Cooling Contingency Planning

Many companies have emergency preparedness plans to maintain business continuity in the event of an emergency, but companies often overlook the need to make special emergency plans for their HVAC systems.

When thinking about your emergency preparedness plans, imagine if the cooling system in your facility failed or needed to be shut down for an extended period of time - what effect would its downtime have on your operations? For many operations, an hour’s lapse in business continuity can mean losing hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

Complete and return this form to learn more about how a Cooling Contingency Plan can help protect your business.

Who Needs HVAC Emergency Preparedness?

Companies operating in all industries and businesses need a cooling contingency plan as part of their overall emergency preparedness plan.

• Healthcare Industry
  In order to provide high-quality healthcare and a safe and effective environment for patients, visitors, and staff members, many medical facilities develop emergency preparedness plans for their healthcare building
  HVAC systems.
• Industrial Industry
  To maintain business continuity and prevent downtime and/or lost production, many industrial organizations develop a contingency plan for each of their critical industrial HVAC systems.
• Education Sector
  Universities and schools also include heating and cooling contingency planning in their emergency preparedness plans for their education HVAC systems to ensure that students and faculty remain focused on learning rather than on temperature during an emergency outage.

How HVAC Emergency Preparedness Works?

Trane will work with you to create your Cooling Contingency Plan. The goal of one of these business continuity plans is to minimize downtime and reduce the risk of financial loss to your facility due to the loss of your HVAC system.

Document Data about your HVAC System
Together, you and an experienced Trane emergency preparedness representative will document basic facts about your facility ranging from facility information, such as critical HVAC system information, to details about the components of your current system.
Analyze Possible Failure Scenarios
Your Trane emergency preparedness representative, along with your staff, will analyze possible failure scenarios to identify potential needs for temporary chillers . This process establishes the required cooling and specific HVAC emergency preparedness needed to maintain your critical areas.
Trane Provides Recommendations
While the cooling contingency plan is being refined for adding onto your current emergency preparedness plan, your Trane business continuity representative may also make recommendations on facility modifications to prepare your system for temporary cooling. These modifications would allow faster installation in the event of an emergency. They may also help you manage the emergency preparedness expense in a proactive manner.
Cooling Contingency Plan is Drafted
With the collaborative effort between your personnel and Trane, a comprehensive cooling contingency plan is drafted to be added to your existing emergency preparedness plans. Once the plan is approved by your organization, you will receive information detailing your specific business continuity plan.

Following these steps will ensure that if your building requires temporary cooling in the future.

Benefits Of HVAC Emergency Preparedness

Having a cooling contingency plan added onto your building’s emergency preparedness plan can help:

• Condense the time needed to acquire, install, and startup a temporary cooling system. In addition, having the paperwork completed in advance further reduces acquisition time.
• Ensure that all emergency preparedness staff who will be dealing with the outage are aware of their roles and are trained in what steps need to be taken to deal with the problem.
• Lessen the total cost of temporary cooling because the building modifications required for business continuity can be done on a planned schedule instead of during the emergency.
• Reduce startup delays caused by oversights or problems resulting from improvised designs.
• Decrease stress on the associates involved in emergency
  preparedness planning.
• Improve business continuity operations because the HVAC system’s weaknesses have been identified and reduced.

If your company or building does not already have a cooling contingency plan wrapped into its emergency preparedness plan, contact your local Trane commercial sales office or call 1-800-755-5115 to discuss your cooling contingency plan needs today!