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When is your building actually occupied?
Paint in the hours somebody is genuinely in the building. It works out how many hours a week that is, the longest continuous window you have for planned work, and what it means for how the plant should be scheduled.
What that schedule means
Nothing painted in yet. Start from one of the patterns above and adjust it. Every outcome this grid can produce is written out below.
A window of eight hours or more
Long enough for most single-unit work in one visit. That figure is what a renewal should be planned around, and it belongs in the written scope rather than in somebody’s head.
- Renewal can be phased into overnight or weekend pieces, each one ending with the building conditioned again before it opens.
- A survey should establish the window in writing before anything is priced, because the window is what the price is built from.
- Plant does not need to run through it. A setback schedule that nobody has ever set is the most common free saving in a commercial building.
A window of four to eight hours
Workable, but tight. Expect renewal to take more visits than it otherwise would, and expect temporary heating or cooling to be priced into the scope rather than improvised on the night.
- Breaking the work smaller costs more in visits than it saves in disruption, and it is much better to know that before the quotation arrives.
- Crane time, staging and access all get harder in a short window, and all of it is knowable at survey.
- Ask what the fallback is if a phase overruns. There should be a written answer.
A window under four hours
Phased renewal is not really available on that. The conversation should start with temporary plant or a planned half-day closure instead, and anybody quoting a phased job against this window has not read your schedule.
- Temporary heating or cooling stops being an option and becomes part of the scope.
- A planned closure for half a day is frequently cheaper than three visits working around the building.
- It is also worth asking whether the occupied hours are real. A great many buildings are scheduled for hours nobody actually uses.
Occupied around the clock
There is no scheduling saving to find here, so the attention goes into maintenance intervals, redundancy, and a written plan for what happens when a unit fails.
- Any unit that cannot be taken offline needs that plan written down before it fails, not after.
- Renewal on a continuously occupied building is a different kind of project and it needs temporary plant in the scope from the start.
- Shorter maintenance intervals are worth more here than anywhere else, because there is no quiet period to catch up in.
Nothing here is sent anywhere and nothing is stored. There is no email field on this page. This works out what your own numbers imply about scheduling; it knows nothing about your equipment, your loads or your budget, and it deliberately produces no price.
Three things a written schedule changes
A building with a twelve-hour overnight window can take a rooftop unit off and put a new one on in a single night. A building with four hours cannot, and the same job becomes three visits, a crane booked twice, and temporary cooling. Same equipment, different price, and the difference is the schedule.
Plant conditioning an empty building is the most common avoidable cost we find, and it happens because the schedule was set by an installer years ago and nobody has looked at it since. Correcting it costs an hour of somebody’s time. We will not put a percentage on it, because that depends on your tariff and your building — but it is free to check.
Which is just as useful. If there is no window, phased renewal is not really available and the conversation should start with temporary plant or a planned closure instead. Finding that out at survey is a great deal better than finding it out at two in the morning.
What we will not do with your schedule
We will not turn it into a savings figure. Anybody who takes a week of occupancy hours and produces a dollar amount from it has invented the tariff, the loads, the envelope and the weather. What the grid gives you is hours, and hours are real.
We will not use it to sell controls either. Plenty of buildings have perfectly good controls running somebody else’s schedule, and the fix there is an hour with the existing system rather than a new one.