Can Regular Commercial HVAC Maintenance Benefit Your Facility?

Can Regular Commercial HVAC Maintenance Benefit Your Facility?

Studies prove that preventative HVAC maintenance can help facility owners save on repair and replacement costs. Nevertheless, most facility owners react to maintenance emergencies, instead of including commercial HVAC maintenance into their budget. The most common reason given is a lack of resources.

Why Maintenance Pays Off

Preventative maintenance is important not only for the comfort of your employees, but also for providing the proper environment to house telecommunications and computer equipment. High humidity and temperatures can damage sensitive computerized equipment that most businesses require for daily operation.

For most businesses, the HVAC system accounts for as much as 40 percent of the utilities expenses. Despite the fact that preventative HVAC maintenance can lower utilities costs, it’s often defrayed in favor of more visible maintenance tasks, such as painting and replacing carpets and lighting. Being out of sight, the HVAC system is seldom seen as a priority in managers’ minds.

Convincing Your Budget Manager

Documentation of expenses is a key way to convince budget managers of the importance of allotting funds for preventative maintenance. Keep a log of past expenses for repairing and replacing equipment. Also, keep a log of utility costs, and work with manufacturers or a service company to create an efficiency curve for equipment. Then, develop another curve that can reflect what efficiency would be if maintenance were performed as recommended. From these comparisons, budget managers will clearly see potential cost and energy savings.

Make sure to document inspections, testing and equipment maintenance, as well as projected costs during down time. Analyze equipment failures, both the ones that maintenance could have prevented, as well as those that were random. Facility managers know that in general, equipment that hasn’t been regularly maintained break down sooner than well-maintained equipment. You should be able to support this in your case study.

To learn more about how commercial HVAC maintenance can cut costs for your facility, contact Air-Tro Inc. in Monrovia. We’ve been looking out for our commercial and residential customers in the Monrovia area since 1969.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in the greater Los Angeles, California area about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).

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