New Construction Commissioning

We drive project success by facilitating a collaborative approach, which recognizes the value of people in facilities and seeks to deliver meaningful systems that are realistic, manageable over time, and designed with the users and operators in mind.

We work closely with building operations and maintenance staff, making sure they receive the proper training and support to ensure ongoing energy efficiency and building systems optimization.

Altura is a leader in commissioning high-performance buildings for a wide variety of systems and technologies, including

• Building envelope
• Renewable energy systems
• Building automation systems
• Central and cogeneration plants
• Advanced HVAC systems
• Advanced lighting systems and controls
• PA and security systems
• Fire and life safety systems
• Emergency power systems

Half of our staff are licensed Professional Engineers (PE’s), meaning that our clients benefit from working with experienced commissioning agents with deep technical understanding of building systems.

Altura staffs and manages our projects with senior personnel who have more than 50 years of combined field experience in building efficiency and management. We frequently provide commissioning services in support of requirements for LEED and CALGreen

As an unbiased, technology-neutral advisor, Altura guides clients through the new construction commissioning process with keen attention to the unique needs of each project and the future occupants of the building.

With our unique Connected Building Commissioning (CBCx) process, Altura leverages advanced analytics tools to connect a project’s design, construction, and operations phases.

This process also enables continuous analysis of all equipment and systems, ensuring issues are identified and corrected while under warranty.

The result? CBCx helps ensure that new buildings meet the team’s common goals for sustainability and energy efficiency. The process includes:

With a “listen-first and adapt” methodology, Altura stands apart from typical commissioning agents. Each new commissioning project begins with a partnering workshop that’s designed to achieve the following goals:

• Introduce the entire team
• Facilitate an integrated design process
• Identify shared goals and objectives
• Share lessons learned
• Ensure buy-in to the commissioning process

During design, we facilitate communication between owners, architects, and engineers, ensuring that project designs meet the owner’s needs with resilient, maintainable, and efficient systems.

This step provides valuable technical feedback while helping to translate overall design intent into commissionable specifications and operations sequences.

During the early construction documents phase, Altura leads a series of detailed design-phase controls coordination meetings. The outcome: complete and optimized operations sequences and systems designs in bid documents.

Such early controls coordination processes significantly reduce contractor change orders during construction, while delivering considerably higher performance systems from the start of operations. This process also greatly reduces schedule risk associated with systems start-up and testing at the end of construction.

During construction, our hands-on approach allows for an efficient and well-coordinated start-up, test, and balance process, followed by functional testing that is highly targeted to the owner’s needs.

These efforts toward early coordination of controls sequences and codification of performance establish a solid foundation for training and support during the initial year of operations.

Other benefits of our CBCx approach include

• Efficient project management, which reduces the risk of time delays and mobilizes the project team in pursuit of shared goals
• Deploying of an automated fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) program that identifies issues across multiple systems and 100% of the HVAC equipment installed (as opposed to the 10 – 20% sampling rates often used)
• Continuous testing of systems throughout the warranty period, intended to resolve warranty-related issues while optimizing building performance
• Providing meaningful on-the-job training to building operators and empowering them to take a data-driven approach to ongoing building performance optimization
• Reducing the cost of measurement and verification efforts while connecting design engineers directly with systems-performance data, closing a critical (and typically broken) feedback loop

Altura offers a breadth of new construction commissioning expertise that delivers immediate ROI and lasting cost savings for

• Single buildings
• Global portfolios
• Campus-wide initiatives
• Commercial office spaces>
• Healthcare facilities
• Multi-family residential properties
• Hospitality and gaming facilities
• And more

In a recent engagement, Altura led a design and controls coordination review process for a large central chilled water plant. Our efforts involved a number of design improvements, including:

• Removal of redundant monitoring sensors
• Reduction in overall chiller capacity, improving system efficiency while reducing cost
• Control optimization, ensuring the plant operates at peak efficiency from the start
• The result: well over $1.5M in immediate capital savings, and millions more in lifecycle energy savings.
• Past controls coordination and design reviews have demonstrated the value of similar optimization to sensor networks, piping layouts, chiller sizing and selection, etc.

Altura is breaking new ground in the commissioning industry by pioneering new approaches to automated commissioning. In two recent engagements that span the healthcare and higher education markets, Altura has worked with our clients and project teams to develop automated functional testing methods that leverage our work with ongoing analytics tools.

Our approach to automated testing provides benefits to the entire construction project team. Contractors benefit from faster feedback from the testing process and less time in the field having to oversee commissioning agents, leading to more efficient scheduling and use of resources.

Owners benefit from complete and ongoing testing of all equipment and systems, ensuring all issues are identified and resolved quickly, leading to better use of the warranty period and more on-time project delivery.

Design teams benefit from transparent performance feedback and direct engagement in performance monitoring data, enabling direct engagement in the performance of their designs post construction.