Commissioning & loop balancing.

Who calls us for this

Three populations of homeowner make up the audit caseload. First, owners of newly-built houses who can feel that something is wrong — one room cold, the boiler short-cycling, the floor running hot at the kitchen and lukewarm at the office over the garage — and want a second set of eyes before the installing contractor's response feels adversarial. Second, owners of houses they have just purchased, with a radiant system they did not specify, wanting an inventory of what they have and a list of what needs maintenance. Third, buyer's agents and home inspectors who refer us as a specialty inspection during the diligence window.

We do not take over the installing contractor's role unless the homeowner asks us to and the original contractor has been formally released — and even then we are reluctant. The point of an audit is to make the system perform as designed, on the contractor who designed it, with a documented hand-off so the homeowner's relationships and warranties stay intact.

What we do on site

A typical audit is a single day with a two-technician crew on site. We arrive with a rolling commissioning kit: a Testo 320 combustion analyzer, a Fluke 87V for electricals, two clamp-on thermistors with logging, a Fluke 750 ultrasonic flow meter for the trunks, a refractometer for glycol percentage, a manometer for boiler gas pressure, and a notebook.

We measure: supply and return temperature at every manifold and at every loop port; circulator differential pressure across each pump; boiler combustion (CO, CO₂, O₂, stack temp) at minimum and maximum firing rates; the outdoor-reset curve currently set vs the curve the envelope wants; gas-line static pressure under load; expansion-tank pre-charge; system pressure at cold and operating; air-elimination status at the high points; glycol concentration if the system has snowmelt. Everything is written down, photographed where appropriate, and stamped with the time and the outdoor temperature on the audit day.

The deliverable

Two weeks after the site visit, we deliver a three-ring binder identical in format to the one we leave on our own installs: cover sheet, executive summary on one page, audit data with stamps, a list of findings ranked by priority (safety → comfort → efficiency), recommended adjustments with the technician's identity who proposed each one, and the as-found vs as-left state for any adjustments we made during the visit. We also deliver a one-page PDF executive summary the homeowner can hand to the installing contractor as a basis for a follow-up conversation.

The findings list is candid. If the boiler is oversized by 80%, the report says so. If the outdoor-reset curve is at factory default and was never commissioned, the report says so. If the manifolds were never balanced, the report says so. We do not soften findings to spare the installing contractor's feelings, and we do not inflate findings to sell more work. The audit fee is a flat fee; we do not earn more by writing a more alarming report.

What we charge

Audit fees run $2,800 to $5,400 per system, depending on the number of manifolds and the travel distance. The fee includes the on-site day, the kit time, the report, the one-year follow-up phone call, and the file we keep so that if the homeowner calls us back in five years we still have the as-found baseline. We do not charge travel separately within Gallatin County; for Park County (Livingston, Cooke City, Gardiner), Madison County (Ennis, Cameron, Virginia City), and Big Sky we add a modest per-diem.

What follows from an audit

The most common follow-ups are small. About half of audits result in the installing contractor making the changes themselves at no charge under their workmanship warranty; about a quarter result in us being brought back to perform a specific adjustment (most often a fresh outdoor-reset commissioning) on a follow-up day. Less than 10% of audits result in us being asked to rip out and replace work — and we are reluctant participants in those conversations, since rebuilding from an audit position is more expensive than installing from a clean slate.

Read across

Read the about page for the binder approach we apply to every install. Read the radiant floor scope for the design assumptions an audit measures against. Read the shoulder-season tuning entry in the daybook for a worked balancing visit on a system we did not install.