Automating your building’s On-Demand HVAC program may not be a top priority, but your manual process of inputting individual after-hours requests into your building management system (BMS), either from a work order or form, could be costing your building thousands of dollars. Unnecessary equipment depreciation, billing leakage, excess energy usage, and manual labor are hidden costs of many buildings’ after-hours air processes. Find out how to avoid losing valuable space in your budget to them below.
Equipment Depreciation
Building equipment is costly. While depreciation is unavoidable, you can moderate and optimize usage to prolong equipment lifespans — and automating On-Demand HVAC is one such way to do it. We’ve seen building after building leave equipment running on weekends and minor holidays just in case tenants show up. The system could also be full of recurring requests that aren’t necessary and are putting extra wear on your equipment. Running HVAC equipment when your building’s at low capacity puts unnecessary wear on your machines, which leads to higher maintenance bills and shorter lifespans.
The simplest way to preserve your equipment is to turn it off whenever possible. The contractual agreement to provide HVAC services outside of normal lease hours does not have to mean your machines must run constantly at full blast. Automate your after hours HVAC service and go on-demand, so that equipment automatically turns on only when it’s requested.
Billing Leakage
Most after hours air service operates on requests submitted through work order systems or paper forms — neither of which are designed to efficiently handle the nuances that come with it. Requests submitted through work order or a paper form are typically programmed manually into the BMS and added to a billing spreadsheet. Once a request is submitted, changes, extensions, and cancellations become cumbersome to manage, and dependent on a tenant’s ability to find someone on the property team to help them. The likelihood that things like duplicate requests or changes in after hours service will be accurately programmed and billed for become very slim — leaving a ton of room for accounting errors, billing leakage, and unhappy tenants.
Automating request collection and fulfillment can save your property team time, make your tenants’ lives easier, and ensure billing accuracy (even in complex scenarios).
Energy Use
Nobody likes to talk about how often buildings are left on, even when they’re unoccupied. Most buildings have very low occupancy on weekends and minor holidays (think MLK Day or the Friday after Thanksgiving), but property teams run their buildings “just in case” tenants show up, or to avoid losing the building, which wastes a huge amount of energy and could be wreaking havoc on operating costs.
The solution is to go on-demand; to provide an easy and reliable way for tenants to request HVAC on weekends and minor holidays, allowing you to turn off your equipment when it truly isn’t needed. Genea’s On-Demand HVAC software solution could save you thousands of dollars on energy and equipment depreciation costs each year by doing exactly that.
To evaluate how to drive energy efficiency through this sort of process automation, check your access card logs to assess your tenant occupancy levels during weekends and holidays. You could be running your building as though it is at 30%, 70%, or even 100% occupancy when your true tenant occupancy is only 3% — a huge waste of energy and money.
Labor
The cost of labor is frequently overlooked when evaluating On-Demand HVAC programs. If you’re operating on a work order or paper form system, the process is manual and timely for your team. Time, of course, is money. Property teams and building engineers balance a tremendous workload, and the inefficiencies of manual practices really add up over time. Consider the hourly salary of your team members, the amount of time they spend trying to manage requests for service or complaints about unfulfilled requests, and the tedium of billing for said requests. While all a part of their job, their time could be better spend if the processes were automated
Genea’s On-Demand HVAC solution provides automated requests and invoicing along with a support team available 24/7 to both tenants and property teams. We can help you manage all of your after hours requests easily and efficiently, saving you time to dedicate to more urgent building matters.
Ready to Cut Down on Air Costs?
If you’d like to learn more about any of the issues above or how our services might be able to help you save money for your building, reach out to our team for more information.
