Typical Pharmaceutical Building Retro-commissioning
Field Engineering Services

Project Profile:

Project:		Pharmaceutical Administration Building
Project Type:		Retro-Commissioning
Square Footage:		430,000
Project Pay Back:		1.2 years
Completion Date:		January 2003

Project Details:
A global pharmaceutical company owns and occupies a 430,000 sf administration facility located in New Jersey.  As part of a LEED for Existing Buildings (EB) project, Dome-Tech Field Engineering was contracted to Retro-Commission the site's HVAC systems.  LEED EB is a set of performance standards for the sustainable operation of existing buildings sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council.

This site was designed and built 25 years ago during the post 1970s energy crisis.  As such ,the systems were designed with numerous energy recovery and energy conservation strategies.  Since the building was first occupied, it has been plagued with persistent comfort complaints during the winter months.

Retro-cx is a systematic process of reviews, inspections and testing which ensures systems have been designed, installed and operate to efficiently meet the needs of the building's occupants.  The scope of the project included rigorous hands-on inspections and testing of the HVAC equipment and building automation system.  All identified issues were documented and quantified such that their resolution could be prioritized.

The project was a great success.  Through the implementation of our retro-cx process, Dome-Tech identified 89 energy, comfort and indoor air quality issues valued at $82,000.  The majority of the issues were readily correctable by the in-house staff for little or no additional costs.  Including implementation, the energy conservation opportunities identified results in a simply payback period of 1.2 years.

In addition, Dome-Tech was able to identify the root cause of the persistent comfort complaints during the winter months and provided recommendations for corrective actions.  This was a great achievement as this problem had been analyzed by numerous engineering firms in the past.  Past efforts had been unable to correct the problem.  Occupant comfort in the building has been substantially improved as a result of this retro-cx process.