Audit of old buildings, need of an hour

Audit is a systematic and scientific way of independent examination in any existing building to determine whether activities and related results conform to planned arrangements and whether these arrangements are implemented effectively and are suitable to achieve the organization’s policy and objectives.

An external Audit activity are fundamental need of an any newly completed projects or old projects which are under operation. The activities contain but not limited to:

Safety of the building
System healthiness
Compliance to rules & regulation
Designer’s intent & its implementation
Protection system for predicted & un-predicted faults

It is wrong to say that the work is executed by a reputed contractor and maintained by the experienced professionals does not need any Audit! We stress upon this statement because we have seen the need of audit quite a number of times in a reputed projects with reputed clients, forget about non reputed projects!

Here, we’ve illustrating one such peculiar case in our building industry. A project for an MNC client in Kolkata, executed by the highly rated contractor in the country was having a unique complaint of nuisance tripping of breakers, burn out of components in the electrical panels. This is an IT building executed few years earlier and handed over to MNC client for their operation. People started Woking in the premises for the past few years. The major complaint they had on earth resistance values apart from nuisance tripping.

We’ve been invited for the site visit and to suggest a way forward. We travelled from Bangalore and stayed locally for two days for monitoring and quick findings. During premises walk, we could find lots of errors in installation of electrical system. We had made the technicians to open few electrical panels, and distribution boards to find a strange strains on the busbars. We could check few parameters while in operation as well. We told the end client that the project needs a thorough study and conduct few audit activities for the solution findings.

few weeks later, we got an assignment to do an audit with a condition of no unplanned interruption of power as the office was in function.

We had prepared a details program of audit, shutdown schedule, testing procedures, tool kit & instrument list etc.,

Before hitting ground, we ‘ve collected below details:

Deviation list from the standard operation practice
Building energy consumption
Field data collection copies to be attested
Analyze two years electricity bills
Supply & distribution system
Inventory list of last two years
OEM report of last two years

Based on the information collected, we had a plan to perform the below activities in a systematic way:

Check Complies to codes
Incoming voltage condition, PF, load management, distribution loss
Harmonics study up to 30th as per IEEE519
Energy usage pattern
24-hour study on week days & week end
Thermography analysis
Efficiency study of various equipment
Changeover, loading methodology, poor cooling study etc.,
Inventories – type of fixture, lamp output etc.,
Illumination test
Consumption towards WS lighting, CA lighting & external lighting

Study-report

We could conduct thermography test for various panels, apart form keeping power analyser in the system for 7 days to monitor the status of all the electrical panels and found that none of the panels are in satisfactory condition in terms of temperature limits, protection settings etc.,

A strange thing we could find is an accumulation of a black strains on any/all the copper conductors including cables, indoor busbars and outdoor earth strips.

While presenting our reports, we had showcased the chemical reaction happening in the project premises on copper material. We had recommended to treat all copper materials with CRC2-22 and CRC2-26 and hardware to be processed with ACPIPARM-CRC.

There was supposed to be some investment on various solution given by us. Same was taken over by the existing contractor to complete the activities.

What inspires you and why?

Diversified behaviour of electrical equipment, its adverse effect on system operation is an opportunity to study and involve in the research aspect of it as we do not get this kind of an experience so frequently

What is your guilty pleasure?

The building was in operational, and client does not intend to go deeper into the problem findings hence we had to stop at the reporting

My take away?

Unpredictive-ness in electrical system operation is always a challenge to look upon, irrespective of how good the installer is.