Executing a successful project begins long before a field technician steps foot onsite. From the early stages of proposal creation and contract acceptance to preconstruction review, physical balancing, and closeout, communication is key.
Proposal and Contract Acceptance
TAB proposal creation demands just as much communication as after the project is awarded—especially pertaining to job specs. “We want to make sure we’re as specific as possible regarding quantities of equipment and other special services we’re providing,” explains Vice President of Aero Building Solutions Nick Muscolino. “It’s good to provide breakout prices for other tasks, too (such as sound and vibration testing) that are not necessarily included with balancing, but are complementary to it. By breaking out prices, you’re communicating to the customer we’re bidding to that we’re including the scope of the project in the proposal. It lets them see the different pieces that go into the price.”
Technology is key to the bidding process. “The old way of bidding a job was printing a large drawing out, going through it with colored pencils, and physically counting all the diffusers in the building and all pieces of equipment with handwritten work,” states Muscolino. “Now you can look at a drawing on a computer and check different pieces of equipment off electronically, and it does the counting for you automatically and saves that data. It lets you trace out piping, ductwork, and so on. It’s more seamless to do, and it saves time and money.”
Once a bid is accepted, the next step in the process begins with a review of the project contract. It is important to note the upstream contracts that precede the balancer’s contract with the mechanical contractor – that is, the project owner’s contract with the general contractor, followed by the general contractor’s contract with the mechanical contractor – so all involved contracts can be fairly represented in the final testing, adjusting, and balancing (TAB) contract.
Typically, the TAB contractor is last in the assembly line of a project’s construction teams. So, the TAB contractor must take care “that the contract we’re signing has references to the upstream contracts and that anything in those contracts is part of our contract,” mentions Muscolino. “Otherwise, anything upstream of our contract, we could be liable for.”
To mitigate or eliminate liability, the balancer must beware of the word ‘alleged’ in the contracts. “For instance, if something malfunctions or breaks on the jobsite and we didn’t do it but were in its vicinity, they may say we must have done it, so therefore we’re liable,” says Muscolino. “That word is dangerous and creates subjectivity for damages to come back to us. So, we try to work with our customer [the mechanical contractor] and modify the contract, striking ‘alleged’ or clarifying ‘liquidated damages’ to make sure it’s satisfactory to us, our customer, and the owner.”
Mentions of ‘liquidated damages’ in a contract also need clarification “because we don’t want to get stuck holding the bag at the end,” states Muscolino. “If there’s a set date in the contracts that says this building needs to be turned over by, say, August 1st, and it’s not turned over to the owner satisfactorily by then, liquidated damages go into effect. The owner charges contractors for every day it goes over schedule, and they can charge anywhere from $100 per day to thousands of dollars per day. We would want to clarify that we’re the last ones on the job, thus other contractors not doing their job can affect ours. If a controls contractor isn’t done getting controls set up to the mechanical equipment, we can’t start our job until that contractor is done. So, we need to clarify our duration for the project and set schedules up accordingly.”
The TAB contract must be consistent with all upstream contracts on the duration of times for change order requests, lien rights on the property, and retainage terms to avoid further balancer liabilities. Equally consistent must be all parties’ drawings, as a key step in job preparation “to be as efficient as possible on the jobsite, so we can identify potential problems before we send people,” Muscolino remarks.
TAB Preparation
Once the contract is signed, the balancer continues to vet the project. It is important that during job preparation, the TAB contractor’s project manager compares the engineer’s and architect’s drawings to the shop drawings the general contractor and mechanical contractor made to build off and vet for discrepancies. The drawings must then be compared to the submittals that list the infrastructural equipment being bought for the project for consistency between the equipment components listed in the submittals and those documented in the drawings.
Utilizing these documents, the communication with the construction team continues by submitting procedures and highlighting prerequisites to balancing. “Before we go on a jobsite, we need to submit our procedures to our customer for approval from the engineer of record,” Muscolino explains. “To do so, we make detailed procedures, referencing NEBB procedures in how we’ll go out and do the job. For us to do our balancing, there must be prerequisites completed before we set foot on the job—for instance, all ductwork installed, all controls complete, all dampers open. With that, we take those prerequisites and make a checklist for contractors to verify that each is completed. That checklist can be used to make sure the systems are ready for us to balance.”
The checklist must include critical paths, or the most complicated mechanical systems that will take the longest to complete, hence take priority. This is part of a balancer’s commitment to create durations, or estimated times in which the balancer will finish a task based on a particular system or zone’s characteristics.
“It may take, for instance, ten calendar days to finish a chilled water system and five calendar days to finish the air balancing on the fifth floor,” says Muscolino. “We provide durations in different areas of a building so they can be worked into the construction schedule. And based on the durations for each one of these systems or areas, we can figure out the total duration for the project. This is given to our customer when we give them our procedures.”
It is also helpful to the process of duration estimations to “work the schedule backwards to let them know when you need to start to execute the job successfully by the approved procedures,” Muscolino mentions. Once the balancer knows the work completion date and the durations necessary to complete it properly, working the schedule backwards will help communication with the other construction teams, as well as hold everyone accountable.
Accountability is especially key regarding requested deviations from NEBB standards. “We get the other contractors to accept what our standards are: to properly balance per NEBB standards,” states Muscolino. “If anyone wants to deviate from the procedures, we try not to let them. If they 100 percent need us to get started [earlier] because of schedules, we need them to sign off on deviations because by then the procedure is already approved. We need everybody to accept those deviations in the contract so accountability shifts to the person who’s requesting the deviations. We work together to make sure all have bought into the deviations to make sure they’re comfortable with any deviations on that project. And we need to document those deviations in our test reports.”
Similarly, all parties must be involved in the overall commissioning process from beginning to end. “A good commissioning process involves communicating ahead of time with the commissioning agent, contractors, and design engineer. We start to advise what this project will look like well in advance–before we get onto the jobsite,” states Muscolino. “It’s a constant commissioning process that lets the whole team onsite so they can understand the balancing process because the controls contractor needs to understand what he needs to get done before we go do our work. The design engineer needs to be part of it, so he has in mind how the building needs to be operating. Having that active communication back and forth about our procedures and process is very important.”
Special Circumstances – Existing Buildings
Active communication is equally important with parties outside a job’s parameters, particularly when it is a renovation in part of an existing building. In this case, the balancer must “be wary of areas surrounding the area in the contract during bidding and call them out and break out pricing to force conversation,” explains Muscolino. “When the general contractor and mechanical contractor look at a job like that, they look at boundaries of the area we’re working in. When we’re balancing a system, all that ductwork and piping comes from the bigger system around it, so adjusting airflows and waterflows in our small area of work will affect areas outside our walls. We need to talk to them about it and give pricing to readjust outside of our area. If we don’t address that, that other area will have existing problems.”
This is where pre-reads, or base readings and measurements, of a building system’s efficiency levels (before TAB begins) come into play, as changing the balance of a system’s contractually affected areas will affect the adjacent areas they’re connected to. “After everything’s changed, we need to know what the surrounding areas still need to be so we can reset them back to how they were before,” says Muscolino.
Onsite Balancing and Closeout
“A building project’s success entails daily communication with all parties so everyone knows what’s expected and can resolve onsite issues as they arise,” insists Nick Muscolino. “This communication begins with a balancer’s onsite meeting with all parties to review submittal prerequisites and create and review checklists based on those items before arriving at the jobsite,” he adds.
The constant use of portable technology makes that communication more comprehensive, as well as immediate. It allows all parties to electronically review contracts, report job progress, share documents and drawings, and send time-stamped photos of onsite problem areas for swift, accurate troubleshooting.
Technologies that Aero uses for these purposes include MS Teams, which integrates multiple Microsoft applications including Office, SharePoint, OneNote, and Planner; and Building Start, a cloud-based mobile software that streamlines field data collection and sharing for balancers, mechanical contractors, and commissioning providers.
“You can share files from a central database, drawings, submittals, or anything you need to see,” says Muscolino. “You can create different task lists and todo lists and share them with everybody. And you can access them on your phone or computer anywhere. You can chat on it too, and send little notes back and forth. It makes it a lot easier to communicate on a project in a central location. You can do quick calls, and even video calls. If a technician is onsite and needs to show us something, he can call and show the team what he’s looking at. It’s all about moving the schedule forward.”
Given the length of their review processes and the buy-in they need from multiple parties, test reports must be submitted cyclically (rather than singly) at the end of the job to further help communication. “When we need to submit them, they go through a mechanical general commissioning agent for review,” says Muscolino. “Sometimes it can take them a few weeks or a few months for them to review and submit comments for our response. If we submit reports often, people can access and comment on them and we have all questions resolved by the end of the job. That way, we eliminate that whole end-of-project issue.”
“The whole thing is about communication,” sums up Muscolino. “Getting in there early, forcing the conversation, and trying to take control of a project because we know, as the balancer, what it takes to close out a job.”
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