How to Prep for Cooling Season in the Southwest (Yes, It’s Already Time!)
In the American Southwest, summer heat arrives fast and demands immediate performance from your building’s HVAC systems. Temperatures can spike well into the triple digits seemingly overnight. For facility managers and building owners, that spike can quickly expose weaknesses in aging or poorly maintained equipment. If your systems are not prepared to handle the sudden, intense thermal load, you risk facing expensive downtime right when you need cooling the most.
Cooling season readiness means not just turning the system on and hoping for the best. It requires a strategic and proactive approach to maintenance and lifecycle planning. By addressing potential issues before the heat hits, you ensure your system’s reliability, protect your budget from emergency repair costs and maintain a comfortable environment for your building’s occupants. Before peak heat arrives, assess your equipment condition and put a plan in place tailored to your infrastructure that carries you through the entire cooling season.
The High Stakes of the Southwest Summer
Managing a commercial facility in the Southwest is distinct from managing one elsewhere in the country. The cooling season is longer, more intense and unforgiving. Equipment that is already aging or operating inefficiently will be exposed quickly under the strain of a Southwest summer.
When a chiller fails or an air handling unit goes down in July, it is rarely a minor inconvenience. It becomes an operational crisis.
- Occupant Discomfort: In extreme heat, indoor temperatures rise rapidly, leading to immediate complaints, reduced productivity and potential safety hazards.
- Financial Impact: Emergency service calls command premium labor rates. Furthermore, if a major component fails, you may be forced to pay expedited shipping fees for parts or worse, replace equipment hastily without the benefit of competitive bidding.
- Reputational Damage: For tenant occupied buildings, hospitality venues or healthcare facilities, the inability to maintain a comfortable climate reflects poorly on management and can damage long term relationships.
The way to avoid these situations is very straightforward. Move away from a reactive fix it when it breaks approach and put a cooling season readiness plan in place before temperatures climb.
Moving Beyond Reactive Maintenance
Many organizations fall into the trap of deferred maintenance, assuming that if the system is running today, it will run tomorrow. However, unexpected outages are rarely truly unexpected to a trained eye. They are often the result of small, unnoticed issues such as vibrations, minor leaks or electrical inefficiencies compounding over time until the system reaches a breaking point under peak load.
A proactive readiness check does more than just verify operation. It digs deep into the system’s health to uncover these latent issues. By identifying aging equipment or drifting performance metrics early, you gain the luxury of time. You can plan repairs on your schedule during standard business hours rather than scrambling for a technician on a holiday weekend.
Taking this approach also reveals any efficiency gaps that may have gone unnoticed. Dirty coils, slipping belts and uncalibrated sensors force your HVAC equipment to work harder to achieve the same cooling output. In a region where electricity costs for cooling can represent a massive portion of the annual operating budget, ensuring peak efficiency is a direct way to lower operating costs.
Strategic Lifecycle Planning
Cooling preparation should support your broader capital plan. Managing equipment over its full life cycle requires visibility into age, condition and projected replacement timing. A dedicated service partner helps tie short term readiness to long term financial planning.
Creating Predictable Budgets
One of the greatest stressors for facility directors is budget volatility. A surprise $50,000 compressor replacement can wreck an annual maintenance budget. Through lifecycle planning, costs are spread out over time. We can assess the age and condition of every piece of equipment, allowing you to forecast replacements years in advance. This turns volatile emergency spending into predictable planned capital investments.
Reducing Risk Through Reliability
For most facility teams, reliability is the main priority. By identifying equipment that is nearing the end of its useful life, you can make informed decisions about whether to repair, retrofit or replace. This proactive stance significantly reduces the likelihood of catastrophic failure. It moves the conversation from reacting to failures to preventing them altogether.
Identifying Efficiency Upgrades
New HVAC technologies such as variable frequency drives, advanced building automation systems and high efficiency chillers can deliver measurable energy savings compared to
equipment installed even ten years ago. A proactive cooling assessment is the perfect time to evaluate whether an upgrade could pay for itself through reduced utility bills.
Getting Your Systems Ready for Peak Heat
Getting ahead of cooling season starts with fundamentals. In the desert environment, condenser coils and filters can quickly become clogged with dust and debris, restricting airflow and forcing compressors to work harder than necessary. Even a moderately dirty coil can significantly increase energy consumption. A thorough cleaning improves heat transfer and restores efficiency before peak demand arrives.
High ambient temperatures also put stress on electrical and mechanical components. Loose connections, worn belts, low refrigerant levels or aging contactors often go unnoticed until systems are pushed to their limits. A detailed inspection that verifies voltage, amperage and overall mechanical condition reduces the likelihood of mid summer failures.
System controls deserve the same attention. If building automation sensors are out of calibration or schedules no longer reflect actual occupancy, equipment may be overcooling and wasting energy. Reviewing setpoints and confirming sensor accuracy ensures performance aligns with operational needs.
Preparation should also include practical contingency planning. Understanding lead times for critical parts and identifying rental cooling options in advance can make the difference between a controlled response and a costly scramble during extreme heat.
Partner with Harris for Cooling Success
Cooling season does not wait. At Harris, we help building owners and facility teams prepare with a clear, practical plan that improves reliability and manages long term costs.
Our team can help you align maintenance with business goals, reduce comfort complaints and extend equipment life through disciplined service and lifecycle planning.
Do not let the first heatwave dictate your response. Most cooling failures can be prevented with the right preparation. As temperatures are already climbing, now is the time to evaluate your systems and put a plan in place so your facility performs when demand is at its highest.
Categories: Blog