About

What this is

A single-subject publication about building commissioning and the specific way it is being hollowed out.

The thesis, stated once so I don't have to restate it in every post: commissioning has been reduced, across most of the market, from an engineering verification process into a document that gets a building its certificate of occupancy. Both products are sold under the same word, at very different prices, to buyers who mostly cannot tell them apart until years later.

I call the second one drive-by commissioning. The term is not in ASHRAE Guideline 0, Standard 202, the BCxA best practices, or any LEED reference guide. There was no name for it, which is part of why it has been so hard to argue about. There is one now.

What this isn't

It is not a commissioning firm. Nothing here is for sale, and there is no services page. If you are looking to hire a commissioning provider, the twelve questions will do more for you than any directory.

It is also not a complaint about individual practitioners. Most people producing drive-by commissioning reports are working hard inside a procurement structure that pays for documents and does not pay for verification. The argument here is about that structure. Where I criticize firms, I criticize practices, not names.

The standard I hold myself to

If I am going to spend a website arguing that other people's work is unrigorous, the arguments here have to survive the same scrutiny.

So: every quantitative claim is sourced and linked. Where I'm inferring rather than citing, I say so in the sentence. Every post that makes a case includes the strongest objection I know of to that case, and I try to state it in the form its best advocate would use rather than a version I can knock down. If I get something wrong and you show me, I'll correct it in place and note the correction rather than quietly editing.

That is a real constraint, and it means some posts land softer than the headline. Good.