Salas O'Brien News

The Highland Sam J. Racadio Library and Environmental Learning Center unites the best in academic and hands-on educational experiences, and our engineers’ mechanical, electrical, and plumbing expertise helped bring it all together.

If you’re headed to the beach this summer, you may encounter some of our designs—especially now that we’ve merged with T-Squared Engineers and Axiom Commissioning Group in San Diego, just minutes from the beautiful California coastline. These additions to the Salas O’Brien portfolio include dozens of waterfront properties from city-run parks to military facilities. Here are two you could visit this weekend:

Salas O’Brien’s engineers have experience designing for projects from entire master-planned communities to expansive critical environments. But oftentimes, complex projects fit into a small space.

One of our recent projects exemplifies a small space with precise design needs. Housed in the university’s Fine Arts building, San Francisco State University’s new Global Museum serves as a teaching lab for the school’s Museum Studies program, a research resource for scholars, and a Bay Area destination for history lovers.

In any industry, the safety and efficiency of engineered production processes have a major impact on the bottom line. In the food and beverage industry, there’s a lot more than money at stake. Even the slightest production errors can radically affect consumer health and safety, and public trust, once lost, is difficult to regain. The Salas O’Brien team is passionate about community well-being, and we’re proud to promote product quality and compliance through our work for this vital industry.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) began in 1993 with the singular mission of promoting sustainability in the building industry. This passion led to the creation of what has become the world’s most widely respected and utilized green building rating system: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). Since the system’s inaugural year at the turn of the century, LEED has been part of more than 92,000 projects in over 165 countries and territories across the world—and its impact on the community, the environment, and building-owner costs is nothing short of revolutionary.

A LEED certification from the USGBC is more than just an environmental stamp of approval—it’s a recognition of exceptional design that will translate into energy and operational cost savings and improved quality of life for building occupants. Research also shows that these quality and cost benefits attract tenants and lead to higher property sale value.

Commissioning plays a big role in achieving the level of design sophistication LEED requires, and as top U.S. commissioning firm with extensive LEED experience, Salas O’Brien has both the training and the track record to guide clients through the complex process.

At Salas O’Brien, efficiency is more than just catch phrase. It’s the goal we’re constantly pursuing and achieving in our work. With the addition of our new Varo team, we can increase efficiency in more markets that ever before—including the manufacturing industry.

In manufacturing, the efficiency and longevity of industrial equipment have a huge impact on the bottom line. Even a minor system failure can dramatically affect production quality, costs, and turnaround. Our solutions will help.

Salas O’Brien has decades of experience designing building systems and controls from mechanical and electrical to direct digital control (DDC), life safety, and fire protection. Our professionals have an extensive knowledge base that covers not only older electric, pneumatic, and electronic systems, but also the migration path of the cutting-edge systems of today. Our merger with Varo has reinforced these areas of expertise and introduced complementary ones—like automation for industrial clients.

To Salas O’Brien clients, the word “commissioning” means energy savings, lowered operating costs, and optimal environments—but a lot goes on behind the scenes to achieve these amazing results.  The field is constantly evolving, so having a trustworthy, communicative expert by your side through the process will make all the difference.

Sophisticated property owners aim to construct a building as economically as possible, and for good reason. Financial pressure is intense.

But yet, over a 30-year span, a building’s utility, maintenance, service, and system replacement costs can run between 50 to 80% of the facility’s total cost (including construction costs). The more complex the building and the more energy it uses, the higher that percentage will move within this range—especially in regions with high or increasing utility costs.

Salas O'Brien's merger with T-Squared Professional Engineers has brought us a team experienced with military projects—yet the word "military" includes a wider variety of projects than you might think. For example, a child development center owned by the U.S. Navy received engineering and LEED consulting services and achieved Silver Certification. In another case, we provided mechanical and plumbing design and LEED consulting for the U.S. Navy Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center. Monitoring weather or sea conditions and children require vastly different equipment and facilities, but our team proficiently accommodated both.