How HVAC Copilot Uncovered Widespread Equipment Failures Across a 120K Sq Ft Commercial Office Portfolio
Office · 120K sq ft commercial office · Northeast U.S.
A 120K sq ft commercial office in the Northeast operated over 2,000 individually controlled R-22 water-source heat pumps ranging from 1 to 10 tons. With no building management system in place, the facilities team had no visibility into equipment health — only the complaints and failures that surfaced organically.
The result: approximately 40 tenant comfort complaints per month, 20+ equipment failures or replacements per month, and steadily rising energy costs with no clear path to resolution.
Thalo's HVAC Copilot was deployed across a monitored subset of the portfolio. Within the initial deployment window, the system surfaced a level of equipment dysfunction that had been invisible to the facilities team entirely.
100% of monitored equipment was running incompatible operating modes — units simultaneously heating and cooling, or operating counter to actual building demand. 65% had active refrigerant leaks. 30% were short-cycling. A preventative maintenance alert caught an impending failure worth over $1,000 in parts and replacement costs before it occurred.
As Thalo works with the onsite team to roll out building-wide, the initial findings project significant operational and energy savings: $145,000 in energy savings, $169,380 in parts and materials savings, and $119,200 in equivalent labor savings.
With over 2,000 units to address and a clear diagnosis of what's wrong across the portfolio, the property now has a data-backed roadmap for systematic remediation — and the visibility to prevent the next generation of failures before they generate complaints.
of monitored equipment ran incompatible operating modes (cooling on cold day, heating on hot days, simultaneously heating and cooling)
of equipment had a refrigerant leak
of equipment was short-cycling
in failures and replacement parts prevented by a preventative maintenance alert