Jen Buckley, Thermatic Director of People and Client Services
When cooling and ventilation systems run flat-out for weeks at a time, as they have across the UK this summer, most conversations focus on whether the equipment holds up. Fewer focus on what it’s costing to keep it running. The price of poorly maintained equipment doesn’t only show up as a single dramatic failure, it also appears quietly, week after week, through reduced efficiency, increased costs and then ultimately, costly reactive repairs when systems can no longer cope.
Data from technical FM services provider Thermatic shows just how quickly that pressure builds. Reactive maintenance callouts more than doubled during the hottest week in May, compared with a ‘typical week’, as systems struggled under sustained high temperatures.
While some of the issues that arose were unavoidable due to ageing assets not built for changing climates, there is a growing argument for introducing more effective maintenance strategies to help futureproof equipment and ensure it can perform when temperatures rise. However, that means breaking the reactive loop and making a deliberate shift towards planned preventative maintenance or PPM.
Inefficiency is an energy cost before it’s a breakdown
Equipment operating in poor condition must work harder to achieve the same output. A fan working against a partially blocked filter or a refrigerant circuit running below charge won’t necessarily stop a system from running, but all of them make it run less efficiently. As cooling systems operate for longer periods during heatwaves, even small inefficiencies can lead to a significant increase in energy consumption and cost.
This is the part that’s easy to overlook in a reactive maintenance model. Reactive maintenance is designed to respond once something fails outright. It does very little to catch the slow decline in performance that happens before that point, the period during which a unit might still be technically functioning but consuming considerably more energy than a well-maintained one. Over a fleet of assets, across a whole cooling season – that difference adds up.
A stress test for ageing infrastructure
Part of what makes this an energy story, not just a maintenance one, is the scale of the underlying shift in demand. Data projections from the Met Office already show that climate change is leading to warmer and wetter winters, hotter and drier summers, and more frequent and intense weather extremes1. By 2070, that will mean hot summer days are between 4 and 7°C warmer than they were in 1990. On top of that, this year we are facing the impact of a ‘super El Niño’, which could further raise temperatures.
Many buildings, whether commercial or domestic, were designed for a different climate and now operate in conditions they were never intended to withstand. The same is true of the systems inside them, which must work harder for longer to deliver the same result. That sustained demand doesn’t just expose weaknesses that would otherwise have stayed hidden, it also raises the baseline energy usage of a building’s entire cooling and ventilation set up, often without anyone noticing until the bill arrives.
When demand exceeds capacity
There’s also an operational dimension that feeds directly back into energy performance. When reactive demand surges, FM teams are forced into firefighting mode, prioritising business-critical and safety systems above everything else. That’s the right call for managing immediate risk, but it also means planned servicing and calibration work, the kind that keeps equipment running efficiently, gets pushed back to make room for urgent jobs.
Deferring that preventative work doesn’t just increase the risk of further failures. It also means inefficient equipment stays that way for longer, consuming more energy than necessary for weeks or months at a time, while everyone’s attention is focused on preventing the next breakdown rather than on how much the last one, and the ones building up behind it, are actually costing.
For our teams, it also means taking time to review planned work orders within SLAs to understand what flex we can put into the system to allow us to attend urgent jobs.
How PPM plays its part
Planned preventative maintenance, or PPM, isn’t a way to eliminate extreme weather. What it does is change how buildings and the systems within them respond to it and that has a direct bearing on energy performance. Proper asset tagging, regular inspections and robust servicing schedules catch wear and tear, inefficiencies and potential failure points before they become critical, which means equipment spends more of its working life running at, or close to, its intended efficiency.
PPM also provides a clearer picture of asset condition across the board. Rather than waiting for equipment to fail, building owners and operators can use maintenance data to identify trends, assess risk and make more informed decisions about repair, refurbishment or replacement.
For a long time, PPM has been talked about primarily in terms of compliance and asset life. Both matter, but neither captures the full picture. As cooling and ventilation systems are asked to do more, for longer, in a warming climate, the condition of that equipment has a direct and significant effect on energy consumption and therefore on cost and carbon.
Organisations that treat maintenance as an energy performance strategy, not simply an engineering or compliance function, are better placed to manage that cost as the demands on their buildings continue to grow. Those relying solely on reactive intervention will keep discovering the price of inefficiency the same way – after the failure, on the bill, rather than before it, in the plan.
1 https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/climate-change-in-the-uk
