Goodway Presents: A Guide to Creating Your HVAC Maintenance Program

on January 31, 2011 in Facility Management, HVAC Maintenance and Efficiency

The good people at Just Venting and Goodway Technologies spend a lot of time thinking about how you, our readers, maintain your HVAC systems. We do so because that’s our business – helping you keep your HVAC gear in the best shape possible. Sure, we hope we can sell you a SAM-3 Firetube Cleaning System or maybe a CoilPro CC-100 coil cleaning system. But we also hope we can show you how maintenance can be a tool to help you both improve performance and lower costs.

One of the things we regularly talk about is the importance of a planned preventive and predictive maintenance program. By this, we mean organizing and planning the tasks you need to perform to keep your HVAC system running at the peak of its capabilities.

Well, leave it to a group in – where else? — California to develop a guide to help you write a comprehensive, organized and effective maintenance plan for HVAC and other building systems. The Collaborative for High Performance Schools is a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to the proposition that better-built schools yield better-educated students.

Here’s a quote from the beginning of the guide: “The mission of a school’s HVAC system is to provide comfort and good indoor air quality. The goal of an HVAC maintenance program is to meet those needs while also ensuring reliability, energy efficiency and minimum system life cycle cost.”

The guide shows how to create the principal sections of an HVAC maintenance plan, including:

HVAC maintenance goals
Responsibilities
System documentation
Maintenance task list and schedule
Evaluation task list and schedule
Record-keeping
Maintenance system audit

It is difficult to assess how to best maintain an HVAC system until you know how well it is actually performing. The next major section of the guide suggests techniques for monitoring system performance. Sections include recommendations for measuring electricity consumption, air quality, thermal comfort and noise. Those are followed by a series of techniques for measuring the performance and performing maintenance on all of the major components of your systems, including :

Packaged Air Conditioning Systems
Fan Coils and Unit Ventilators
VAV Systems
Chilled Water Systems
Hot Water Systems
Economizers

One thing that differentiates this program from others we have seen is that it includes a broad range of outside references and links to trade groups, government entities and other organizations that can assist you as you plan the maintenance program ideally suited to your organization and its needs.

Whether your organization is large or small, we hope you will find something useful in the maintenance plan guide we detailed in this post. And if you happen to decide to buy large amounts of quality equipment from us at Goodway Technologies to help you maintain your system, well, we think that’s okay, too.

Rich Silverman
Goodway Blogging Team

Image courtesy of Goodway Technologies