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The "Physical-First" Rule: Lincoln Property Determined FDD Fails Without Mechanical Integrity
Lincoln Property Company operates its buildings with the pretense that the effectiveness of Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD) depends on the physical condition and design of the HVAC system itself.
When Chris Lelle, Senior Operations Manager at Lincoln Property, began onboarding properties into the company’s PointGuard-based FDD program, the team started by mapping every piece of equipment connected to the building automation system. That process immediately exposed gaps between what engineers believed existed in the system and what was actually installed.
“A lot of times there’s more units than the engineers even know exist,” Lelle said. Some equipment had never been mapped into BAS graphics.
As discrepancies were resolved and the analytics began surfacing faults, many of them traced back to mechanical issues that software could detect but could not meaningfully resolve.
For example, repeated short-cycling alerts are sometimes traced to return air grilles installed too close to supply grilles. In other cases, airflow restrictions came from blocked ductwork, poor filtration, or poorly located takeoffs. These conditions produced abnormal runtime patterns in the data, but the root cause only became clear through physical inspection.
“Fault detection just monitors the points that are in the building,” Lelle said. “It’s only as good as the points being monitored.”
The lesson for LPC was that analytics platforms assume the underlying mechanical system is functioning properly. Sensors must be calibrated, ductwork unobstructed, and airflow paths designed correctly for the software to work as intended. If those physical conditions aren’t addressed first, the effectiveness of an FDD platform will always be limited.
For operators implementing condition-based maintenance, FDD can reveal performance gaps, but mechanical integrity ultimately determines how much optimization the software can deliver.
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Lincoln Property Company operates its buildings with the pretense that the effectiveness of Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD) depends on the physical condition and design of the HVAC system itself.
When Chris Lelle, Senior Operations Manager at Lincoln Property, began onboarding properties into the company’s PointGuard-based FDD program, the team started by mapping every piece of equipment connected to the building automation system. That process immediately exposed gaps between what engineers believed existed in the system and what was actually installed.
“A lot of times there’s more units than the engineers even know exist,” Lelle said. Some equipment had never been mapped into BAS graphics.
As discrepancies were resolved and the analytics began surfacing faults, many of them traced back to mechanical issues that software could detect but could not meaningfully resolve.
For example, repeated short-cycling alerts are sometimes traced to return air grilles installed too close to supply grilles. In other cases, airflow restrictions came from blocked ductwork, poor filtration, or poorly located takeoffs. These conditions produced abnormal runtime patterns in the data, but the root cause only became clear through physical inspection.
“Fault detection just monitors the points that are in the building,” Lelle said. “It’s only as good as the points being monitored.”
The lesson for LPC was that analytics platforms assume the underlying mechanical system is functioning properly. Sensors must be calibrated, ductwork unobstructed, and airflow paths designed correctly for the software to work as intended. If those physical conditions aren’t addressed first, the effectiveness of an FDD platform will always be limited.
For operators implementing condition-based maintenance, FDD can reveal performance gaps, but mechanical integrity ultimately determines how much optimization the software can deliver.
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.