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Fire & Water - Cleanup & Restoration™
(703) 229-0260

Winter Maintenance Tips for Commercial Buildings

12/18/2018 (Permalink)

While the cold weather may be great for deer hunting or ice fishing, it can be challenging for maintenance and service teams. As a result, preparing your commercial buildings and facilities for winter becomes all the more critical.

In this blog post, we will highlight maintenance tips you can do as a building owner or facility manager to prepare your properties for the heating season. Most of these tips are tied solely to your heating and cooling systems, while others focus on your building structure and the areas around it. All play a part in ensuring you are ready for whatever Mother Nature has up her sleeve.  

Inspect Heating Systems

It’s a no-brainer that maintaining your heating systems should be a top priority in colder weather. We recommend that you inspect heating systems regularly and create a written plan to outline what maintenance tasks need to be addressed daily, weekly, monthly and annually.

Concerning equipment, hot water heating boilers will see increased use.

To ensure their proper operation, we suggest you:

  • Examine flues for carbon buildup
  • Analyze combustion to ensure the flames burn cleanly and efficiently
  • Check safeties for proper operation
  • Look for cracked heat exchangers
  • Examine water pressure gauges to ensure they are calibrated correctly
  • Remove and clean burners
  • Brush boiler tubes
  • Check expansion tanks for proper air cushion and to ensure they aren’t flooded
  • Furnaces and rooftop units also need to be checked. Specifically, look for cracks in the heat exchangers, which can leak dangerous carbon dioxide into a building. *For furnaces older than 10 years, consider replacement. Efficiency ratings for today’s equipment far exceed those of older ones, sometimes as much as 40 percent or more.

    • Winterize Cooling Systems

    While heating systems move on-line, cooling systems not in use during the cold season need to be winterized. This might include draining your cooling tower, shutting down your chiller or emptying a condensate drain trap. Not addressing maintenance tasks as systems are taken off-line could result in significant damage to them. Additionally, necessary repairs can be addressed at this time rather than at the moment when you need cooling in the spring and summer.

    Calibrate Thermostats / Reduce Set Points

    This suggestion contains two points. First, by calibrating your building’s thermostats, you ensure your heating systems will operate more efficiently. And that saves money. You know what else saves money? Lowering the temperature in your building (not too much, though, as you don’t want building occupants to be uncomfortable). Studies show you lower your utility bill by an average of one percent for every degree dropped. Imagine the savings you’ll enjoy over the course of a winter!

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