Creating a High-Rise Maintenance Checklist
Mike LaCount | Sopra Communities
High-rise buildings come with their own unique set of problems and issues, and having a maintenance checklist will help the management team run a successful community. Since few managers have years of experience working on the maintenance side of things, it is helpful to have a checklist that will keep you focused on the many moving parts within a high-rise community. Boilers, cooling towers, circulation pumps, booster pumps, and sewage ejection pits are just a few of the systems that you may encounter at the building. Your list can serve as a blueprint for you and your staff to assist in the successful operation of the building. Your residents will always appreciate minimal disruptions to their daily routines with scheduled repairs, as opposed to emergency shutdowns that may take time to find replacement parts.
Know Your Components: A reserve study is a great place to start your list and will help you examine all the different parts of the property. A comprehensive reserve study will list all common area mechanical equipment within your community that requires regular inspection. If you don’t have a study, you can still ask your trusted service providers to help you locate all of the equipment in the building. This includes the heating and cooling components, elevator machine room(s), plumbing stacks, roof, and fire/life safety components. Knowing how all of this equipment works together is also a big help and will aid you when a service provider (or the Fire Department) starts talking to you as if from another planet, trying to explain the system to you.
Create Your Checklist: Now that you have your equipment list, you can start adding what type of preventative maintenance is required for each component and/or system. The second step is to develop a schedule of when items need to be checked. Some components may not have any maintenance requirements other than to check it periodically to make sure that it is turned on or set to the correct temperature for the season. Other items may require regular filter changes, frequent monitoring, and even daily temperature logging to ensure the HVAC system is functioning properly. (Let’s face it, nobody wants that midnight phone call saying the heat is out in the middle of a snowstorm.)
Create Your Schedule: Now that you have your equipment list and an itinerary of tasks to be completed, you can organize them into a schedule. This can be daily, quarterly, semi-annually, monthly, or yearly. Give some thought to the scheduling, as chillers and boilers will need to be in operation for your vendor to perform proper maintenance on them. Don’t schedule boiler annuals in the middle of summer, or chiller annuals in the middle of winter. Instead, schedule service as the season is beginning. Use your list as a reminder and calendar to track items to turn on and off with the change of seasons. Remember to turn on those stairwell heaters in the fall and to turn them off in the spring. Also, periodically check them to ensure they are performing as intended. Nothing is worse than displacing three floors of residents after a frozen fire line burst and floods the building, all because a heater quit working and nobody checked on it.
No Two Buildings are the Same: Your list and schedule will be organic and unique to that particular community. Don’t be afraid to use it as a template for another high-rise that you may have the privilege to manage. Over the last twenty years, I have had the privilege of operating many of the historic and modern high-rise communities in downtown Denver. The one thing I have learned is that no two buildings are alike, and will always have some oddities about how they operate throughout the year. Use your maintenance list to help guide you through the multitude of items at your property, and operating the high-rise community will become a much more organized and manageable task. I am always learning something new about both new and older properties, and I am never afraid to ask a trusted vendor questions from their viewpoint and experiences.
Age is a Factor: The older the community, the more important it is to maintain it properly. Most mechanical contractors are happy to provide quarterly inspections and routine maintenance. However, seldom does a piece of equipment magically stops working while they are there. Take the time to review maintenance requests for mechanical items that are being more problematic than normal. This may be a good indicator that it is time for a replacement. Look at everything, such as drain lines and water supply lines; nothing is designed to last forever, and many mechanical companies may tell you a twenty-year life span is about normal. Well, we all know that twenty years is a drop in the bucket for an HOA community.
The more a manager knows about their community and its daily operations, the better prepared they will be when it comes time to explain to the board why a certain piece of equipment needs to be replaced or rebuilt. Deferred or undone maintenance is far from ideal for any community, because that can make it challenging to get and stay caught up. You may end up wasting time on putting out fires instead of working through your organized and systematic building checklist.
Mike LaCount is the Director of Engineering and CXO of Sopra Communities. He is passionate about the core of all buildings, in particular the intricacies of high-rises old and new.