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Office parks, suites and light industrial around Redwood Shores and along the mid-Peninsula corridor.
A record per unit, written for the next person
What it is, where it sits, roughly what age, the condition of the curb and the roof penetration, whether the economiser travels, the filter size it actually takes, the state of the electrical connections, and where the condensate goes.
Office parks change tenants and change managers, and the institutional memory leaves with them. A written record per machine is the only thing that survives that, and it is what makes a drifting unit visible before it stops on a Monday morning.
Twice a year, readings against the machine
Before the load
- Condenser coils cleaned properly rather than rinsed
- Charge verified by superheat and subcooling
- Belts, bearings and drive alignment
- Economiser dampers opened and proved to travel
- Drains cleared and float switches tested
- Electrical connections torqued, contactors inspected
Before the cold
- Combustion tested on gas sections, figures recorded
- Heat exchangers inspected
- Flue and combustion air checked as installed
- Defrost proved on heat pumps
- Filters replaced with ones that fit the rack
- Readings compared against spring and the drift noted
Three things we find here more than anywhere else
Outside air shut in 2011
A damper closed years ago to save energy and never reopened. The building feels stuffy, somebody proposes an air cleaning product, and the actual answer is a linkage and an hour. We check it before anybody sells anything.
Suites subdivided around the ducts
Ten years of tenant improvements leave one unit serving two tenancies with one thermostat in one of them. It is not a fault, it is an arrangement, and it wants saying out loud rather than rebalancing every quarter.
Server rooms nobody planned
A closet with a rack in it and the door shut. These run all year, they do not care that the building is on a schedule, and they are the commonest reason a suite has a cooling complaint in January.
What we turn down
Chiller plant, building management systems on proprietary protocols, and anything that genuinely wants a controls engineer rather than a mechanical contractor. We say so at the survey rather than after the second visit.
We also turn down a maintenance contract on a building we have not surveyed, and we will not take on a suite where the landlord and the tenant disagree about who owns the equipment until somebody has settled it in writing.