Dee Davis (00:00)
If you have a fire smoke damper that is 15 feet in the air and there's equipment stacked up in front of it and no way to reach it with a ladder or a lift,
How are you going to ever check that fire smoke damper? Because someday it will malfunction.
Good morning and welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast. I'm your host, Davis, and today I'm here with a question for you. If you are an installing contractor or a GC, who is your client? You might think you know the answer, but if you really stop and think about it, the answer is way more complicated than we would like it to be. Our clients could be anybody from, if you're an installing contractor, the GC, but then it just goes from there. It's the users.
It's the facility engineers or facility managers. It's the owner, the owner's rep. It could be a host of people that you are serving as your ultimate client and you get into who needs what and how are we satisfying all the requirements of every single user and final occupant of that space.
Our jobs are not easy. There's no doubt about it. The list is almost endless of who our clients are. The only people our clients really aren't are, any subcontractors of ours, and they're still a client in their own way. So I just want to talk about the facility managers a little bit today, facilities, engineering, maintenance staff, whatever you want to call them in any given facility. Those are, I would say one of the least
thought of clients that we have and we need to make a more concentrated effort of thinking about them as we're going through design and construction in these facilities. So let's think about what is their responsibilities. Once we hand the proverbial keys over to facilities engineering, then what? These folks are responsible for everything from the most minor leak to a flood or a fire.
annual inspections, everything all the way down to some jurisdictions require every single fire smoke damper to be physically checked in that facility every single year. the fire department comes in and does full checks on the fire sprinkler system every year. There's all kinds of things that have to be done that we don't get to see because we're not there at the end of the day. So just to name a few.
of the items that have happened in occupied facilities that I happen to be working in recently. We've had a fire, we've had a flood, we've had glycol leaks. We have had equipment malfunctioning sequence of operations that are not working like they're supposed to be working because who knows what happened? Who knows what changed? You know that every facility you go into, everybody says they didn't touch it, but somehow it's not behaving the same way it did.
six months ago. So we have to go in and figure that out. We've had frozen pipes, we've had fire sprinkler pipes burst, we've had air conditioning units freeze up because of some unexpected weather conditions in certain parts of the country. We have had snow sucked into the air intakes of air handling units. This kind of stuff is the stuff that these facilities folks have to deal with all day, every day. I have pictures somewhere.
of all the snow and 55 gallon drums that was shoveled out of the air handler intakes in this facility because when it was designed and it was constructed, there were some things that didn't get checked quite as thoroughly as they should have been at the time. And in the end, we ended up redoing those entire air handler intakes because it was such a nightmare for that facility owner.
So when we are designing, we're doing design reviews, we're looking at things, we should be looking at them with a critical eye, not just of how do I install this and what's the best application for this, but we should also be looking at it from a maintenance point of view. If you have a fire smoke damper that is 15 feet in the air and there's equipment stacked up in front of it and no way to reach it with a ladder or a lift,
How are you going to ever check that fire smoke damper? Because someday it will malfunction. Someday it will not close all the way or it will slam shut unexpectedly and you may have to go find out what's going on. Maybe there's a screw in a wrong place. Who knows? You're going to have to get to that fire smoke damper. How do you do it? How do I make sure that we're installing things
so that we're not obscuring the access to fan coils, air conditioning units, the filter pulls electrical pull boxes, all these things we need to make sure that we need to be able to get to, not just for future work, but for ongoing maintenance. So I urge you to step back and think for just a moment about whatever facility you're working in now, whatever facility you're designing now.
What lens are you looking at your work through? Are you looking at it through the lens of ongoing maintenance and ongoing building operations? If you're not, pull out your facility maintenance engineer lens and look at your work through that lens for just a few minutes on each item and think about how am I going to get to it? If you asked me to go do that work, whatever that work is, fix a valve,
change a filter, access it for inspection. How would I do that? Is it possible to do it? If it's not, raise your hand, speak up and say, hey, you guys, I don't think this is gonna work for the following reasons. Too many times I have been in meetings where I say, what about facilities maintenance? How are they going to blah, blah, blah? And the answer I get back is, well, we don't wanna ask them because if we ask them, then they're gonna come up with a whole bunch of stuff we don't wanna deal with.
Guess what? That's their job and it's your job too. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.
