global delivers planned maintenance at major London-based office building
1 Embankment Place, a large office building in London, is benefitting from planned and reactive maintenance provided by global associates.
Comprising 11 floors in total (basement, ground/reception, staff floors 1–9), as well as office space the building features two kitchens (one with a serving/canteen area), a café, a private healthcare centre and a shower room.
To ensure that the site’s BMS system is always healthy and able to control building operations in an efficient manner, global has been brought in to carry out planned maintenance on the BMS panels/controllers and plant, as well as to investigate and rectify any reactive faults that may occur. When carrying out planned maintenance work global is on site five days a week.
Planned maintenance is, by definition, a scheduled or proactive approach to carrying out maintenance that can prevent equipment failure, improve performance and extend the lifespan of building assets. Though an element of reactive maintenance is often still required in projects of this nature, planned maintenance can play a crucial role in protecting critical systems.
The maintenance of this London based building involves physical checks of each panel and controller, alongside any plant that is associated with the panels control. This allows global to ensure there are no clear physical faults with the equipment.
The controller’s live software is also reviewed. This involves reading the live data to ensure that the systems are operating as expected and controlling efficiently. Any changes that can be made to improve control are carried out or documented and passed onto the client for approval.
Alongside reviewing the live input/output data, tests are carried out to ensure that physical counterparts are fully functional. For example, sensors are point-to-point tested and fan inverters have their speed demands raised/lowered to ensure the output generated is correct. Any faults found are rectified where possible and reported to the client.
As this is an occupied office building a large part of the job is to ensure the staff have a suitable working environment, but the building also contains many MERs and SERs that hold and transmit data that is critical to the company. These rooms are temperature controlled to prevent the internal equipment from overheating.
Whilst on site reactive works are carried out on any live faults and issues that occur. This can range from investigating staff complaints regarding space temperatures to live plant failures. The objective here is to ensure the system is healthy and supplying the end user with the required parameters to create a suitable working environment.
The previous BMS maintenance provider carried out the original installation. As part of their system specification, they installed a ‘third party system’ in each control panel to manage digital I/O. Unfortunately, this system is essentially locked and is only accessible to that company’s engineers and ex-engineers who retained any necessary software. Therefore, many panels on site house a component that global cannot interrogate or work with.
Fortunately, global has been able to work around this and, at the request of the client engineering department, has started the process of removing this from the critical MCPs on site. So far global has completely removed this system from the chiller MCP and the LTHW pumproom MCP, with future works planned to remove this from the two 24/7 chiller MCPs. Removing the system will give global and the end user more visibility as it will allow access to all aspects of plant control.
With the global team on hand to assess all aspects of the BMS at regular planned intervals, the occupants at 1 Embankment Place can be assured that that the risk of breakdowns has now been minimised and the system is ensuring a comfortable working environment as well as delivering substantial efficiency savings.
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