The editors of Engineered Systems recently interviewed ACG Board Member and EMA Member Mark Gelfo, CxA, EMP, TLC Engineering Solutions.
We have been involved with ACG since the early 2000s. There are different commissioning organizations out there and we picked ACG for a few reasons. One was the Commissioning Guideline and educational resources (including webinars) to help train our team. The commissioning certification program that they offer that really helps to land legitimacy and heft to TLC and to our commissioning providers. It is not just the initials after your name but the weight of ACG that goes behind that. And maybe mostly because of ACG’s philosophy, third-party direct from owner independent total building commissioning, which we believe in very much as well.
The fact that ACG had a Commission Guideline in 2002 – that was huge because they had a document that outlined the commissioning process, and it was the best practice guideline. But the thing that always struck me is that ACG always offered that guideline for free. Not just to its members, but to everybody. Even today, you can go to ACG website www.commissioning.org and pull it up and read it, it’s just out there, they are trying to promote and help to educate the industry on what commissioning is and what the best practices are.
We are working on issuing the Third Edition with a Technical Committee. It’s complete reformatting and re-writing of the guideline because we are not trying to restate things (ASHRAE Guideline 0’s outline on what the process is). We are trying to develop a guideline that offers a lot more of best practices, more in-depth tools and tips not just from mechanical commissioning but so it expands to electrical, emergency power systems, and building enclosure commissioning. Eventually we will have other modules that represent total building commissioning.
He closes by encouraging engineers to become familiar with the Authorities in Building Performance: made up of the Associated Air Balance Council (AABC), the AABC Commissioning Group (ACG), and the Energy Management Association (EMA).
