ASHRAE Journal - June 2020 - 27

TECHNICAL FEATURE

construction costs. Existing building commissioning was
shown to be at a median $0.25/ft2 ($2.69/m2), including
a median 6% energy savings, and 2.2-year payback.
Estimating the costs of functional performance testing
typically assumes costing for a one-time test for every
task, per the tailor-made testing protocols created by an
individual commissioning company and their company
rules and practices.
For example, a typical job task speciﬁcation for construction commissioning work would require functional
performance testing and documenting (FPT&D) of such
results for each piece of equipment, assembly or system,
such as:
* Chillers; pumps; air-handling unit; variable refrigerant ﬂow/mini-split; fan-coil unit, exhaust fan, variable air volume box; ventilation and exhaust devices;
lighting devices electrical interfaces; interoperability to
BACnet/Modbus/other, etc.;;
* Building automation systems (BAS) and automatic
temperature controls; each temperature, pressure,
humidity, ﬂow, CO2, and specialty sensor control devices
(usually abbreviated ATCS; BAS application-speciﬁc
controllers and BAS workstations and graphical user
interfaces (GUI); and
* Each segment of the control sequence of operations.
Some companies may use a safety factor, multiplier
or contingency, although not mandatory, that would
account for some amount of free retests, but theoretically and in practice, one test is required, estimated and
included in the baseline job estimate, unless otherwise
speciﬁed by the owner, contract or designer.
When a particular project piece of equipment or BAS/
control sequence is tested, those tests are performed
continuously until ﬁnished, which completes its
baseline test. If it passes, the commissioning process
moves on to the next piece of equipment and/or BAS/
sequence segment test. If it fails, it is placed on the
Issues Log to be reviewed later and may be required to
have a retest. (Some retests may not be required if the
item can be ﬁxed/repaired quickly during the initial
process.) If any retest is required, then a back-charge
may be levied against the contractor or contract holder
of the project.

Conclusions

Commissioning is a serious business and a necessary
task in today's design and marketplace. ASHRAE process

standards and guidelines and commissioning organization procedural standards form a basis for minimum, as
well as better and best practices.
As demonstrated by this article, the safeguarding and
protection metrics we have been developing over the last
several years have been:
* Credentialing requirements included by engineers
and their speciﬁcations;
* Licensing requirements mandated by government
agencies and commissioning organizations;
* Minimum requirements for qualiﬁcations;
* Striving for third-party independence of commissioning providers;
* Helping owners sufﬁciently word RFQ/RFPs to ensure the quality and quantity of respondents;
* Evolving industry process standards and guidelines,
as well as procedural standards;
* Requiring continuing education for annual renewal
of credentials;
* Increasing industry public and private publications;
* Including written protection clauses in contracts
and speciﬁcations for cost recovery as a result of excessive retesting, failures and deﬁciencies;
* Urging owners to make sure their sole-source
equipment vendors/suppliers/BAS/controls
contractor(s) follow the rules of the contracts and speciﬁcations and cooperate fully with the commissioning
team; and
* Prequalifying companies for small, medium and
large projects, so bid proposals are scaled to commissioning company capabilities.
Many cost-control measures that can help sustain
commissioning costing for the foreseeable future are:
* Use of industry private software program development to automate commissioning estimation, testing,
documentation and reporting;
* Better standardization of processes and procedures
identiﬁed in ASHRAE and commissioning organization
standards and guidelines and other industry guides and
publications;
* Reducing unnecessary risk to all parties;
* Improving the continuing education for CxA/CxPs
to keep up with technology changes and product migrations;
* Standardizing the minimum requirements for
credentials, education/experience, licensing, insurance
levels, declaration of specialization and organizational
J U N E 2020

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ASHRAE Journal - June 2020

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