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UCSF Health Extended Its Commissioning Contracts Past Occupancy, and the University Is Now Requiring It for All Projects
UCSF Health recently completed two all-electric outpatient surgery centers, including complex plants with no cooling towers, sink source coils, and sequences of operation that ran eight to nine pages just to run the central plant. Both buildings took six to twelve months post-occupancy to reach design intent. Gabe Sandoval, Senior Controls and Commissioning Engineer at UCSF Health, considers that a success.
Another healthcare system running the same MEP design still hasnāt gotten its plants running properly after two to three years. UCSF got there in a fraction of the time, in part because Sandoval and his energy engineers worked on the buildings nearly every day post-turnover, forcing sequence rewrites four to five times until the plant performed as designed.
Sandovalās observation from the project: most building owners donāt have the internal depth to continue diligently tweaking a building after turnover. So what do you do if you donāt? UCSFās formal answer, now approved by the UC Office of the President and being deployed across all University of California projects, is to extend the commissioning agent and controls contractor contracts beyond occupancy.
The standard model breaks at handover. Contractors pack up, the warranty clock starts, and the owner inherits whatever is left long before the real occupants can give the building a full test drive. Getting teams back on warranty issues is slow and adversarial. Keeping them engaged from the outset changes the dynamic entirely.
Running two similar buildings simultaneously also revealed the importance of a strong commissioning agent. One of the two firms UCSF engaged was technically sharp and drove resolution. The other was passive, checking boxes without pushing outcomes. UCSF eventually stepped in and took over that buildingās commissioning, which not only delayed work but gave the owner more problems to solve.
Assuming everything will work at handoff is a recipe for a difficult first year. Designing the engagement so that the right people stay involved through the period when the building actually starts being used, and the gaps between design intent and operational reality become clear, is what gets buildings to where they need to be.
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UCSF Health recently completed two all-electric outpatient surgery centers, including complex plants with no cooling towers, sink source coils, and sequences of operation that ran eight to nine pages just to run the central plant. Both buildings took six to twelve months post-occupancy to reach design intent. Gabe Sandoval, Senior Controls and Commissioning Engineer at UCSF Health, considers that a success.
Another healthcare system running the same MEP design still hasnāt gotten its plants running properly after two to three years. UCSF got there in a fraction of the time, in part because Sandoval and his energy engineers worked on the buildings nearly every day post-turnover, forcing sequence rewrites four to five times until the plant performed as designed.
Sandovalās observation from the project: most building owners donāt have the internal depth to continue diligently tweaking a building after turnover. So what do you do if you donāt? UCSFās formal answer, now approved by the UC Office of the President and being deployed across all University of California projects, is to extend the commissioning agent and controls contractor contracts beyond occupancy.
The standard model breaks at handover. Contractors pack up, the warranty clock starts, and the owner inherits whatever is left long before the real occupants can give the building a full test drive. Getting teams back on warranty issues is slow and adversarial. Keeping them engaged from the outset changes the dynamic entirely.
Running two similar buildings simultaneously also revealed the importance of a strong commissioning agent. One of the two firms UCSF engaged was technically sharp and drove resolution. The other was passive, checking boxes without pushing outcomes. UCSF eventually stepped in and took over that buildingās commissioning, which not only delayed work but gave the owner more problems to solve.
Assuming everything will work at handoff is a recipe for a difficult first year. Designing the engagement so that the right people stay involved through the period when the building actually starts being used, and the gaps between design intent and operational reality become clear, is what gets buildings to where they need to be.
ā
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.