How We Work
What is actually wrong
with your building.
Not a technical primer. A plain-English explanation of why most commercial buildings waste money on automation systems that do not automate anything.
The Problems
Why your system is not working the way it should.
The system was never set up for your building.
Every piece of equipment ships with default settings. Default setpoints. Default schedules. Default sequences that assume a generic building no one actually works in. Most installers leave those defaults in place and call it commissioned. Your building has been running on factory settings for years.
You have no idea what your system is actually doing.
A building automation system should be the most transparent thing in your facility — it should tell you exactly what every piece of equipment is doing and why. Instead, most owners have a black box. Nobody trained them on it, the documentation was never handed over, and the only way to find out what's wrong is to wait until something breaks.
The people who installed it are gone.
Controls contractors finish the job and move to the next project. The person who programmed your system left the company. The sequences are in a controller nobody has the password to. When something goes wrong, you are starting from scratch with someone who has never seen your building before.
You are paying for energy you should not be using.
A cooling valve stuck slightly open. An AHU running heating and cooling at the same time. A schedule that still thinks it is a construction site. These are not exotic problems — they are in most buildings that have never been commissioned. Each one costs money every hour it runs.
Our Approach
What we do differently.
We write the sequences for your building.
Not templates. Not defaults. We read your mechanical drawings, understand how your equipment is supposed to work, and write control sequences that match your actual building. Then we test every single one before we leave the jobsite.
We hand you a system you can understand.
When we finish a project, you get as-built drawings of every wire we touched, a plain-English description of how every sequence works, and training so your operators know what to do. If we got hit by a bus tomorrow, you could hand our documentation to any other controls company and they could take over immediately.
We watch it after we leave.
Most problems in building automation show up slowly. A sensor drifts. Someone overrides a setpoint and forgets to reset it. A schedule never gets updated after daylight savings. Our remote monitoring catches these things before they become utility bill problems. You get a monthly report that tells you what we found and what we did about it — in plain English.
We work on your system, not ours.
We do not push a proprietary platform that creates dependency on us. We work with whatever your building is running — Johnson Controls, Siemens, Trane, Honeywell — and we can connect systems that do not talk to each other onto a single interface. The goal is a building you own, not one you are locked into.
Systems We Work On
We work on what your building has.
We do not push a replacement when your existing system can be fixed. Here is what we work on most.
Johnson Controls Metasys
One of the most common systems in commercial buildings. We commission, fix, and integrate Metasys — including systems that were never properly set up by the original installer.
Siemens Desigo
Strong in larger commercial and campus environments. If you have a Siemens system that is underperforming, we can usually find the problem in the first site visit.
Trane Tracer
Common in buildings with Trane HVAC equipment. We see a lot of Tracer systems running simultaneous heating and cooling because nobody ever tuned the sequences.
Honeywell
Common in healthcare and older commercial buildings. We work on Honeywell systems and can integrate them with newer equipment without replacing the whole platform.
Tridium Niagara
The platform we use when we need to connect multiple systems together — putting a JCI system, a Siemens system, and a Trane system on one screen for one operator. Niagara is the translator.
Distech Controls
What we install on new projects. Open-protocol, reliable, and built to be worked on by anyone — not just us. You should be able to get another contractor to service what we install.
Real Questions
Things building owners actually ask us.
My building has a BAS and I have no idea if it is working. Where do we start?
A retro-commissioning engagement. We pull 90 days of trend data from your system, walk every mechanical room, and compare what the system is doing against what your mechanical engineer designed it to do. Most buildings have 10–20 problems we can identify in the first visit. We prioritize them by how much money they are costing you and fix them in order.
We have three different control systems from three different companies. Is that fixable?
Yes. We put them all on a single supervisory interface — Tridium Niagara — so your operator has one screen, one alarm system, and one trending database instead of three. The underlying systems stay in place; we just connect them.
How do I know if what I am paying for energy is normal?
We start every engagement by benchmarking your building against similar buildings of the same size and type. If you are spending significantly more per square foot than comparable buildings, that gap is almost always controls-related — wrong setpoints, running equipment when it should be off, or equipment fighting itself.
My last contractor said everything is fine. How do I know if that is true?
Pull trend data. If your system can show you 90 days of cooling valve positions, AHU discharge temperatures, and occupied/unoccupied transitions — pull it. If the data shows equipment running at full cooling on a 40-degree day, or heating and cooling at the same time, something is not fine. We will look at your trend data for free if you want a second opinion.
Want a second opinion on your system?
We will look at your trend data for free. If your system is performing the way it should, we will tell you that. If it is not, we will show you exactly why and what it would cost to fix it.
Get a Free Second Opinion