Why is Building Maintenance Important?

Why is Building Maintenance Important?

For companies or leasers that own large buildings, building maintenance can seem daunting, costly, or even superfluous, particularly when building functions appear to be running smoothly. But proper and consistent building maintenance is imperative for a number of reasons. Buildings inherently function less effectively over time due to natural causes such as climate, daily occupant use, mechanical obsolescence, and more. When left unresolved, these issues can devalue user experiences, create dangerous and unhealthy environments, and even incur costs higher and more sudden than consistent building maintenance costs.

The scope of building maintenance ranges from the most minute details to the most essential functions. Some functions, like washing windows, seem inconsequential but can have enormous influence on presentability and worker happiness. They are also imperative to delegate to other companies because of the need for specialized equipment and additional workers. In other words, though minute, they necessitate significant work and attention.

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© Wikimedia Commons user Acabashi licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

The maintenance of other functions may even be imperative to occupants’ health. Gas safety checks, elevator checks, and fire system maintenance, for example, prevent gas and elevator accidents and could potentially save lives in the event of emergencies. Other functions, such as water testing and air conditioning check-ups, both potentially protect health and ensure that environmental standards continue to be fulfilled. Building maintenance is, therefore, both diverse in its required functions and in the reasons for their maintenance.

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Courtesy of Max Pixel under CC0 1.0

To preventively address these issues, building owners have several options. Attending to the issues themselves is often an ineffective if not unrealistic task due to the necessity of specialized knowledge and equipment. More realistically, they could hire specialized technicians to individually respond to the building’s myriad points of maintenance, or they could hire facility managers to oversee the functions of the building as well.

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Diagram of Falcon Lift's Falcon FS 520C. Image Courtesy of Falcon Lift

With specialized equipment and technical help, the possibilities for building maintenance expand dramatically. One company, called Falcon Lifts, specializes in mechanical lifts that provide accessibility to difficult-to-reach spaces, allowing technicians to service areas that would otherwise be inaccessible. With long, flexible arms that can reach up to 170 feet high and bend in countless different ways, few things are inaccessible, ensuring that building maintenance is as comprehensive as possible.

However, maintenance should not always be outsourced, but can be incorporated as an integral part of the building project, delivering a complete long-term solution, as a turn-key option. Then, the chosen lift, suitable for the specific project, should be considered a part of the building so that it can be used quickly and easily, whenever necessary.

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Diagram of Falcon Lift's Falcon FS 520C. Image Courtesy of Falcon Lift

Thus, building maintenance isn’t just imperative for issues of health, safety, cost reduction, and even sustainability, but is also necessarily serviced by the aid of technicians and specialized mechanical equipment that make comprehensive maintenance fully possible. While the cost and effort appear to be high, consistent maintenance adds up to be lower in cost than frantic responses to health and safety emergencies, and is more easily budgeted than unexpected cost hikes when something goes wrong. And the effort of building maintenance is necessarily offset by the delegation of work to companies with the specialized technical knowledge and equipment to exercise maintenance in the first place. These all combine to show that comprehensive building maintenance is a no-brainer.

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Courtesy of Falcon Lift
About this author
Cite: Lilly Cao. "Why is Building Maintenance Important?" 18 Dec 2020. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/928044/why-is-building-maintenance-important> ISSN 0719-8884

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