PROJECT

LEED Enhanced Commissioning for Hospital Expansion

Our team was the prime commissioning provider for LEED Enhanced Commissioning for a 440,000-square-foot hospital expansion at the University of Virginia. The project included renovation of existing systems for the hospital, which accommodates over 1 million patients and visitors annually and houses several environmentally sensitive spaces: labs, surgery suites and infectious disease treatment areas.

The expansion occurred in phases to support normal patient care operations. Commissioning tasks for the complex — an expansion that also includes retail, office and foodservice operations — were split across four task orders. Our commissioning services conformed to codes and standards, including ASHRAE guidelines for the commissioning process for new buildings.

Resource conservation is an important goal for the university, where most projects target LEED Silver certification. The hospital expansion project achieved LEED Silver certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The project incorporated a rainwater harvest system that supplies water for the green roof and existing cooling towers.

We assisted in developing the owner’s project requirements (OPR) document for each building. We developed the owner’s design criteria document during structured meetings with stakeholders that formed the basis of OPR content. We were responsible for maintaining the OPR and providing a final version with the final commissioning report for each project.

Our scope of work included:

Preparation of commissioning plans. We created a commissioning plan that included a communication plan, testing plan, and roles and responsibilities matrix. This commissioning plan helped team members from the owners, designers and contractors understand the commissioning program.

Development of basis of design documents. We participated in meetings governing operations, commissioning planning, design and construction teams, and vendors, allowing us to verify the commissioning was incorporated into the project planning and documents. We wrote the commissioning specifications, drafted a preliminary commissioning schedule, prepared the OPR document, reviewed the basis of design, identified systems to be commissioned, identified acceptance criteria, and wrote the preliminary commissioning prefunctional checklists and functional performance tests.

Review of construction documents. We conducted commissioning design reviews at the 50% and pre-final design stage. These design reviews were from an O&M perspective focusing on each system and equipment’s ability to be serviced, maintained and balanced. By conducting these reviews, we addressed coordination and design errors before they became issues.

Coordination of commissioning activities milestones. We worked with the general contractor to input the main commissioning activities into the master schedule.

Directing and facilitating commissioning during construction. Our commissioning team facilitated the project’s construction phase commissioning process by leading commissioning meetings with the project team and stakeholders to coordinate necessary tasks. We also provided reviews of contractor-generated reports, site observations to witness the ongoing installation status of equipment, and regular updates to the project’s issues log.

Review of construction submittals. Our team reviewed construction submittals to verify compliance with the design intent in the areas of energy conservation, operations and maintainability.

Maintaining issues log and commissioning field notebook. We used the Facility Grid commissioning software platform to distribute real-time information to the project team concerning the status of issues log items. The project team was also provided access to the commissioning field notebook and commissioning checklists through the Facility Grid platform.

Post-occupancy site visits. Our warranty review included a survey of O&M staff and key stakeholders, review of trend data, and testing of any issues not previously verified. The final commissioning report was updated with an appendix to include data gathered during the warranty review.

Client

University of Virginia

Location

Charlottesville, Virginia

Region

Mid-Atlantic

Services

Higher Education Facilities

Commissioning (Cx)

Industry

Commercial, Retail & Institutional