Summer brings warmer weather and longer days, and with that, challenges for facility managers as they transition from wet spring weather to summer's humidity and heat. Because of this, it’s important to spend some time preparing your facilities for the changing season to ensure everything operates in optimal condition. Are you spending time on these seven summer maintenance activities?
Pre-Summer HVAC Inspection
As the temperatures increase, dedicate some time conducting a pre-summer HVAC inspection. In doing so, you should:
- Check furnace system controls and thermostat
- Tighten electrical connections
- Lubricate moving parts
- Check condensate drain for proper function
- Clean the air conditioning coils and evaporator
- Check the refrigerant level
- Clean and/or change the air filter
This will ensure that your HVAC systems are in appropriate working order and ready to handle the additional workload that the summer brings.
Air Filter Replacement
Changing your HVAC air filters in your pre-summer inspection serves as a step in the right direction, but make sure you are monitoring the condition of the air filters throughout the summer months.
Dirty filters reduce equipment efficiency and can result in poor indoor air quality, but can also result in more serious issues – like poor heat transfer and dirty coils, which are much more difficult to replace compared to filters. Setting up automated preventive maintenance requests will ensure that this stays top of mind for your team.
Lighting Calibration
Lighting can consume up to 30 percent of all energy in commercial buildings. Depending on window placement in your building, you can use natural sunlight instead of flipping the light switch during work hours. It can help reduce your costs, and has been shown to improve employee productivity.
Lawn Care Priorities
Does your building have a green area for employees to enjoy? Make sure you focus time on activities to maintain this space. Cutting the lawn, pruning the bushes and pulling weeds require use of your resources. Including these maintenance procedures on your calendar can make it easier for your team to build into their day.
Air-handling Systems Efficiency
Keeping air circulating throughout the building is imperative during the hot summer months, as it can directly impact how comfortable building occupants are. Evaluate your air-handling systems and conduct preventive maintenance on a regular and frequent basis during the summer months. That way, you can ensure that air-handling systems are working at optimal efficiency and keeping your buildings cool and comfortable.
Pavement Repair
Soggy winter and spring months have likely left parts of your parking lot and other paved areas in disrepair. Patching and repairing pavement issues helps to improve aesthetic appeal of the building, but more importantly, ensures safety for building occupants.
Maintenance Procedure Evaluation
Evaluate your maintenance procedures, particularly those that are scheduled during the summer months, to ensure that you are addressing issues that may arise due to weather changes during these months. In addition, make sure that you have procedures in place for outside activities that only happen during this time of year, such as maintaining the landscaping and caring for external building elements like the parking lot.
If you use an automated facility and maintenance management solution, it’s easy to find the procedures that you’ve used in past years and create scheduled maintenance requests around them. In addition, reporting functionality can make it easy to gather data and analyze results from previous summer maintenance activities.
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