Building commissioning

Lyon · 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 Lyon.

Discuss a project Scope and phases

Lyon · Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes

What calls for a commissioning assignment in Lyon.

Lyon presents a configuration not found elsewhere at this scale: a business district under permanent deep restructuring, and district heating networks among the most developed in France. The first concentrates certified office projects; the second moves the point of drift somewhere few assignments look — the substation.

The building stock

What Lyon changes about verification.

On a building connected to a district heating network, performance is not decided at the emitters but at the interface between primary and secondary circuits. A return temperature that is too high degrades the efficiency of the whole network, costs the building through the tariff structure, and shows up in no end-of-works inspection: the system heats, setpoints are met, everything appears normal.

It is a textbook case of what commissioning is supposed to catch and what conventional handover lets through. Verifying a substation means looking at secondary-side temperature regimes, at the heating curve, at how control valves behave at part load, and at whether the control system matches its own functional description. None of this is exotic; it is simply rarely asked for.

Deep restructuring of office towers adds its own difficulty. Reworking the services of a tower in partial occupation means commissioning in phases, on an installation that changes state at each floor handed over. The issues register then becomes the central document of the project, because it is the only thing that retains what was verified and when.

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 Lyon

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.
Secondary-side temperature regimes at full and part load, the heating curve and its justification, control valve behaviour outside the nominal point, and whether the parameters actually loaded match the functional description. A return temperature that is too high degrades network efficiency and costs the building without any end-of-works inspection detecting it: the system heats, setpoints are met, everything looks normal.
In phases, accepting that the installation changes state at every floor handed over. The issues register becomes the central document of the project: it is the only thing that retains what was verified, when, and in which configuration. Without it each phase starts again from nothing and the verifications done on the previous one are lost.

Go further

The rest of the commissioning material.

A project to commission in Lyon?

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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