Building commissioning

Paris · 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 Paris.

Discuss a project Scope and phases

Paris · Île-de-France

What calls for a commissioning assignment in Paris.

Paris barely builds any more; it restructures. That single fact governs everything for a commissioning assignment: occupied or partly occupied sites, heritage constraints on facades and therefore on technical solutions, urban heating and cooling networks, and an office stock massively subject to the French consumption-reduction obligation.

The building stock

What Paris changes about verification.

Restructuring on an occupied site changes the nature of the work. On a new build, verification concentrates at handover; on a floor-by-floor refit it repeats at every delivery, on an installation whose configuration keeps changing. The hard part is methodological rather than technical: knowing at any moment what has been verified, in which state of the installation, and what will need re-verifying after the next phase.

Heritage constraints add a difficulty of their own. When the facade cannot be touched, performance rests entirely on the systems — air handling, terminal control, management of gains. In other words, on what is set rather than on what is built. A restructured Parisian building is one whose performance is almost entirely parametric, which moves the whole exposure into set-up and operation.

One further point, specific to the period and pronounced here: office occupancy rhythms have changed, with very uneven densities across the week, while control systems installed before that shift are still tuned for uniform occupancy scenarios. Heating, ventilating and lighting largely empty floors two days out of five is a saving that requires no investment at all.

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 Paris

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, provided a register retains the state of the installation at each verification. On a floor-by-floor refit the configuration keeps changing: what was verified on the previous phase may need re-verifying after the next. The hard part is methodological rather than technical, and it decides the value of the assignment.
Move the requirement onto the systems and therefore onto their settings. When the envelope cannot be touched, performance rests entirely on air handling, terminal control and management of gains — parameters, not construction. A building in that situation is one whose performance is almost entirely parametric, and set-up decides everything.

Go further

The rest of the commissioning material.

A project to commission in Paris?

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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