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In a commercial building, ask what is leaving before you ask what is arriving
Hoods, extract fans, roller doors and a front door that is open all day move an enormous amount of air out of a building. Something replaces it, and if nobody designed what, the building decides for itself.
Small commercial, across Vallejo and southern Solano
Offices and suites
Downtown and waterfront offices, professional suites and small clinics. Packaged rooftop units and splits, zoning that somebody reconfigured years ago, and a written record per unit so the next person is not guessing.
Workshops and light industrial
Units off the highway with tall roller doors, high bays and a process that makes heat. Destratification, spot heating and extraction, sized for how the space is actually worked rather than for its floor area.
Warehouses and storage
Where the requirement is usually temperature stability and dry air rather than comfort, and where the doors dominate everything. We measure the door schedule before we size anything.
Restaurants and kitchens
Hood exhaust and dining-room comfort are one problem, not two. We measure the make-up air. A dining room that cannot hold temperature at service very often has a building being pulled into a vacuum by its own hood.
Retail and trade counters
Door-open trading, a counter by the entrance where somebody stands all day, and one unit expected to cope with both. Air curtains and vestibules get discussed honestly, including when they are not worth it.
Landlords and managers
Attend, diagnose, photograph, price, report. Annual condition surveys per unit with ages read off the serial numbers, so a budget is built on facts rather than on the last invoice.
The measurement almost nobody takes
What it is
The difference in pressure between inside the building and outside it. Every extract fan and every hood pushes it negative. Air then arrives through whatever gaps exist — the front door, the roller door, a service duct, a lift shaft — unconditioned, at whatever temperature it is outside, and usually straight across somebody who works there.
What it looks like from inside
A front door that is heavy to open or whistles. A dining room that is cold at the door end and only during service. A cold draught across a counter. Heating that runs continuously and never wins. Cooking smells moving into the seating area. Each of those is a pressure symptom being treated as a temperature one.
What we measure
Extract volumes at each hood and fan, make-up air supplied, and the pressure difference across the envelope, under the conditions the building actually runs in — at service, with the door open, with the fans on.
What usually fixes it
Supplying make-up air deliberately, in the right place and at the right temperature, rather than letting the building find it. That is frequently cheaper than the additional heating or cooling that gets proposed instead, and it is the thing that makes the additional capacity unnecessary.
A schedule with a named month
Filters at an interval that suits the air in your building rather than a default. Coils cleaned, drains proved, belts and contactors inspected, charge and combustion measured, extract volumes re-checked where there is a hood, and the readings entered against last year’s.
You get a single document per site listing every unit, where it is, what it serves, its age from its serial number and its last readings. If you change contractor, that document goes with you.
