Continuous Commissioning® of a commercial building in Austin, Texas

ABSTRACT Continuous Commissioning®* technology has been proven to be highly cost-effective in reducing building energy consumption. This article illustrates a successful continuous commissioning project that has been recently completed in a commercial building in Austin, Texas. Even though the building's HVAC systems were well maintained and their operations had been tuned by an experienced facility management team, the CC® project was still able to achieve an annual cost saving of $287,400 (14 percent of the total utility costs, or 60¢ per square foot per year) by further optimizing the operations of various HVAC components, the chilled water and hot water loop systems, and identifying malfunctioning control devices. The simple payback of the CC project was estimated to be less than 7 months.