Building commissioning

Marseille · 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 Marseille.

Discuss a project Scope and phases

Marseille · Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

What calls for a commissioning assignment in Marseille.

Marseille combines three markets that each call for commissioning for different reasons: office stock produced at volume within a national urban development operation, where institutional investors make certification a condition of their commitment; a large stock of older housing under deep refurbishment, where design assumptions are inherently fragile; and municipal school buildings engaged in a renovation and reconstruction programme carried by a dedicated public company.

The building stock

What Marseille changes about verification.

The climate changes what needs verifying. Under a Mediterranean summer, cooling is not a comfort extra: it is a consumption item that weighs as much as heating, and sometimes more on a well-insulated office building. The consequence for the assignment is direct — summer seasonal testing is not an option to be traded away at the end of the budget, it carries half the exposure. A system handed over in February and never retested in August has been verified on one regime only, and not the expensive one.

There is also a point about the older building stock that shows up on almost every refurbishment here: the high thermal mass of traditional stone construction moves where drift occurs. A control strategy tuned for lightweight-building time constants overshoots in mid-season and takes hours to respond on start-up. That is a parameter fault, not an equipment fault, and it appears on no snagging list.

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 Marseille

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.
Yes, and projects imported from other regions routinely overlook it. Under a Mediterranean climate the summer regime carries a share of consumption comparable to winter on a performant office building. A system handed over outside the cooling season and never retested in August has been verified on half its operation. We therefore schedule seasonal testing on both regimes, not only on the winter start-up.
Before the design team is contracted, and certainly before the works packages are let. The pattern we see most often here is a certification body flagging a missing prerequisite during construction, at which point the design review and the testing clauses are already behind the project. An assignment bought at that stage costs the same and delivers a fraction of the service.

Go further

Commissioning across Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.

A project to commission in Marseille?

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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