7 Reasons You Need a Feasibility Report

Your property is a valuable asset, and those engineering services within should also be considered as valuable. The slightest fault within any of these services could not only cause the relevant systems and associated services to drastically lose its efficiency, but also lead to its untimely failure. In several buildings, loss of services could lead to financial losses.

Besides undertaking regular maintenance to uphold the condition and lifecycle of the engineering services, we recommend a detailed capital expenditure process which our experts at Karsons provide. Karsons have developed our own unique software to generate these reports so that we can accurately advise on these items that require urgent attention or replacement.

But what happens when your essential engineering equipment is on its last legs? What do you do when the threat of tenants not paying their service charges due to system malfunction and this cannot simply be appeased by yet another band-aid over a wound? Answer: Karsons provide our feasibility study and give you the options fully considered. We perform a thorough inspection of your property, take into account every legislation and regulation, and deliver a report considering all options; financials, energy efficiency, logistics...

Here are Karsons’ seven reasons why our feasibility report will benefit you:

1 – We Help You to Understand the Options Available

Your building could have problems big and small, everything from faulty radiator valves to failed air conditioned systems. There are numerous options available to you when it comes to dealing with these issues, and it’s hard to know what the most technically sound and feasible is. That’s where we come in, we help establish all options available to you and recommend to you the technical solutions required. Our experience in the industry and eye for meticulous detail means we know exactly what’s best for your building, what design solutions are required to meet current regulations and what works best with current applications and budget. We supply this information to you in a detailed and thorough report.

2 – Don’t throw money away on the wrong solutions

A flooded basement, a building-wide clean-up operation, a project that will cost an arm and a leg to execute, it’s hard to know where to allocate costs while ensuring you have the best work available, whilst maintaining business continuity. In many cases, capital expenditure and plant replacement options come down to cost. Consider a failed air conditioning system; one might say replace the existing chiller (wet system) with a Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) type system. Sure we can consider this, but we look at the whole picture too. The wet system carries a lifecycle of 20-25 years compared to 15-20 years for the VRF system, therefore with full financial consideration, one stands out more than the other.

3 – Help Obtain the Latest, Most Current and Most Up to Date Technologies

The technologies within your building might be out of date yet fully functional. When these fail, you have an option of replacing with a similar technology or going with something more energy efficient. The technologies very often come with a hefty price tag. There are however government grants and other means to obtain finance and we advise of these within our technical reports. Most importantly is that a feasibility report can advise on the correct solution that meets the current regulations, future proof design, within budget and meets the current occupancy requirements.

4 – Selecting Future Proof Designs

As regulations continue to change, it’s important to consider future-proof technologies. For example, since 1st January 2015, it has been illegal to use R22 refrigerant to maintain or repair air conditioning systems. Now most air conditioning systems utilise F-Gasses which are also under regulations for stringent testing but the lifecycle of these are finite. We consider these and all options before presenting you with replacement options within our feasibility reports. We present you with all the facts to make an informed decision on a system type. This is essential to ensure that the system recommended is the right one and is future proofed.

5 – Knowing What to Do and When?

Do you know whether your engineering services are close to the end of their lifecycle? Do you know what facilities you need to consider for replacement and which are of high priority and pose high risk if left? Which are still maintainable and which need to be replaced? These are questions that get answered with a proper, thorough site survey. It looks at the engineering services in your building and ensures that everything is inspected, from newly installed items of plant, down to poor and items in immediate need of replacement. The thorough budget reports provide a detailed overview of every item of plant within the building with prioritised and costed recommendations for year-one expenditure. We then arrange a meeting to discuss this option and discuss the feasibility of the items most in need of replacement.

6 – Ensure That the Property is Energy Efficient

When the system was originally specified, criteria for this technology would undoubtedly have changed. Karsons use tools such as dynamic thermal modelling to simulate the building in its space to accurately ascertain heating and cooling loads for the most accurate solution, from lighting replacements utilising natural day-lighting to heating and cooling solutions. This ensures not only a system compliant with current regulations and meets current occupancy demands, but is energy efficient. Since April 2018, landlords of non-domestic property in England and Wales have had to ensure that their properties reach at least an EPC rating of E before granting a new tenancy or before the purchase process. With our processes of plant replacement, we also consider the improvement to your EPC rating and how this might be improved with our recommendations. Not just that, we also strive for the most energy efficient buildings which translate into efficiently run buildings with energy metering strategies to monitor this services that might lead to energy and cost savings.

7 – Planning and Project Management

From our initial site survey to the time a specific project is completed, we offer detailed project management services whereby we specify recognised issues with your building services and tender this service to industry leading contractors. Once appointed, we work with the client and contractor to deliver this project until we test, validate and ensure this meets the initial requirements before ultimately signing-off. Finally our team also provides an auditing service to ensure this system continues to run as intended. Knowing the details of a project process such as this, could also help in the management of other essential works in this site, therefore expertise such as ours in this entire process is extremely valuable.

Are you concerned about your buildings assets and need a replacement or refurbishment strategy? Do you know the best options for this? Our thorough knowledge of building services design, coupled with our use of the most up-to-date technology and operation of existing buildings to the most energy efficient standards means you’ll get the most detailed and accurate report possible.

If you wish to learn more contact us here so we can discuss future opportunities, and see what we can offer you.