Exterior building inspections are important tools for maintenance and engineering managers seeking to ensure the safety, reliability and energy efficiency of their institutional and commercial facilities. Structured and performed properly, inspections can give managers the data they need to set department priorities, develop accurate budgets and make the business case for investments in facility renovations and upgrades.
To achieve these goals, managers first need to understand a range of issues related to effective inspections, including the project’s scope, the personnel involved and the technology that will be deployed. By addressing these issues, managers can produce inspection results that turn into tangible benefits for their facilities and organizations. For managers, these decisions are critical.
“The stakes in the case of missing repairs that need to be done can be pretty disastrous,” says Doug King vice president for healthcare, with Project Management Advisors, a consulting engineering firm. “Depending on where your building is, if it's in an urban area and stuff falling off the facade hits somebody or hits a car, you've got serious problems. You're in the newspaper.”
An effective exterior building inspection often starts with identifying the equipment or area of the building on which to focus. While complaints from building occupants about such issues as water or air leaks obviously can help managers home in on likely problems, they also need to gather first-hand information on facility conditions. In some cases, this process involves front-line technicians using their feet and eyes.
"Walk the roofs, walk the parapets,” says Mike Borgelt, building enclosure regional manager with Smith Seckman Reid, a consulting engineering firm. “Look at all the building envelope windows, any fenestrations they have on the buildings. What's the material? Brick? Stucco? Concrete panels?"
If managers opt to handle inspections using in-house personnel, it is critical that both inspectors and managers understand the components and systems they are investigating. Given the growing complexity of facilities and materials, up-to-date knowledge is essential.
“What's visible to a building maintenance engineer might be a sealant joint around the perimeter of his window,” says John Posenecker, senior principal consultant with Terracon, a consulting engineering firm. “If that window leaks, it makes sense to him that it's got to be the sealant.
“But in reality, it could be internal components of the window system — the gaskets or other things that aren’t as visible or obvious to him. If his building has a curtainwall, that's a big issue for him. That's a priority. If there are a few small windows, it may not be a big deal to him.”
Managers also need to be aware of the requirements that accompany building components, perhaps most importantly their roofs.
"A lot of guys know they have a roof and a warranty on it, but they don't realize the requirements of the roof warranty,” Posenecker says. “You've got to inspect it annually. You've got to clean it annually. There are all these requirements that should be done to a roof, and if you do some of the maintenance to the roof, it'll last a long time — past its design life sometimes.”
In more complex cases, managers often bring in outside help in the form of a consulting engineering firm with experience conducting exterior building inspections. The decision is challenging, in part because of the increasingly complex nature and role of building facades.
"We have a lot of other options that come into play with facade design, to the point where we have facade consultants,” King says. “They do facade commissioning. We started out with building commissioning, and now the facade has become commissioned because we've discovered that it's integral in the energy efficiency of a building.
“Depending on the complexity of your facade — and believe me, the newer the building, the more complex that facade probably is — the more likely it is that you want to have somebody looking at that with training specific to facades.”
The decision to bring in a consultant often starts with a seemingly simple problem that quickly becomes more than in-house technicians are able to address.
"Often, they have a leak, but they can't find it, or it might have started off in a northwest corner and now it's down in the southeast corner,” Borgelt says. "They can't determine where it's coming from. They just know they have a leak, and they need someone to fix it. That's when we get called in as an outside firm. Then we can do our investigation or assessments to find it.”
In these instances, the consultant requires as much information on the problem, the building and its components as possible.
"Before we even do our proposal, we would like to get a set of any kind of building design documents — more particularly, architectural and structural (drawings) so we know how this thing was originally built,” Borgelt says. “We want to get a handle on the year it was and what kind of codes were in place.
“The downside is most facilities don't keep architectural. Managers are more worried about (mechanical, electrical and plumbing drawings). They often couldn’t care less about architectural, so we scratch our heads sometimes.”
Perhaps the most helpful information is specific to the problem at hand.
"If we're being called out for a water leak, do you have a trending and a history of your water leak?” Posenecker says. “Usually, if we find a leak, it's a symptom of a broader problem. How big is this problem? Is it a case where you're going to have 10 more problems in the next five years that are similar? The history of the problem is important.”
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
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