OPINION Your views from across the built environment
CRITICAL FUNCTION
Building maintenance is moving up the construction industry’s agenda, with more recognition of the need for new engineering roles and standards, writes Rob Farman
If I recall correctly, former Labour Education Secretary Charles
Clarke got his budget bid to the Treasury wrong one year, and so simply decided to chop maintenance to save teacher posts. When times are hard, building projects are often the fi rst budget item to be cut, closely followed by maintenance. However, for sound health and safety reasons, much of maintenance is statutory. This is partly because, if such requirements aren’t followed and someone dies as a result, there are serious consequences. In one of many examples of such consequences, in 2002 Barrow borough council halted weekly statutory legionella tests at a leisure centre to cut costs. Subsequently, 180 people caught Legionnaire’s disease and seven died; it was the UK’s worst outbreak of the disease. In 2006, the council was fi ned £125,000, with £90,000 costs, and an employee was fi ned £15,000. Had the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 – with unlimited fi nes, remedial orders and publicity orders – been in force, the council’s fate could have been worse. Maintenance of business-critical
systems is highly important, too. In a single day, major fi nancial institutions can have hundreds of billions of pounds worth of transactions fl owing through just one data centre. A false fi re alarm can see hundreds of traders turfed onto the street, potentially incurring vast losses for their companies. Regulators regularly scrutinise the
design resilience and maintenance of fi nancial data centres. Mission-critical systems are found in transport networks, aerospace systems and hospital operating theatres, to name just a few.
20 CIBSE Journal January 2012 The top priority for maintenance is
the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and its back-up standby generators (since UPS lasts only 15 or 30 minutes). The third priority is the air conditioning system which, if it is off line for a few hours, will force servers to be closed down to prevent overheating and failure. The fourth priority is the fi refi ghting system, where the main problem is false alarms. The rising demands for a comfortable,
creative workspace – and for IT operations to run 24/7 – are producing increasingly sophisticated buildings. These require profi cient maintenance providers, supported by several dozen specialists, including manufacturers. The level of complexity is comparable with aviation (where I started my maintenance career), including detailed, step-by-step maintenance procedures. There will be a need for more engineers – especially in the Middle East and Asia – who can understand these sophisticated buildings and manage their resilience and energy usage. Some may have done an apprenticeship, HNC or HND, and some may have started in design as graduates. But either way they will need both broad, sound engineering knowledge
Poorly-maintained air- conditioning systems can have major knock-on effects
and to be highly skilled in managing clients, suppliers and their own people. Technicians in the industry may have grown up with data centres, or may have come from the electricity-generating, nuclear or maritime industries or the armed forces, where the safety, reliability and maintenance requirements of sophisticated mission-critical machines are paramount and clearly understood. Maintenance engineers and technicians are also needed for the very diverse estates we have in this country: thousands of telephone exchanges; government estates each comprising hundreds of buildings; major offi ces; manufacturing, and so on. The CIBSE Maintenance Task Group
Clients are increasingly recognising the value of protecting their functions, data and employees through proper maintenance
is revising CIBSE Guide M: maintenance engineering and management, one of CIBSE’s bestselling publications. We are reviewing Guide M at present and aligning it with work done by RICS, the HVCA and BSI, in order to develop a suite of national standards to enable, for the fi rst time, the calculation of the costs of maintenance and life- cycle replacement at the start of both refurbishment and new-build projects. The days of Barrow council and Charles Clarke may not be over, but they could be drawing near. So there is plenty of work to keep maintenance issues high up on the agenda. And it is not just CIBSE and other organisations such as the British Institute of Facilities Management that continue to take maintenance seriously. Clients are increasingly recognising the value of protecting their functions, their data and their employees through ongoing maintenance.
● Eur Ing ROB FARMAN is secretary of the CIBSE Maintenance Task Group. CIBSE Guide M is available free online for CIBSE members via the Knowledge Portal, where printed copies can also be purchased (with discounts for members):
www.cibseknowledgeportal.co.uk
www.cibsejournal.com
Lisa F Young/
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