The owner in my CI project is planning to appoint the operations and maintenance (O&M) firm as the CxA to achieve this credit. In order to ensure compliance, we are planning to add this credit's requirements to the scope of work of this firm under its contract. My question is does this O&M firm have to conduct any specific tests or commissioning activities? Typically, following the construction completion, the representatives of the contractor, owner and the O&M firm establish a commissioning committee and do the typical commissioning, testing and balancing works. My understanding is this O&M firm would participate in this commissioning process, do all the reviews, provide all the documentation required and finally complete the commissioning report after the commissioning committee completes its job. Are there any specific commissioning activities or tasks (other than listed in the LEED guideline) that GBCI would like to see performed as part of the CxA scope of work to achieve this credit? One reason why I am asking this question is that at the introduction of this section, it is stated that enhanced commissioning causes up to 40% cost increase in comparison to fundamental commissioning. Is this cost increase just due to additional review and reporting requirements?
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Scott Bowman
LEED FellowIntegrated Design + Energy Advisors, LLC
LEEDuser Expert
519 thumbs up
March 5, 2014 - 8:24 am
First, the O&M firm must have someone that can act as the CxA and have the requisite experience as required by the standard. Then they must perform all activities required under EAp1 and EAc3. One caution, commissioning (especially enhanced) must start long before completion of the construction! Many of the tasks related to enhanced happen during early design phases. So your question worries me a little in a true CxA with experience would be able to tell you all of this. I would recommend a frank discussion with the firm and determine if they have this experience and can guide the process.
To answer your question related to cost of enhanced, you have to know the scope of the project. Some projects will have a very minimal increase in cost, other it will be more significant. Commissioning is all about time…time for reviews, time to develop the deliverables, meetings, pre-functional checklists, designing functional tests, etc. There is a threshold amount of time required regardless of the size of a project, so on smaller projects, the cost of commissioning can appear high. But then if you double or triple the square footage, the fees do not double or triple!
For proper evaluation of a Cx fee, you have to review the scope and rigor being applied. That has been one of the most difficult parts of this industry, as we have lots of different people doing this work, and there are lots of different opinions as to scope and detail. If someone’s fee is half of another, then they looked at the scope differently and have a different view of the time required to be engaged in the project. They are not paying their people half of the other firm!