In a recent survey to the air conditioning and related services, performed by First Q, on  a large number of   shopping centres of a major European Retail Developer,  representing a total GLA of almost 600,000m2, some clear conclusions were reached on the importance of a long-term relation with the engineering teams.

Although designed and built over a period of 10 years, most units showed common problems ranging from design practices, construction management and maintenance.

Of the total of identified corrective measures, 34% (by cost) refer to issues that should be tackled during the design phase, 48% concern construction and 17% are directly related with the operations and maintenance.

First Q issued a number of recommendations, summarised as follows: In design, make detailed analysis of special zones using computational fluid dynamics and comfort analysis, integrate architecture and building services for maintainability. Construction applying best practices in construction management and in testing, balancing, start-up and commissioning. Operations preparing maintenance project for each unit and adopt a maintenance management system, maintain an updated documentation management system to track changes.

It is widely recognised that the air conditioning and related systems have a large impact on the success of a large retail unit. Comfort is of paramount importance in retaining visitors. Economy of operations is the key to the financial sustainability of the investment. A new effort on environmental impact reduction is observed in most developers, with many filing for ISO-14000 certification of individual units, where energy consumption and emissions play a large role reinforcing the tendency to use renewable energies. The optimisation of all these parameters requires a very detailed and methodical approach to the design, the construction and the operations and maintenance of the systems.

Luis Burnay
First Q General Manager