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Commercial HVAC Maintenance Checklist: Provide Consistent and Scalable Service (Free Template)
HVAC
No matter how experienced an HVAC technician is, leveraging a maintenance checklist can give HVAC contractors additional peace of mind that their techs consistently deliver quality maintenance services.
Without a checklist, there’s no way of ensuring that techs complete each of the necessary steps for every job, and that can lead to costly mistakes, damaged reputation, lost customers, and lost revenue.
Furthermore, failing to check every unit and part is also a missed sales opportunity for installing new equipment or fixing current systems. Checklists remind your techs to look out for damaged or worn equipment and parts, and to flag these issues to the customer.
In this post, we share a commercial HVAC maintenance checklist, designed based on HVAC industry best practices, to help ensure all of your technicians use the same process when maintaining commercial HVAC equipment.
It guides technicians through the following steps:
Below, we cover:
How to Download and Use Our Commercial HVAC Maintenance Checklist
3 Workflow Challenges to Commercial HVAC Maintenance That PDF Checklists Can’t Solve
Do you want to see for yourself how ServiceTitan’s HVAC software can give you the tools you need to streamline operations and maximize your profits? Schedule a call for a free product tour.
How to Download and Use Our Commercial HVAC Maintenance Checklist
To use the commercial HVAC preventative maintenance checklist, click here to download a copy.
Save the PDF to your desktop as a new file. From there, you can customize the first page with your company name, address, and logo and begin using the checklist.
The main part of our maintenance checklist is divided into the following sections (as shown in the images below):
Equipment Description and Safety
Describe the Equipment Details
This section of the PDF checklist covers information about the equipment undergoing maintenance, including the date of the job, the voltage of the unit, phase of the unit, its location, the type of refrigerant used, and the serial number/model number.
Take Pre-Maintenance Safety Precautions
In terms of safety, the checklist includes notes for your tech to check that the disconnection switch is off and the area around the units is cleared of debris and potential hazards or contaminants.
Air Conditioner Section
The A/C section focuses on the regular maintenance tasks for air conditioning units.
The checklist prompts HVAC professionals to check the following:
Check the Blower Area
This includes checking the belt tension, the motor, bearings, wiring, and blower wheel. Additionally, it prompts the tech to note down belt size.
Check the Filter Area
Techs are asked to make sure they have changed the air filters, cleaned the economizer screen, and checked the evaporator coil.
Check the Cooling Area
Techs are required to check if the drain trap is flushed out with no clogs, check thermostat controls, and inspect electrical connections for the cooling system.
Check the Condenser/Compressor Area
The checklist asks your techs to look at the condenser fan motor, the blades, the condenser coil, the filter dryer, and the crankcase. It also warns the technician that the crankcase may be hot, reminding them to be careful.
Heating Section
If your HVAC tech is on a job that includes a heating system, our maintenance checklist also includes the following items that need to be inspected.
Check the Exchange Area
Air filters
Heat exchangers
Fan, blower motor, burner assembly
Check the Ignition Area
Gas pipe and valve
Draft inducer motor
Burner logs
Ignition board
Thermostat controls
Electrical connections
Additionally, there is a final section to add specific notes about the maintenance visit and any issues that arose during the HVAC service, or any details that were discussed with the customer, for example.
Checking off all the items on our HVAC maintenance checklist will ensure your techs carry out a thorough inspection of your commercial customers’ systems and equipment. This should ensure the equipment is given a proper tune-up, that its energy efficiency is maintained and all work is carried out to keep it running smoothly.
With that said, while you can do this with a PDF checklist like the one we’ve created for you (printing copies out, ensuring techs have copies in their trucks, and having techs fill them out with pen and paper), PDF checklists have some significant limitations to consider, which we’ll discuss next.
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3 Workflow Challenges to Commercial HVAC Maintenance That PDF Checklists Can’t Solve
If you provide commercial maintenance services and want to maximize your profits, it’s essential that your processes are repeatable and scalable, while also being customizable. In this respect, although PDF checklists are easy to print out and use, they’re unable to solve certain key workflow challenges in ensuring your maintenance checklists are always used—and subsequently that techs follow consistent processes in the field.
Specifically:
Technicians need to be sure they always have paper copies of the checklist in their truck.
There’s difficulty organizing and accessing paper checklists across the organization.
Commercial maintenance often requires customization which is difficult with a pre-printed maintenance checklist.
Let’s look at each.
1. The Need to Always Have Paper Copies of the Checklist in the Truck
Techs have a lot to remember when they go out on a job. They need to have all the right HVAC tools for the scheduled job, review customer details before arriving, find their way to the customers’ premises, and make sure they arrive on time with a smile on their face. Printing out checklists is an additional chore for them—and it isn’t convenient for your office staff, either.
To use a PDF, each tech will need a hard copy of the checklist for every commercial maintenance job they have scheduled each day. That either means remembering to keep a stack of them in their van (and replenishing it whenever it runs out), or printing out a new copy every time they have this type of job in their schedule.
If they run out of hard copies, or forget to print one out, they will either be late for an appointment because they went back to the office to get one, or they’ll have to do the job without it, potentially forgetting some of the items on the checklist. Neither of those options is ideal, and both will reflect poorly on customer experience.
Mistakes created by forgetting to use a checklist may be considered a breach of the maintenance plan or contract, or may invalidate the equipment’s warranty. This will make you liable for solving any problems created by the mistake, and lead to multiple follow-up calls and repairs at a potentially huge additional cost to your business.
2. Difficulty Organizing & Accessing Paper Checklists Across the Organization
Correctly storing PDF printouts of checklists after they’ve been used on a job is another challenge. To get the information added to the checklist back to the office and stored where everyone can access it, techs will have to either:
Drop them off at the office on a regular basis. This takes time out of their daily schedule, which would be better spent on working more billable hours.
Take photos of them and send them back to the office. An admin team member will then be responsible for filing them and extracting important details about the customers’ equipment, which also takes up staff time that could be used for more productive tasks, like following up with leads or ensuring billing information is up to date.
Additionally, these printed maintenance checklists are easy to lose track of both in the field and in the office, and this leads to gaps in customer information down the line. So when another tech goes out for the next maintenance call, they won’t have all the information they need about work carried out on previous visits.
Because each PDF maintenance checklist is filled out by hand, the information collected then needs to be manually transferred into your customer database or CRM. This leads to delays in adding data to your computer systems, and to potential data entry mistakes as the information is copied onto customer files. It also takes up a lot of your office teams’ time, and the bigger your operations get, the harder it is to manage these issues.
3. Inability to Easily Customize Checklists for Complex Commercial Maintenance Jobs
Commercial premises can vary in size and in the HVAC equipment installed, so a standardized PDF maintenance checklist won’t cover all the potential variables of every one of your commercial customers.
Aspects of commercial HVAC systems that can vary include:
Different types of equipment (brand, model, etc.)
The total number of installed HVAC units
Additional equipment that your techs can also service (ice machines or refrigeration units, for example)
Each different A/C or heating system has different parts to check, so maintenance will vary depending on its technical specifications and model. When a customer has multiple units installed, each one needs to be correctly identified, checked separately, and the results of maintenance have to be recorded on a separate maintenance checklist.
Customers often also need a record of each maintenance checklist, for warranty purposes, for example, and that means doubling up on the number of printouts needed. Overall, that amounts to a lot of paper to keep track of and file, which can be avoided with holistic HVAC software like ServiceTitan.
How ServiceTitan Helps You Build Scalable, Customizable Checklists for Each Commercial Customer
ServiceTitan’s HVAC software, which provides a wide array of tools for managing HVAC business operations (scheduling, dispatching, flat rate pricing, reporting, etc.), also allows you to build customized forms for all your needs, including commercial HVAC maintenance checklists.
You can easily design maintenance checklists in ServiceTitan and add them to specific jobs, customers, locations, or equipment. These forms can be created, and then used by your HVAC technicians within the ServiceTitan mobile app, or by your staff back at the office.
Your techs no longer need to carry around stacks of forms or fill them out by hand, and your office employees don’t have to spend time transferring customer and job details onto a computer system. ServiceTitan records and stores all these forms and information in the cloud, making it easy to find and pull up whenever it’s needed.
You can create forms from scratch based on forms you already use, or you can access and use pre-built, best-practice forms used by other companies through TitanExchange, which offers dozens of forms that you can adapt to your specific needs.
The forms you use for each job and customer can be fully customized and offer a range of setting options to embed them into tech workflows. This ensures HVAC techs stay accountable for their work, as you can stop them from cutting corners and moving on to the next step of a job, or completing it, without specific forms being filled out and submitted first.
Because all the data entered into ServiceTitan is immediately available to view, supervisors can even monitor your techs as they check off each step on the list. This gives supervisors the option to sign off on a job remotely, if a tech is new, for example, right from their tablet or desktop computer. Plus, it ensures procedures are followed consistently by every technician, for every single customer.
Settings Ensure Checklists Are Used Every Time
To ensure that technicians never fail to fill out a maintenance checklist, you can use “Smart Forms” settings in ServiceTitan. This will allow you to trigger forms to appear on their device at the beginning or end of each visit and are usually tied to a specific job type.
For example, commercial business owners may require a warranty form to be filled out alongside an HVAC maintenance checklist whenever their system is checked. This warranty form can be created in ServiceTitan and tied to a maintenance contract job type. Your techs can be prompted to complete the warranty form any time they are sent to a maintenance job for that customer.
The HVAC technician won’t be able to close out a job until that form is filled out with all the required information. This ensures that records are kept up to date—accurately and consistently.
Adding Form Fields to Your Maintenance Checklists
HVAC technicians and contractors can go into minute detail in what they can include in specific maintenance checklists with ServiceTitan, as the above image shows. This is particularly useful when taking into account the different features and models of equipment that your techs are bound to encounter in commercial buildings.
To cover all bases, they can also add other items to the maintenance checklist depending on what is installed, including:
Condensers
Heat pumps
Air handlers
Boilers
Evaporators
Venting systems
Air distributors
Air ducts
Air filters
Compressors
Condensate drains
Condensing unit
Flue systems
Heat exchangers
Ice machines
Refrigeration units
Drip pans
Drain lines
Each form or checklist can be duplicated to cover maintenance of as many units as necessary, even while at the job site.
ServiceTitan: Make Commercial HVAC Maintenance Checklists Customizable, Consistent, and Scalable
Although using a PDF (or other paper-based template) as a commercial HVAC maintenance checklist is better than using no checklist, it will not solve the challenges of HVAC contractors working with multiple commercial customers, including:
Filing and keeping track of large amounts of paperwork.
The time involved in copying job and equipment details onto computer systems.
Liability for mistakes made due to lost checklists and inability to check work carried out on previous visits.
A customizable checklist created using ServiceTitan’s forms, and stored within the platform, is a far more efficient and scalable solution. It is immediately accessible and viewable, in real-time, to everyone who needs to look at it—whether they are in the field or at the office.
Our checklists are also integrated directly with all your other business processes (many of which are crucial in managing commercial maintenance contracts) including:
ServiceTitan’s HVAC software helps you manage all aspects of your HVAC business, saving your team the time and effort involved in paper-based procedures. Schedule a call now for a free product tour.
