Category: Building Maintenance

Ventilation is crucial for health and comfort. Good ventilation keeps air pollutants out and occupants safe. In addition, having peak ventilation and airflow in your home or facility can prevent unwanted odors. Proper airflow is continuous and uninterrupted. Anything blocking the ventilation systems of your building can potentially be bad news for your property and your health.

Odor Control

Irksome odors in a building can cause distress and affect the occupants’ concentration. Better ventilation removes unpleasant smells, excessive heat, smoke, and fumes—all while increasing the life of your HVAC system and cutting down HVAC costs by 15-30%.

Fresh Air

Proper ventilation brings in fresh air while cycling out stale air. By removing moisture and dust build-up, a good ventilation set-up continuously replaces the interior air with cool and fresh air from the outside, preventing odors, bacteria, and allergens from penetrating your environment.

Control Condensation

Condensation can bring mold and mildew, which can lead to health and even structural problems down the road—things you definitely don’t want. Damp conditions can create health issues like allergic reactions, respiratory problems, and worse to the occupants exposed to them. Good ventilation can reduce or eliminate these risks.

Whether you’re designing a new structure or improving the ventilation of an existing one, you will likely need the services of an experienced contractor. To learn more about proper ventilation, call MaintenX!

As we spend more time outdoors during the summer months than any other time, follow these simple tips for a healthy yard your neighbors will envy.

Plan for the Long-term

Landscaping your home requires thinking in terms of years—even decades—not just a few weeks. Start by breaking down your project into small, manageable steps. You don’t have to totally renovate your yard all at once. A few small projects over a season can slowly transform the landscaping of your home.

Follow the Shadows

Plants can be finicky, and you want to make sure they get just the right amount of sun and shade. Look at where sun rises and sets on your property when planning out landscaping. Find out which areas get the most sun, as well as the areas covered in shade for most of the day. That way, you can plant sun-loving plants and shade-loving plants in the places where they’ll thrive.

Trees

Trees can add significantly to the beauty of your landscape, and September is a great time to plant a sapling. Trees aren’t just easy on the eyes, they can also be beneficial for your property, absorbing unwelcome noises and bringing shade to windows and walls, reducing air conditioning costs in the summer. These benefits carry on into the winter by reducing heating costs by blocking cold winds from buildings.

Want to know tips for creating the perfect landscaping for your home or facility? Contact MaintenX!

Take the initiative with equipment maintenance, especially boiler maintenance. Appropriate planning of routine repairs helps you to identify and fix potential problems before they even happen. When you are proactive about boiler maintenance, you will also find that it operates more safely and efficiently.

Here are some tips:

– Keep the boiler room free of debris.

– Never use your boiler room for storage; it creates a safety hazard if items block the equipment.

– Make sure you know all the information about the maintenance needs of your boiler.

– Teach your staff about proper boiler safety. Inform them of the boiler’s basic operation. That way, if there’s a problem, they’ll know about it before it becomes a bigger one.

– Avoid storing flammable materials.

– Hire a professional service to inspect it regularly.

– Make necessary repairs immediately.

– Inspect equipment after every repair.

– Make a maintenance schedule and keep it updated.

– Keep an accurate and up-to-date maintenance log.

– Never overlook something because it is automated. It’s only automated if it’s working correctly, and all systems will eventually fail. Check it anyway.

Safety First

Your boiler is a powerful piece of gear. Make sure you follow your boiler technician’s recommendations. This will ensure safe, efficient operation.

Like anything else, boilers will be more dependable when serviced on a regular basis and with managed maintenance and servicing. This should allow your boiler to bring you excellent service for many years to come.

A “Smart Building” links a building’s systems to a network, passively collecting data on their function. That information lets managers improve building operations by allocating resources optimally. Certain functions can even be automated.

Essentially, smart buildings provide building services that make their occupants happier and more productive by streamlining and automating things like:

– Lighting

– Climate control

– Air quality

– Security

– Sanitation

Smart buildings do this while also lowering costs and environmental impact over the building’s life. Smart buildings use IT systems to link an assortment of smaller systems which normally operate autonomously. That way, these systems can share data, enhancing a building’s overall performance.

There are many ways a smart building can save money; most involve optimized operation and increased efficiency:

– Preventative maintenance of equipment: Systems detect problems in performance before they cause issues with the power grid.

– Dynamic power consumption: By analyzing how and when you use electricity, a smart building can change its behavior to lower energy costs; it can even make you money by selling surplus power back to the grid!

Smart Buildings are the Future

Smart buildings do a lot more than save money and energy. They also extend the life of your equipment, appliances and systems. They allow innovation by making information easily accessible. They turn buildings into mini-power generators by allowing the system to sell the unused energy back to the market. They are a key element of a future in which IT and human resourcefulness come together to help foster a more connected and responsible world.

Most people think of buildings as permanent structures, and who can blame them? There might be buildings one or even two hundred years old in your city—sometimes much older.

Think Ahead

But buildings, like everything, degrade over time. That’s why they have to be maintained and occasionally renovated. Don’t wait for something to go wrong before you invest in your building. It makes better sense to get ahead of the problems a home, warehouse, or office space can experience.

How long will a Building Live?

The lifespan of each building is different, because of the very complex nature of its construction, purpose, use and environment. But the life of a building can be broken down into several phases:

Under 1 Year

This is the very start. Everything is fresh and new. There are many facets and appliances that have various warranties. Maintenance is generally focused on cleaning and occasional inspections.

1 to 18 Years

The owners have full responsibility for maintenance, repairs and renovations of the building. The owners should have a maintenance program in place with a rainy-day fund for major repairs.

18 to 30 Years

This phase will usually see the first instances of high-cost maintenance and renewal projects. At this stage, owners may have to reevaluate the projected costs of future renovations.

30 to 50

The biggest and most costly renewal projects have a tendency to arise during this stage in a building’s life. So a lot of money is required to keep the building working and functional.

50 and Older

At this time, all structures will have undergone at least one renovation or replacement. So, essentially, the owners just go back to the second stage. The cycle continues from there, repeating in this mode until the owners sell the property and/or it is demolished.

Want to know more about maintaining a building? Give MaintenX a call!

Preventive maintenance is the regular, planned maintenance done to keep your business’s equipment running. It prevents unexpected downtime and/or expensive repairs from unforeseen equipment problems while allowing managers to plan expenses. Proper preventative maintenance requires careful development and scheduling to prevent potential issues, as well as detailed records inspections and equipment servicing reports. Unsurprisingly, preventive management tends to be a complicated task to master, but a very important one for the success of the company.

Benefits of Preventative Maintenance

Here are just a few of the benefits of Preventative Maintenance:

– Equipment downtime is significantly reduced

– Number of major repairs (and their costs) are reduced

– Better preservation of assets

– Increased efficient lifespan of assets

– Lowered equipment replacement costs

– Reduced overtime costs

– Better and cheaper use of maintenance workers

– Improved safety and health conditions for owners, management, staff, and customers

Costs of not implementing a Preventative Maintenance Plan:

– Safety and health issues

– Erratic and unpredictable maintenance and repair costs

– Shorter life of equipment

– Higher chances of equipment failure and downtime

When preventive maintenance is properly organized, all of these costs can be … well, prevented!

PM: A Smart Choice

Implementing a preventive maintenance plan can be an intimidating job, but it more than pays for itself in the long run. With all the benefits gained from no or low downtime and a healthier, more productive work environment, it’s easy to see why, though it can be painful to plan and execute, so many companies opt to create a preventative maintenance plan.

Your company keeps working efficiently, dependent on a strong network of communication, usually a CMMS. Computerized Maintenance Management Software is a central hub containing information about your company’s machinery, property, equipment, and workforce which is easily accessible by the people within the company who need access to it.

Below is a list of some of the best maintenance management services:

FT Maintenance

FT Maintenance has an array of powerful tools for your maintenance management plan. It works with many sectors, including those that interact with servers on a regular basis

Key Features:

– Highly-respected in the CMMS field

– Offers a Demo

– Real-time, trackable system

– Service history tracking

Manager Plus

A lot of industry leaders depend on Manager Plus for their CMMS needs. The Manager Plus is ideal for companies of all sizes and can be personalized for scale and sector. Data is easily accessible, and the user interface is easy to operate.

Key features:

– Easily track work orders

– Scheduling assistance

– Automatically records asset history

– Offers external network requests

– Work Order Management

Corrigo

Corrigo is aimed at complete automation at every level of facility management. It encompasses systems that can be accessed by customers, managers, employees, contractors, and technicians throughout every stage of the process. This can aid management on all levels of facilities management and implementation.

Key Features:

– Planning Calendar

– Purchasing

– Scheduling

– Technician Management

– Facilities Management

– Risk Management

– Inventory Management

Work Order Basics

A work order is a document that details the specifics of a scheduled task. You can think of it as a link between a customer and a business, or one between employees and the maintenance department of a business.

Uses of Work Orders

Service businesses handle tasks like:

– Renovation

– Landscaping Work

– Cleaning

– Routine Maintenance

– Snow Removal

– HVAC Maintenance

Such companies use work orders to organize tasks. Used by employees, customers, and the contractors themselves, work orders ensure everyone knows the specifics of the tasks being performed.

For example: A customer calls a landscaper to ask for a tree to be removed from their property, an employee of the contractor comes to survey the issue, gives the customer a quote, and once the customer accepts the quoted price, another employee schedules the job and generates a detailed work order.

A work order contains information like:

– Contact Details

– Order Timeframe

– Estimated Cost

Work Order App

A mobile work order app is the best way to make sure your technicians are using your work order software to its fullest extent. It lets anyone in your facility log a problem when they spot it, and lets technicians in the field see open work orders without having to run back to a computer terminal. This saves time and ultimately money in your day-to-day operations.