The Underappreciated Backbone of Commercial Buildings

Pumps play a critical role in commercial building comfort, efficiency, and sustainability—but only as part of a larger water system.

While markets for large industrial and municipal pumps often draw the most attention, there is a thriving market for smaller pumps for commercial buildings—even though the two markets are as different as apples and oranges. Experts Tim Zacharias, president of Cougar USA, and Devin Carle, the president of Hurley Engineering, explore those differences.

In this roundtable, we explore some of those differences with two leaders who are also helping to develop the Hydraulic Institute’s new pump system optimization course for commercial buildings. The invited experts are Tim Zacharias, president of Cougar USA, a Houston-based manufacturer that specializes in water control systems, and Devin Carle, the president of Hurley Engineering, a manufacturer’s representative in Tacoma, Wash. 

Tell us about the commercial building space. What type of buildings do you serve?

Devin Carle. In the Northwest, high-rise buildings are our primary market, followed by campus-style universities, hospitals, and office facilities. Over the past five years, we’ve also seen a lot of multiuse buildings, five- or six-stories high and built near transit centers that combine housing and businesses. We also service data centers. Together, those segments account for about 80 percent of our business. The biggest applications for us are hot water heating, domestic water boosting, and sump and sewage. 

Tim Zacharias. Our market is similar to Devin’s markets. It also includes hospitals, high-rise buildings, hotels, multifamily apartments and condos, and campus-style local schools and universities. We also do a lot of stadiums, not just professional and university but also high schools. The stadium in my high school district, for example, has the same capacity—22,000 people—as the stadium where our professional soccer team plays. 

Because of Houston’s hot weather, the largest market for us is comfort cooling. Houston is one of the largest HVAC markets in the world. We also have some comfort heating, pressure boosting, and hot water distribution, but cooling is really the big one. 

Unlike in industry, pumps are a tiny fraction of the cost of owning and operating a building. How do you get building owners interested in energy-efficiency and pump optimization? 

Carle. They started to pay more attention when the Department of Energy started talking about energy efficiency regulations. It was like someone had thrown a switch. The regional utilities, as part of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, started to provide information and incentives for the purchase of efficient pumps. While pumps themselves are not a major cost in buildings, they can have a big impact on chiller system operations and user comfort. That’s something building owners care about. So, in the past two or three years, there has been a tremendous uptick in interest in energy costs. 

Also, commercial buildings are now facing smaller budgets and reduced staff, and that has changed how they think. In the past, everything always went to the lowest bidder. Now, they want equipment that lasts and reduces downtime. From my view, the owners are definitely more involved, and this makes it much easier to have a conversation about overall lifecycle costs.

Zacharias. I see two driving forces in our market. First, people want to drive down operating costs, and that means focusing on chillers. If we can educate them about how optimized pumps can save 10 percent on chiller energy, that’s a big number. Often, this involves making sure you’re designing and controlling pumps so that they operate most efficiently at partial load—that’s where they’re operating most of the time. By balancing staging and loads, we can reduce pumping costs and potentially improve the efficiency on the chiller.

We also see another factor driving interest. Building owners are looking for sustainability upgrades, either because their tenants or their tenants’ potential hires are asking about it. So, they want to be able to show them the steps they’ve taken to make their buildings more sustainable.

Devin, you mentioned incentives from the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. How important are they?

Carle. Seattle City Light, PG&E, and most large Pacific Northwest utilities are very active through NEEA and on their own. Even medium-sized users have a public utility account manager that works with them on energy savings. Just about every one of our projects requires us to estimate energy savings and discuss rebates.

Zacharias. Incentives are not yet a big part of the conversation in Houston. That is because our power costs are very low. My office pays less than 5 c/kWh. If we replace a pressure boosting system that’s running 24/7 with a new variable speed system and cut energy consumption by 90 percent, that may only amount to a few thousand dollars per year. That is not enough to make a difference. 

Instead, the driver is improved comfort for tenants or guests. Building owners also want to prevent maintenance downtime and service disruptions. After the freeze this past February, and the hurricanes we’ve had, owners want redundancy and the ability to keep their buildings running during and after natural disasters.

How well are building maintenance personnel trained to monitor and service pumps? How do you help them?

Carle. We’ve seen a real surge in their technical ability. They used to focus on the equipment itself. Now, technical maintenance personnel are far savvier about the overall system and its control systems. They are definitely in tune with how the equipment works, operating mode differences, and how they can link it with water and HVAC systems. 

We try to help them learn even more. We work with our vendors, like Cougar and Grundfos, to set up hands-on training sessions for mechanical contractors, maintenance technicians, operators, and engineers. They can rip systems apart, push buttons, and watch how everything works. We want to be a resource. We reach out and bring equipment everywhere—from union and trade halls to universities—to train them on it. 

Zacharias. I couldn’t agree more. So, if you’re looking at facility managers or building engineers, they definitely posses some formal education as well as advanced certifications. Because staffing is so thin, most of them focus on identifying issues, then bringing in a third party—a plumbing service or mechanical contractor, for example—to do the actual maintenance. Most facility engineers today are managing subcontractors who do the work.

We work with service contractors, backing them up or helping to troubleshoot and fix some of these issues. A lot of those issues are controls-based, even when they are related to pumps. We also try to work with facility operators, enhance their education, teach them to identify some systems issues, so that they may be able to do some of the simpler maintenance themselves. 

How does Hydraulic Institute’s new Commercial Building Service-Pump System Optimization course play into this?

Zacharias. As Devin said, people are much more attuned to this type of information now. I think the course will give facility managers and engineers some direction on what to look for in their building, assess their equipment, understand its potential, and recommend some improvements. 

Carle. It brings value to the technicians because they know their buildings better than anyone. Unfortunately, if you look at the mechanical rooms, they’re always in the bottom corner of the building, right? You don’t even have to look. You just go to the deepest place with no cell reception and that’s your mechanical system. And sometimes the voices from those rooms get left out, too. 

I think Hydraulic Institute’s new course will upgrade the skillset of the people who work in those rooms. It will round out their knowledge, so if they only understood domestic water and not chilled water or heating boilers, the course will help them see the entire system. Plus, they will learn to translate what they say about energy efficiency into terms of cost savings and ROI, and that’s the type of conversation that gets management’s attention.

What will the course be like?

Carle. We’re planning a test run in October at the Museum of Light in Seattle. I expect that to go for two days. But it’s hard to get someone out of their facility for two days, so we may have to break it into two sessions or maybe do some of it virtually. But we definitely want to conduct some of it live so that we can bring in some pumps and variable motors to give attendees some hands-on experience on the equipment.    

Zacharias. I can see it split into a virtual component and then an in-person component so, as Devin says, we can bring in some equipment. The course is not going to make anyone a pump systems expert, but it will give them the tools to assess their equipment and create a plan to improve it.

We’ve seen a lot of changes in how buildings are used over the past few years. Where do you think we will be in five or 10 years?

Zacharias. Offices are not going away, though we may use them differently. But we are going to see more technology. For a long time, we’ve had our Nest at home, and we could easily change things with an app or have its AI learn our habits and adjust automatically. We’re going to see that type of technology become more and more common in commercial buildings.

Carle. I agree with Tim. We need to have heat and security and a place to shelter, so buildings are not going anywhere. Thanks to technology, people expect services to be delivered quickly, and commercial buildings and those that service them have to follow that model. We’re going to see more smart buildings, and how we monitor and control the equipment in them will be a real consideration.

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