Building commissioning

Bordeaux · From brief to the first year of operation

No one would deliver a car without driving it. Commissioning organises, across the whole project, the verification and the evidence that a building's technical systems reach their designed performance. ARKENOR carries that assignment in Bordeaux.

Discuss a project Scope and phases

Bordeaux · New Aquitaine

What calls for a commissioning assignment in Bordeaux.

Bordeaux produces offices and housing at scale within a national urban development operation, where environmental requirements are carried contractually by the developing authority, and maintains a historic centre whose heritage constraints bear on every technical solution. The two markets call for the same approach for opposite reasons: one because performance has been promised, the other because it can only be delivered through the systems.

The building stock

What Bordeaux changes about verification.

On development-operation projects, the environmental requirement is written into the agreements binding the operator to the developing authority. It is therefore not an internal objective that can be revised mid-project: it is a contractual undertaking whose delivery will have to be demonstrated. That configuration favours commissioning, because it turns good practice into an obligation of proof — and proof is exactly what the assignment produces.

The historic centre poses the opposite problem. When facades cannot be modified, achieving the performance rests entirely on the installations and their settings. The construction lever is closed; only the parametric lever remains. On that kind of project, set-up is not one handover step among others: it is where the entire gap between calculation and reality is decided.

A third and quieter point concerns mixed residential and office schemes, common in recent developments. Shared installations serving uses with incompatible rhythms — offices during the day, homes in the evening and at weekends — almost systematically drift in transition regimes, for want of having been tested in both configurations.

The full phase-by-phase structure of the assignment is set out on our page on the scope and phases, and the wider discipline on building commissioning.

The assignment

Five phases, and the first one decides the rest.

Roughly a third of the work happens before ground is broken. A project that discovers the subject during construction has already lost what should have been documented upstream, and it does not come back.

  1. 1 Brief Write down what is expected of the building before it is drawn. Everything else is measured against it.
  2. 2 Design Critical review of drawings and specifications, and insertion of testing clauses into the works packages.
  3. 3 Construction Review of contractor submittals, attendance at verifications, one single issues register.
  4. 4 Handover Functional testing, and comparison of the functional description with the parameters actually loaded.
  5. 5 First year Seasonal testing and optimisation, while the one-year statutory completion guarantee still runs.

Applicability

No regulation requires it. Several schemes do.

Commissioning is not required by any French building regulation. It becomes binding by contract as soon as a project targets a label or a certification: LEED places it in a prerequisite that cannot be traded away, BREEAM treats it in a dedicated credit with seasonal testing in a separate one, the Effinergie labels require it unconditionally, and NF Habitat HQE rewards it at its maximum weighting.

The full comparison, with the exact wording used by each scheme, is on our page on certification requirements. On a building already in service the approach is called retro-commissioning and acts on settings and control logic; extended over time it becomes ongoing commissioning, which meets the French tertiary decree obligation from the operational side.

FAQ · commissioning in Bordeaux

What building owners ask.

No. No French building regulation requires it. It becomes binding by contract as soon as a project targets a label or certification: the Effinergie labels require it unconditionally, NF Habitat HQE rewards it at its maximum weighting, and LEED places it in a prerequisite. Many projects fall within scope without the subject having been addressed at the outset.
The pre-handover operations establish conformity of the delivered works and produce the snagging list, at the end of construction. Commissioning starts at briefing stage and continues through the first year of operation. And the contractor's own set-up work belongs to the contractor alone: commissioning verifies that it was properly done without substituting itself for it.
It depends on the level targeted. Assigning the role to the design team is the simplest route, but that team then verifies its own design, and the most demanding schemes exclude it: BBCA requires a third party, DGNB requires a party that is neither designer nor contractor, and LEED version 5 removed the exemption for smaller projects. We say plainly when our own position on a project prevents us from taking the role.
It changes its purpose. A certification target can be revised downwards mid-project; an undertaking given to a developing authority will have to be demonstrated. Commissioning then becomes an instrument of contractual security: dated test records, the functional description compared with the parameters actually loaded, and the issues register with attribution form the file that allows you to answer. An energy model does not, because it describes a conventional building rather than the one delivered.
By moving the whole requirement onto the installations and their settings, since the construction lever is closed. On that kind of project, set-up is not one handover step among others: it decides the entire gap between calculation and reality. It is also what makes the approach pay back quickly, since it acts on parameters rather than on works.

Go further

The rest of the commissioning material.

A project to commission in Bordeaux?

We scope the assignment at the level your scheme actually requires, at the right point in the programme, and we say plainly when an independent third party is needed.

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