You can find many ways to ensure you get the best office for your company. You can do usual things such as adding attractive furniture pieces, installing and replacing better appliances, etc. As long as you keep your office comfortable, you can expect positive feedback from employees and staff.
Although, there is one way you can do to create a significant impact while staying under the budget-- altering the office lighting. Most offices would prefer doing that because it's simple and doesn't need too much work. If you have plans on fixing up your office lighting, make sure you follow these helpful tips to ensure you achieve the correct lighting. Lighting Tip#1: Use LED Lighting to Save Money Nowadays, offices focus more on becoming an effective workplace, which also means choosing the right office lighting. Even something as simple as providing proper and efficient lighting can help employees with their work. They will need lighting to read documents and reports or help reduce incoming glare from computer screens. If you want to create efficient lighting, it's time to ditch fluorescent lights and replace them with LEDs because it provides better lighting. However, the only downside of LED lighting is how expensive they can get than fluorescent lights. But if you think about it, it would be best to invest in LED lighting because it lasts longer and is energy-efficient. You should also choose the LED lighting if you want to keep your office safe from harmful chemicals like mercury that most fluorescent lights have. At one point, you or one of your employees may get into an accident with the fluorescent lights, and they could potentially come into contact with the mercury chemical. If you want to prevent these types of accidents from happening, you should install LED office lighting. Simultaneously, you should install an exterior access door and panel if you want technicians to access the wires behind the ceilings and walls. Lighting Tip #2: Focus More on Natural Lighting Besides using LED lighting, you should also focus on adding more natural light, especially if your office is on the commercial building's upper level. Using natural lighting helps save more on energy bills and can also make your office feel more welcome. Most contractors would usually prefer to design an office that can add more natural lighting. Employees who get exposed to adequate sunlight more often can potentially increase their work productivity, can rest and sleep better after work, and have a superior overall quality of life. Since natural lighting can help improve your employee's work ethics and life, it would be best to let in more natural light. Lighting Tip #3: Make Use of a Lighting Control System A time will come where everyone in your office might forget to turn off the lights after work. Leaving the office lights on for hours can put a large dent in your office's energy bills, which you wouldn't want to happen. Even if you have guards or cleaning personnel to turn off the lights, you shouldn't rely on them because it's everyone in your office's responsibility. If everyone forgets to turn the office lights off frequently, you have the option to install a lighting control system that you can set up to adjust the lights at a specific time automatically. It's also the best method to control the lighting in several parts of the office. You can use the lighting control system to turn off the lights in naturally-lit areas while providing adequate lighting in dark office areas. Are you still having difficulty in improving the office lighting in some areas? No need to look far because Best Access Doors can help you with that by giving you lighting tips for every room in your office.
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Most buildings need air conditioners to ensure the interior stays cold during summer. Commercial buildings even use the air conditioner for days without rest. The only time they would turn it off is when HVAC technicians do their regular maintenance or after working hours. But when it keeps running for a long time, you should expect it to gain many problems. You should expect your air conditioner to encounter problems at some point, so you need to prepare yourself for them. If you still don’t know what air conditioner problems to expect in the future, no need to fret because Best Access Doors can provide the necessary answers. Understanding these problems can also give you several benefits. Issue #1: Low Refrigerant Levels Have you ever wondered how the air conditioner can provide cool air all the time? You have the refrigerant to thank for doing that. At some point, your air conditioning system’s refrigerant lines get damaged and will leak, causing the refrigerant to pour out. If you don’t have the problem fixed by hiring an HVAC technician right away, you might find yourself paying more rather than repairing it before it got worse. When your HVAC technician fixes the leaking refrigerant, they might do more repairs on the other parts of the air conditioner. Usually, the leaking refrigerant may not happen on the refrigerant lines but in other system areas. You need to expect that fixing this issue will take a long time, depending on how much refrigerant got out of the air conditioner. Issue #2: Iced Evaporator Coils The refrigerant will travel through your air conditioner’s evaporator coils, an integral part of the cooling process. It is also responsible for sucking up the heat found in the air. The evaporator coils need warm air surrounding them to function correctly. It is why you would usually feel the back of classic refrigerators becoming hot since it’s where you can find the evaporator coils. If the evaporator coils become too cold, it will eventually cause the cooling process to slow down or stop altogether, which you would not want happening with an air conditioner. In most cases, ice will envelop the evaporator coils that could slowly destroy them. Ensure you give your air conditioners a break from time to time if you want to avoid the icing problem from happening. Issue #3: Filthy Condenser Coils Another part that works by removing warm air and expelling it outside of your building is your air conditioner’s condenser coils. After a while of using the air conditioner continuously, the condenser coils will start to get dirty since it’s also sucking dirty particles along with the warm air. You won’t notice the filth in your air conditioner’s condenser coils if you don’t hire an HVAC technician to check it and do the proper cleaning and maintenance. You might encounter this problem most of the time if you situate your commercial building in busy and polluted areas. Ensure you get the condenser coils cleaned if you want your air conditioner to provide the necessary cooling your building and people need. Issue #4: Water Present in Ducts You wouldn’t want to experience one problem around your commercial building, like the air conditioner ducts starting to leak. Your HVAC technicians might have more issues because they can’t easily access it. You need to make sure your contractor installs a duct access door and panel in several parts of the duct system to ensure technicians can easily find the problem without destroying any surface. Over time, your ducts will turn into a home for potential rodents that would chew away the ductwork. Since the ducts transport cool air around the building, the cool air will cause water to form around the ducts. And with the rodents causing small holes in the ductwork, you can find yourself placing buckets to catch the dripping water from the ceiling. Are you still not convinced of how essential your air conditioner is? Make sure you read Best Access Doors’ blog about the Importance of HVAC Systems. You can find many good points about why you need to take care of your HVAC systems within your building. Before a commercial building operates, it must meet the Leadership in Energy and Efficient Design (LEED) certification standards. They consider some of the things before issuing this certificate: construction, sustainability, water and energy efficiency, materials, and closeness to public transportation. This process has the primary goal of ensuring the building’s social, economic, and environmental impact.
However, many building owners and contractors have a hard time achieving their LEED certification, especially if they are new in the industry. Here are some strategies to achieve your goals keep your establishment operating: 1. Set LEED-certification targets and note them down. In LEED certification, four levels may correlate with the GRI reporting goals. These are the Certified (40-49 points), Silver (50 to 59 points), Gold (60 to 79 points), and Platinum (80+ points). By setting your target, you can easily lay down your plans for your building’s materials, components, and design. If your company wants to boost energy efficiency to earn more points, you can maximize your passive solar gains by using adequate HVAC controls for various building parts. You can also install daylight-responsive controls to make your power usage more efficient. This way, you can optimize your LEED pints as it will boost your environmental, social, and financial performance. While at it, you can also install LEED access doors and panels for your control systems. 2. Promote lifecycle value engineering When determining your construction project design’s expenses, it is essential to consider its life cycle and performance impact. Instead of doing an initial-cost value engineering, it would be better to do a lifecycle value engineering that will give an in-depth analysis of the future expenses when using a material. For example, a product may have a higher upfront cost, but in the end, it will give more benefits and may reduce the operating costs within a few months. It is an essential factor that will affect your LEED certification. 3. Set a higher goal to initiate creativity. By setting a higher goal for the LEED certification level in the planning phase, you can stimulate creativity and fresh ideas from your team. With a productive brainstorming session, you can find more ways to make your construction project more efficient and user-friendly. If some of the ideas don’t pass the management’s cost/benefit analysis, you will have more alternatives to back you up. 4. Ensure a common goal with your project team. Teamwork is essential when it comes to construction projects considering that this requires a group effort. If your members are not collaborating toward a common goal, achieving a satisfying result will be difficult. From the start, make sure that everyone knows about your LEED and GRI goals and share them with your team, architects, developers, engineers, subcontractors, designers, and project managers. Always be open with suggestions and feedback from everyone. 5. Prepare an adequate budget If you aim for a higher LEED certification level, you should prepare yourself to allocate a sufficient budget for your construction project. Although using some green features can promote sustainability and lower operating expenses in the long run, its initial installation and cost can still be pretty high. Ensure a realistic budget that can cover the overall project and some unexpected expenses. It will help in assuring the best qualities and outcomes without undesirable cutting corners. 6. Hire LEED-accredited professionals If you want to make sure that your LEED certification will go smoothly, it is ideal to hire some LEED-accredited professionals. Ask them for some advice while you are planning and carrying them out on your construction projects. Ensure that you will only get those with a high level of knowledge and familiarity with the process. It will also be beneficial to know about the green building principles and ways to make commercial buildings sustainable. Conclusion LEED certification is an essential requirement that you must comply with before you operate a commercial building. It will require you to put in some effort when planning the materials and engineering procedure you will use. You should also install some sustainable materials to get more points, such as using LEED access doors and panels when providing access to vital building components. Get them from a reliable company like Best Access Doors and call us to get recommendations and quotations from our product specialists. |
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June 2022
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