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Auburn University's Newest Buildings Were Its Worst Performers, So It Connected FDD During the Warranty Window and Got 70 of 80 Fixes Done on the Contractor's Dime
Auburn University's energy management stumbled across a counterintuitive approach to saving energy: newer isn't better.
"Our new buildings have been our worst performers. That's data driven. That's where the money is," said Rob Engle, utilities engineer at Auburn University, at NexusCon 2025.
Engle clarified that the university has strong project management and hires expensive third-party commissioning agents. Engle's only hypothesis is that new buildings are simply more complex. The old building turnover pattern made the problem worse: find dozens of defects after the warranty has expired, then fight for funding to fix them. "We'd have to go launch $50,000, $60,000 projects at a time to go get the building working, right after it was just built," Engle said.
To tackle the issue, Auburn redirected its FDD approach. When its new College of Education building opened in April 2025, the team negotiated access during the warranty period and connected BuildingLogiX's FDD platform the moment the commissioning agent handed off. Within two weeks they were punching out issues. The workflow ran through Jira, with the BAS contractor and general contractor connected directly, so every defect had an owner while the warranty still covered the fix.
Over six months, the team found 80 issues in the brand-new building and closed 70 of them. Ten remain in the queue when Engle shared the story. Engle called it one of the best turnover processes Auburn has run.
The next step is to scale and standardize this new approach. Auburn wants monitoring-based commissioning funded inside every new construction project, and Engle has a bargaining chip: trading away the interior plug-and-lighting submetering the team never acts on, in exchange for the FDD connection, which also earns a LEED point.
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Auburn University's energy management stumbled across a counterintuitive approach to saving energy: newer isn't better.
"Our new buildings have been our worst performers. That's data driven. That's where the money is," said Rob Engle, utilities engineer at Auburn University, at NexusCon 2025.
Engle clarified that the university has strong project management and hires expensive third-party commissioning agents. Engle's only hypothesis is that new buildings are simply more complex. The old building turnover pattern made the problem worse: find dozens of defects after the warranty has expired, then fight for funding to fix them. "We'd have to go launch $50,000, $60,000 projects at a time to go get the building working, right after it was just built," Engle said.
To tackle the issue, Auburn redirected its FDD approach. When its new College of Education building opened in April 2025, the team negotiated access during the warranty period and connected BuildingLogiX's FDD platform the moment the commissioning agent handed off. Within two weeks they were punching out issues. The workflow ran through Jira, with the BAS contractor and general contractor connected directly, so every defect had an owner while the warranty still covered the fix.
Over six months, the team found 80 issues in the brand-new building and closed 70 of them. Ten remain in the queue when Engle shared the story. Engle called it one of the best turnover processes Auburn has run.
The next step is to scale and standardize this new approach. Auburn wants monitoring-based commissioning funded inside every new construction project, and Engle has a bargaining chip: trading away the interior plug-and-lighting submetering the team never acts on, in exchange for the FDD connection, which also earns a LEED point.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.