By Steve Rizer
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has introduced for public comment a draft standard that would identify the minimum acceptable commissioning process for buildings and systems as described in ASRHAE’s Guideline 0-2005, The Commissioning Process. It is expected to become the first ASHRAE standard focused on the commissioning process. The public comment period for proposed Standard 202P is scheduled to end Oct. 1.
By taking the best practices from the guideline, first published in 1989, and writing a standard, the requirements can be adopted by code bodies and used by standards developers, according to Gerald Kettler, chair of the Standard 202P Committee. “The proposed standard will benefit the industry by ensuring that the built environment industry follows the owner’s quality-oriented process for achieving, verifying, and documenting that the performance of buildings, systems, and assemblies meets defined criteria. Standard 202P will support the requirements in other ASHRAE standards and programs.”
The commission process assumes that owners, programmers, designers, contractors, and operations-and-maintenance entities are fully accountable for the quality of their work. The process begins at project inception and continues for the life of a facility.
“The process includes specific tasks to be conducted to verify that design, construction, verification, testing, documentation, and training meet the owner’s project requirements,” Kettler said.
ASHRAE first began developing formal guidelines for commissioning in 1982, looking at documenting best practices to achieve facilities that perform according to an owner’s needs and requirements. Its original guideline on commissioning was published in 1989.
