Chances are that most facility managers sleep just fine at night without a second thought to their mechanical rooms. Whether it be the boilers humming away or HVAC doing its job, it’s not until one fateful Tuesday morning when it’s not, that someone notices. All of a sudden, one piece of critical equipment has failed, and now half the building has no heat. Or even worse, no hot water. Everyone gets to go home because the building is uninhabitable by law.
These aren’t horror stories conceived from worst case scenario thinking. These are reality on far too many Tuesday mornings, and the commonality lies in essential equipment that seemingly operated perfectly fine and then failed catastrophically.
The Equipment That Fails and Takes Down Everything Else
What surprises people, however, is that as time progresses and building technology strengthens, a sense of redundancy is woven into the fabric of these structures. From backup generators to dual HVAC zones to multiple water heaters, it seems as if one piece of equipment could fail and be okay; the system will have enough failures to spare that life continues as normal. But for certain pieces of equipment, everything from boiler systems to emergency lights, one piece fails, and everything else goes down with it.
Consider the example of the commercial boiler in a multi-tenant office building. It’s not just keeping people warm, it’s tied into the domestic hot water system for bathroom usage, the radiant heating for ground floor temperatures, and maybe even (although rarely) the humidity control for server rooms. When it fails, it’s not one item failing, it’s thousands of transactions for each tenant, multiple floors above and below, connecting with ancillary systems all circling back to one major failure.
But the worst part about these failures is that they’re rarely announced. There’s not a flashing beacon letting everyone know, six months in advance, that disaster is about to strike. Instead, there’s gradual deterioration that might get caught in an inspection but not many places are looking that closely.
A pressure relief valve starts weeping slightly. A heat exchanger begins accumulating scale build up over time. A control board intermittently faults itself but no one is in the office looking at it to catch the nuance; it’s all anecdotal evidence from someone who thinks they saw something strange before taking their lunch break, but no one puts credence to it until it’s 20 degrees outside for a cold snap.
The Equipment No One Thinks About Until It Doesn’t Work
Why do boilers get such little love? Because they’re not sex appeal generators. No one’s touring a building and asking to see the mechanical room. But this kind of critical equipment is how buildings find themselves placing emergency calls at all times of the night—and this is why services such as Boiler Preventative Maintenance Canberra exist, to prevent calls like these from ever happening in the first place.
The difference between planned maintenance and responding to an emergency incident is staggering. A periodic inspection might cost a few hundred dollars to find five problems creating a solution before they worsen. An emergency call on a Sunday for a building that has no heat? That’s thousands in callout fees alone, $X associated with the repair itself (if possible without parts needed), $X worth of lost productivity, and $X in damage with tenant relationships that were thriving three hours ago.
But it’s not even about the money; it’s about timing. Equipment failures don’t occur during normal business hours. They occur when systems are taxed the most: during weather extremes; high occupancy; before major holidays and breaks. A hotel’s boiler isn’t going to fail in April when it’s only running 10%, it’s going to fail on the sold-out weekend that’s kicking off a major convention.
Why Newer Buildings Have Less Resiliency Than Older Ones
There’s an irony here that saddens many a building engineer; older buildings built in the 1970s and 1980s had simpler systems—a boiler was a boiler, and if it broke, you simply fixed that broke thing while the rest of the building limped along.
In newer buildings, everything is smarter; everything is more connected; everything has a management system behind it. Your boiler isn’t just one unit by itself, now it’s relaying information back to thermostats on other floors; it’s adjusting its output thanks to occupancy sensors; it’s communicating with ventilation systems. When something fails, it all comes crashing down.
But even more disappointingly, failures propagate faster. A faulty temperature sensor tells the boiler how much heat to keep ramping up, it stresses the system which triggers safety shutoffs which now leaves half a zone without heat. The mechanical equipment would have been perfectly fine; however, the connection has failed.
What Needs to Be Inspected – Hint: It’s More Than One Thing
Maintenance schedules exist based on manufacturer recommendations, which is better than nothing, but what those schedules fail to acknowledge are the things that happen because of how a building runs day-to-day.
A school’s boiler sees drastically different demand than an office building’s; the school’s regime punishes them every weekday when their building hits setback after an overnight adjustment only to coast through day after day until weekends and holidays when their boiler shuts down entirely. An office building has relatively steady demand but longer hours. These lead to different wear points, different failure modes, and different things that need checking.
When was the last time water quality was considered? Scale within a heat exchanger doesn’t just reduce efficiency, it creates hot spots that crack tubes. In hard water areas, this happens faster than not enough visual inspections catch it before it’s too late and maintenance needs to include water testing/composition adjustments.
Control systems need attention outside of mechanical components; sensors drift and circuit boards have cold solder joints while software becomes buggy after extended uptime. Unless someone is looking inside at what’s normal functioning and what could be turning south, it all becomes a guessing game.
How Shutdowns Actually Happen
It’s usually just a phone call away: “We have no heat!” Now panic ensues while maintenance scrambles to see if this is fixable on site right now or how long occupants can legally remain in the building without adequate systems engaged.
For office buildings in certain climates, occupancy rules apply, i.e., if indoor temperatures sink below 60 while cold air wafts through the entrance doors and people can’t huddle for warmth quietly at their desks, they need to go home (and they also have valid excuses not to be at work). Therefore, sending everyone home results in lost productivity; cumulative costs roll in as furious calls are placed from tenants who still need to pay rent for facilities they cannot use.
A repair is only part of the problem, for certain systems requiring time to reverse their malfunctions, it’s easier said than done. A commercial-sized boiler isn’t going to turn on and instantly heat a sub-40 degree building that’s been without power (pun intended) for hours; instead, there needs to be a startup temperature which also means a thermal mass heat-up has to occur, which means an APD which initially happened for morning tenants can extend all-day strife into everyone’s hearts.
What Shouldn’t Be Preventable vs. What’s Inevitable
Not every failure is preventable, and let’s be clear about that, but with no freak electrical surges or premature end of life parts involved, and instead most catastrophic failures providing warning signs, a great deal can be avoided through regular inspections.
Pressure anomalies occur weeks before a pressure relief valve blows on $15 and less which would have taken 15 minutes of someone’s time had they been checking regularly anyway. Unordinary cycling behaviors show control issues that compound before shutdowns can become failures. Strange noises alert technicians who hear bearing struggles/pump issues from down the hall.
These problems don’t self-correct and all get worse over time.
Buildings that avoid major disruption aren’t those with newer equipment as much as they are those where someone looks at them regularly, capturing trends that go neglected elsewhere until it’s too late.
That regular attention isn’t going to eliminate problems, but it’s going to facilitate tremendously better odds. Instead of gambling that this winter will be the winter that everything fails, facility managers can go into cold weather knowing their critical systems were assessed out of concern vs. hope.
Schedule The Maintenance Before It’s an Emergency
The best time to look at your piece of equipment is when everything seems fine. But that’s also the hardest justification for spending money on maintenance fees when budgets are stressed:
Planned maintenance costs millions less in emergency repairs than appropriate stopgaps translating into extended shutdowns for those buildings who choose wait-and-see modus operandi.
Buildings that wait until something fails are always behind, always playing catch up with their tenants, always reactively hoping what breaks isn’t catastrophic or caused collateral damage in failing system’s wake.
However, buildings that maintain feel better at night, knowing critical systems aren’t three cold snaps away from sending tenants packing early from their prospective homes or offices because their owners/operators were too cheap or lazy or don’t care enough until it was too late.
Comments are closed.