The number that surprises people
Across 11 VA hospital campuses in VISN 1 (New England), Alares performed retrocommissioning on more than 10.5 million square feet of healthcare facilities and identified energy savings of 15 to 20 percent. No new chillers. No new boilers. No capital project. The savings came from finding systems that had drifted out of tune and putting them back.
That's the part owners don't expect: most of the waste in an older building isn't broken equipment. It's good equipment running the wrong way.
Where the money actually hides
Controls that drifted
Setpoints get overridden during a cold snap and never reset. Schedules run systems through empty buildings overnight. Economizers stop economizing. On the VISN 17 retrocommissioning program across nine Texas campuses, our scope was explicitly built around this: condition assessments of energy-consuming equipment, a full analysis of the building automation system, installation of logging devices to capture how systems behave over time, and interviews with the people who actually occupy the spaces.
Problems no one knew were there
Audits surface things that aren't on anyone's work order. While investigating air handler replacements at the Lebanon VA Medical Center in Pennsylvania, our team traced persistent heating and cooling complaints to a campus geothermal system that was misbehaving, bad valves, a faulty sequence of operations, and improper ducting. We designed the corrections. The contracting officer noted the investigation went well beyond what he was used to seeing from other firms. None of that was the original scope; the audit is what found it.
Oversized systems running at part load
Pumps and fans sized for peak design day spend most of the year loafing along at 30 percent, burning power they don't need to. Logging and analysis show you where variable-speed control or a corrected sequence quietly trims the bill every hour of every day.
Why retrocommissioning beats a binder
A conventional energy audit hands you a report. Retrocommissioning follows the methodology, field inspection, data logging, functional testing of HVAC systems against FEMP/DOE and ASHRAE guidance, then carries the findings through to corrected setpoints and sequences. You don't get a wish list. You get a building that's already running better, plus a documented record of what changed.
The payback math
For a facility more than ten years old that's never been formally commissioned, the savings tend to land in that 15 to 20 percent band on energy spend, with most measures requiring little or no capital. For an energy manager weighing it against a capital request, retrocommissioning is usually the cheapest megawatt-hour you'll ever buy back.