Commercial Energy Code Services
Blink Energy Services helps navigate the increasingly complex requirements for commercial energy code and mandatory requirements such as green certifications.
Blink Energy leads the industry in responsiveness, knowledge, and professionalism. Blink Energy Services happily helps contractors, owners, investors, architects, engineers, and builders navigate the increasingly complex requirements of commercial energy code and associated municipality requirements such as mandatory green certifications. Our experience spans all occupancy types and project sizes from local coffee shops to hospitals to historic and landmark buildings and everything in between. We deliver pertinent information for your project on time and in a digestible format. Building design and construction are complicated and our goal is to give our clients one less thing to worry about by providing solutions to undiscovered issues before they cause costly problems or construction delays.
Design Consultation
Real-time Design Feedback
To ensure that a project stays on track and in the green for the entire process, Blink Energy Consulting Services provides real-time feedback during design meetings and reviews drawings sets as they are released. From large-scale issues such as ventilation, fenestration, and exterior sheathing, down to air sealing details that set the project up for long-term success and efficiency.
Reduction of Change Orders
Enlisting the assistance of an energy code professional during the design phase of a project helps produce a set of robust construction documents that stand on their own on the job site. We are able to provide insight and recommendations for air sealing details, specifications, notes, and communication advice for sub-contractors so the bids you receive cover everything that must be done with fewer surprises from the field.
Know Your Options
The finish out of a commercial space requires the careful consideration and balance of several building codes. The construction of a ground-up project can encompass dozens of codes, professionals, and teams. Energy code plays a part in many professional design decisions. Whether the team is aware or not of the final implications during those decisions could cost upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
More Design Versatility
A member of the team familiar with energy code difficulties, nuances, loopholes, and the ability to offer creative solutions helps open new pathways and prevents accidentally designing the project into a corner.
Energy Modeling
Energy modeling deconstructs a building or project into each energy-consuming (or saving) component. When compared to a traditional COMcheck, this tedious process allows for vastly greater flexibility in the design of each component as long as the building as a whole meets or exceeds the energy code requirements.
Blink Energy Services offers Energy Building Information Modeling (BIM) for all applications. Blink can provide energy modeling for any phase or scope of a project. We specialize in modeling for code compliance, green certifications, and tax incentives, but very capable of providing models for most all edge-case scenarios. With Blink Energy Services, you receive iterative feedback on-time delivery and comprehensive analysis of the energy usage of your project.
Code Compliance
We offer comprehensive modeling for IECC compliance with constructive feedback allowing designers to make adjustments to building specifications or design decisions to minimize the energy usage of a project. When making building design decisions, the implications of those decisions are not always apparent until the project applies for a building permit and a COMcheck or REScheck is created. Blink Energy Services offers an alternative to the basic compliance pathways with the use of advanced energy models. Buildings or projects that show non-compliance using these basic performances may easily comply with a more comprehensive energy model that takes into account additional building components site variables by using a complex strategy of trade-offs and detailed weather analysis. When a building struggles to meet the minimum code requirements, Blink Energy Services offers cost-effective solutions to bring the building into compliance without modifying the architectural vision or introducing insurmountable costs to the project.
Green Certifications
We offer iterative modeling for above-code green certifications such as National Green Building Standard (NGBS), Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Austin Energy Green Building (AEGB), and more. We work with the design team during the design process to provide feedback allowing clients to make decisions yielding the greatest energy efficiency per dollar spent. As Above Code Programs increase in difficulty to keep pace and stay ahead of base building code requirements, builders and developers are forced to allocate larger amounts of capital to meet the requirements. Blink Energy Services understands the need to maximize the return on investment when making design decisions and we are fully equipped to aid in navigating these complex programs and building systems to help build efficient buildings that meet these requirements.
Tax Incentive and Tax Credit Programs
Blink Energy Services can assist you with conforming to a number of federal tax incentives based on building energy design and performance. The federal government offers a number of little-known tax incentives that reward developers and owners who construct energy-efficient buildings. Often the benefits received far outweigh the costs incurred to meet the requirements. Blink can provide a preliminary evaluation of your project to estimate which changes, if any, would be needed to meet those requirements. Once the basic expectations are established, we can construct a model that verifies those assumptions and yields further guidance for minimum modifications needed to meet the requirements of the program.
To learn more about these programs please follow the links below to the official IRS website:
ComCheck
A COMcheck is the basic proof of energy compliance document required by municipalities to show that the proposed project is in compliance with energy code. COMchecks take an aggregate of a minimal number of building components and compares those values to the code minimum. Often times deficiencies found from the COMcheck can be addressed by increasing insulation values or upgrading to code-minimum windows.
For commercial applications, there are three distinct COMchecks that may be required depending on the scope of the project which are envelope, mechanical, and electrical. Blink Energy Services offers this service with a quick turnaround time and constructive feedback for projects struggling to meet the basic energy requirements.