Building commissioning

Montpellier · 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 Montpellier.

Discuss a project Scope and phases

Montpellier · Occitania

What calls for a commissioning assignment in Montpellier.

Montpellier builds a great deal, quickly, and under one of the hottest climates in mainland France. That combination puts summer comfort at the centre, at a moment when French environmental regulation has turned it into a binding calculated indicator. A project here is judged as much on its August behaviour as on its heating consumption.

The building stock

What Montpellier changes about verification.

The discomfort degree-hours indicator introduced by French environmental regulation changed the nature of the problem. Summer overheating used to be a defect observed after the event; it has become a value calculated at design stage, with a threshold to meet. But a design calculation rests on operating assumptions: night opening, solar shading actually operated, purge ventilation enabled at the right hours, ceiling fans available.

None of those assumptions is verified at handover in the ordinary course of a project. The building is delivered, the calculation is compliant, and real behaviour depends on scenarios nobody has tested. This is commissioning in its most literal sense: checking that what was assumed at design actually happens, and correcting it when it does not.

The delivery calendar makes it worse. On a market where output is concentrated, many projects are handed over between spring and summer: the building is delivered without the winter start-up ever having been tested, and the first heating season falls after part of the recourse has expired. The reverse holds for autumn handovers, which will not have seen a heatwave before the guarantee ends.

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 Montpellier

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.
Under this climate it is the most useful part of it. The regulatory discomfort degree-hours calculation rests on operating assumptions — night purge ventilation, shading operated at the right thresholds, ceiling fans available — none of which is verified in the ordinary course of a handover. Commissioning consists precisely in measuring whether those assumptions occur, and in correcting the settings when they do not.
The flow rate genuinely achieved on night purge ventilation, the response of automated shading to its programmed thresholds and in the right direction, the absence of start-up during the hottest hours, and consistency between the scenarios loaded into the building management system and those used in the model. Each is simple to check and invisible without a protocol: no end-of-works inspection measures a night purge flow rate.

Go further

Commissioning across Occitania.

A project to commission in Montpellier?

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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