Ongoing commissioning
Building automation, and the gap between installing and tuning
French regulation requires building automation and control systems on non-residential buildings above a power threshold, together with periodic inspection. It requires the system to exist. It says nothing about whether it is correctly tuned — and a control system installed for compliance and never properly set up carries the capital cost without delivering the saving.
The obligation
What French regulation actually requires.
Transposing the European directive, French law requires non-residential buildings whose heating or air-conditioning systems exceed a nominal power threshold to be fitted with a building automation and control system, and to have those systems periodically inspected. The obligation applies to new and existing stock, on a staged timetable, with the threshold having been lowered along the way.
What matters for an owner is the precise nature of the duty. It is an obligation of means — install a system with defined capabilities, have it inspected — and not an obligation of result. Nothing in it says that the control strategies must be correct, that the setpoints must match the actual use of the building, or that the schedules must reflect real occupancy.
Meanwhile the tertiary decree imposes on much of the same stock an obligation of result: a measured reduction trajectory, declared annually through the national filing platform. Between an instrumental duty and a declared result, there is only operation — and nothing obliges anyone to verify it.
The gap
A control system is not a control strategy.
Installing a building management system delivers hardware and a supervision interface. It does not deliver the logic that makes the building behave well, and that logic is where the value sits. We routinely find, on systems that are fully compliant with the regulation:
- points connected to the supervision but not used by any control strategy;
- schedules on default values, or on the values of a previous occupancy;
- overrides applied during commissioning and never released;
- heating and cooling active simultaneously in the same zone, at the boundary between two sequences;
- trend logs collected for years and never read by anyone.
The last point deserves emphasis, because it is where ongoing commissioning differs from a one-off retro-commissioning exercise. Most portfolios already hold the measurement they need to detect drift. What they lack is somebody with the mandate to look at it, and a defined set of things to look for.
The approach
Detecting drift rather than discovering it.
Ongoing commissioning is the extension of the discipline into operation. Rather than verifying once at handover, it establishes a set of indicators derived from the building's own metering, defines what normal looks like for each, and reviews them on a defined cycle.
The value is in the second half of that sentence. An indicator without an expected value is a number on a dashboard, and dashboards are the most reliably ignored artefact in building operation. An indicator with a documented expected value and a named owner becomes a signal — and the difference between the two costs nothing in software.
Typical indicators are unglamorous and effective: simultaneous heating and cooling, night-time base load, secondary return temperature on a district heating connection, ventilation running outside occupancy, and the number of active overrides. Each of them detects a class of drift that would otherwise take a year and an unexplained invoice to surface.
International schemes have converged on the same idea. LEED version 5 raised its measurement-based monitoring commitment to a three-year minimum and moved the ongoing commissioning plan from the enhanced credit into the prerequisite, while BREEAM addresses aftercare in a credit of its own.
Starting point
What has to exist before any of this works.
One prerequisite decides whether the whole exercise is possible: reliable metering. A submeter mislabelled at installation, a channel that has been dead for eighteen months, or a total that does not reconcile with the utility invoice will produce indicators that are confidently wrong — which is worse than having none.
The first phase of an ongoing commissioning assignment is therefore almost always the same: verify the metering itself, reconcile it against invoices, and document what each point actually measures. It is unglamorous work and it is the condition for everything downstream, including any regulatory declaration made on the basis of those figures.
On a building that has never been through the process, this work is part of retro-commissioning; on a new building it belongs to the handover phase of the assignment, where verifying the metering plan costs almost nothing and is almost never asked for.
FAQ
Questions about automation and drift.
Go further
The rest of the commissioning material.
- Building commissioning: the discipline
- Which schemes require commissioning
- Scope and phases of the assignment
- Retro-commissioning an existing building
- LEED commissioning: from CxA to CxP
- BREEAM Man 04 and Man 05
- ARKENOR, environmental project management
- ARKEMEP, mechanical and electrical engineering
- Glossary of technical terms
A control system that has never been properly tuned?
We start from the data your building already produces, verify that it can be trusted, and turn it into a small set of indicators with expected values and an owner.
Sans engagement · Réponse sous 48 h ouvrées · Données confidentielles