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A packaged unit picked from a floor area is a guess on a roof
The oversizing problem is worse on commercial premises than in houses, because the specification is usually made once, from a drawing, by somebody who never sees how the building is actually used.
Small commercial across central Contra Costa
Offices and suites
Suites along the boulevards and in the business parks. Rooftop packaged units and splits, zoning that somebody reconfigured for a layout that has since changed, and a written record per unit.
Clinics and treatment rooms
Rooms that must hold a temperature while somebody lies still in them, where draught and noise at the chair matter as much as the average reading, and where a failure cancels a day of appointments.
Retail units
Door-open trading, west glass and one unit expected to handle both. Honest conversations about air curtains and vestibules, including when the answer for your door is that they are not worth it.
Restaurants and cafes
Where hood exhaust and dining-room comfort are one problem. We measure the make-up air, because a room that cannot hold temperature at service usually has a building being pulled into a vacuum by its own hood.
Workshops and light industrial
Tall doors, high bays and a process that makes heat. Destratification, spot heating, extraction and make-up air, sized for how the space is actually worked rather than for its floor area.
Landlords and managers
Attend, diagnose, photograph, price, report, and authorise nothing without your written say-so. Annual condition surveys per unit across a portfolio.
Four reasons it happens, and what each one costs you
It was specified from a drawing
A tonnage picked from floor area at design stage, before anybody knew whether the space would be an open office, a clinic or a store room. It is then replaced like for like every fifteen years, so the original guess outlives everyone who made it.
Nobody rechecks after a fit-out
Partitions moved, glazing changed, lighting replaced with LED, occupancy halved or doubled. Every one of those changes the load, and the plant on the roof does not know about any of them.
Humidity is nobody’s job
An oversized unit satisfies a thermostat before it removes moisture, which is why a shop can be cold and still feel unpleasant. The complaint gets recorded as a temperature problem, so the answer gets recorded as more capacity.
Short cycling is invisible until it is expensive
A unit starting and stopping constantly wears its compressor and contactors out years early. The failure, when it arrives, looks like bad luck rather than like a sizing decision made before the tenant moved in.
A schedule with named months and real readings
Filters at an interval that suits your building rather than a default. Coils cleaned, drains proved, belts and contactors inspected, charge and combustion measured, run times checked for cycling, and the readings entered against last year’s.
One document per site listing every unit, where it is, what it serves, its age from its serial number and its last readings. If you change contractor, it goes with you.
