Making the Building Run Only as Hard as It Needs To

Most commercial buildings do not waste energy because their equipment is inefficient. They waste it because the equipment runs when nobody is there, fights itself between heating and cooling, or holds a setpoint the space never actually needed. Controls are where those losses are found and fixed.

A building automation system ties your boilers, chillers, air handlers, pumps and zone equipment into one coordinated sequence. When it is commissioned properly and kept current, it is the least expensive efficiency improvement available. When it drifts — and every system drifts — it quietly costs money in every utility cycle.

Signs Your Controls Need Attention

Occupants Overriding the System Constantly

Space heaters under desks and permanently held thermostats are a controls symptom, not a user problem. They mean the sequence is not delivering what the space needs, and they defeat whatever efficiency strategy the system was designed around.

Simultaneous Heating and Cooling

When a zone calls for reheat while the air handler is actively cooling, the building is paying twice to deliver one result. It is one of the most common and most expensive control faults, and it is often invisible without trend data.

Equipment Running Outside Occupied Hours

Schedules get overridden during a repair and never restored, or a holiday calendar was never updated. Fans and pumps running through unoccupied nights and weekends are pure loss.

Sensors That Disagree With Reality

A space sensor reading several degrees off, a stuck outdoor air sensor, or a failed duct sensor causes the entire sequence to make decisions on bad information. Economizers in particular fail quietly this way.

Alarms Nobody Acts On

When a system generates more alarms than staff can triage, real faults get lost among nuisance alarms. An alarm list that everyone ignores is functionally the same as having no alarms at all.

Actuators and Dampers Not Moving

A damper linkage that has slipped or an actuator that has failed in position leaves the system commanding a change that never happens. The control graphic shows the intended state; the building experiences something else entirely.

What Usually Goes Wrong With Building Controls

Commissioning Drift

Setpoints get nudged during a complaint call, an override is left in place after a service visit, and a reset schedule is disabled for troubleshooting. Individually each change is small; over a few years they add up to a sequence nobody would have designed on purpose.

Failed Sensors and Uncalibrated Inputs

Sensors drift with age and exposure. Because a drifting sensor still reports a plausible value, the fault is rarely obvious — the building simply runs a little wrong all the time.

Economizer Faults

Free cooling is genuinely valuable in a climate with cool, dry air like the Eastern Sierra. A seized economizer damper or a failed changeover sensor gives that advantage away and often adds mechanical cooling load instead.

VFD Faults and Bypassed Drives

A variable frequency drive left in bypass after a fault runs the motor at full speed continuously. The equipment works, so the condition can persist for a long time while consuming far more energy than the design intended.

Aging or Orphaned Control Hardware

Controllers reach end of support, proprietary front ends stop running on current operating systems, and network segments become unreachable. Buildings frequently end up with capable field equipment and no practical way to see or adjust it.

What to Expect From a Controls Service Visit

We evaluate what the system is actually doing against what it was designed to do, then separate the corrections into what can be fixed immediately and what needs planning.

Review of sequences of operation, schedules and setpoints against real occupancy
Sensor verification and calibration
Damper, valve and actuator stroke testing
Economizer operation and changeover verification
VFD operation, programming and bypass status
Alarm review and clean-up so remaining alarms are meaningful

Controls Work We Perform

We troubleshoot and repair control systems, replace thermostats, sensors and actuators, service variable frequency drives, optimize scheduling and setpoints, and commission or re-tune systems so the sequence matches how the building is genuinely used.

Retro-Commissioning: Fixing Drift Without New Equipment

Retro-commissioning is the process of returning an existing building to the way it was meant to run. It usually costs a fraction of an equipment upgrade and frequently delivers more savings, because the equipment was rarely the problem — the sequence controlling it was.

The work is investigative. We trend the system under real operating conditions, compare what it does against what the sequence intends, and correct the differences. Overrides get cleared, schedules get matched to actual occupancy, sensors get calibrated, and reset strategies get tuned to the building rather than left at factory defaults.

Trend logging to establish how the building actually operates today
Schedule and setpoint correction against real occupancy patterns
Sensor calibration and replacement of failed inputs
Economizer and free-cooling verification
Elimination of simultaneous heating and cooling
Documentation so the corrected sequence survives future service visits

Controls That Facility Staff Can Actually Use

A control system only helps if the people responsible for the building can see what it is doing and change it without calling for support. We put weight on graphics that reflect the real equipment, alarm lists short enough to be meaningful, and schedules that staff can adjust confidently.

Where a front end has aged out of support or a controller can no longer be reached, we will say so plainly and lay out the options — including the ones that keep your existing field devices in place rather than replacing everything at once.

Building Automation Service Across the Eastern Sierra

We support commercial, hospitality, institutional and municipal facilities in Mammoth Lakes, Bishop and throughout the Eastern Sierra.

Our Mammoth Lakes shop and our Bishop location at 80 Virginia Street let us cover the valley and the high country from two directions. We regularly serve Mammoth Lakes, Bishop, West Bishop, Big Pine, Round Valley, Crowley Lake, Swall Meadows, Sunny Slopes, Chalfant, Aspendell, Dixon Lane-Meadow Creek, Wilkerson and Mesa.

The spread between those communities matters for equipment selection and service planning. Bishop sits near 4,150 feet while Mammoth Lakes is close to 7,880 feet, so two buildings twenty minutes apart can face very different design temperatures, combustion requirements and snow loading. We account for that difference rather than treating the region as one climate.

Energy Management Systems