significant variations in the building’s energy usage.
Many design teams will partner with a contractor to assist with the pricing of the systems, but that provides only limited information. The best approach is to go one step further and consult with a service contractor to establish the cost of preventative maintenance and planned replacement of key equipment or parts based on their on-the-ground experience. Service contractors can provide more insight than the typical manufacturer’s recommendations since they deal with the equipment every day and know how to best manage it over time. With this information, the team can budget a maintenance plan that will help estimate the yearly and significant maintenance costs over the lifespan of the equipment.
Tips for Design Teams
Below are some suggestions for how design teams can ensure long-term, sustainable operations:
Design for the Typical Day
Most buildings are designed around the winter and summer “design days,” where the system is sized to meet peak heating or cooling demands. Mechanical systems are selected for these extremes with very little thought about the typical day during the life of the building. Understanding the typical day will help engineers design systems that have highest efficiency points that are most common for a building.
Work with Controls Contractors Early During the Design Process
Controls contractors have created increasingly sophisticated canned control sequences; however, these sequences aren’t necessarily appropriate for highly engineered high-performance buildings. Small controls discrepancies in a high-performance building can make a big difference. The best way to overcome this is by partnering with the controls contractor early in the design process, not at the end. This helps clarify assumptions for both the controls contractor and the engineering team and gives the controls contractor ample time to create a unique control sequence, if needed.
Equip Building Operators to Succeed
The transition from construction to occupancy is the best opportunity to bridge the gap between design and operations. Unfortunately, it’s the place where our fragmented construction industry most frequently falls short.
Building operators are often handed a building after construction with just a few hours of training by the construction team to help them understand how the building operates. If the building engineers are instead brought on as part of a peer review or are involved with the design process, they will be able to understand the philosophy of why and how the building will be operated. This in turn gives them the knowledge and the ability to troubleshoot better in the future as issues arise, especially since budget constraints or a lack of engineering insight often mean facility management teams struggle to resolve the root cause of system issues.
Look Beyond the End of the Contract
The construction industry is structurally shortsighted. Contracts end, and responsibility for shared outcomes is artificially truncated. That’s why the gap between sustainable design and sustainable operations continues to plague this industry and a major reason why the Department of Energy estimates that 30 percent of the energy in commercial buildings is wasted.
When the places that add richness and depth to our lives underperform, we are not living up to our full potential as engineers, architects, contractors, operators, owners and even as tenants. It’s a complex issue that won’t change overnight; however, design teams can start by simply looking to add value for their clients by considering maintenance and operations throughout the design process.

Mark Gardner, P.E., CEM, LEED BD+C, is an engineering manager at McKinstry, a Seattle-based firm.