Understanding Your Customer: Break the Cycle of Deferred Maintenance
April 20, 2019
Hard decisions are routine when it comes to saving money or aiming to maximize a budget.
Oftentimes, in budget planning, business, school, and government building managers will postpone maintenance, system upgrades, and repairs to buildings or infrastructure because budgets are tight or other expenditures take priority. The practice of delaying these projects to a future budget cycle is known as deferred maintenance.
While standard maintenance and system upgrades can be very expensive, deferring these projects can lead to public safety hazards and higher future costs.
Just consider a case in WA State:
A tunnel housing nuclear waste collapsed at the PUREX plant on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in WA state in 2017.[1] Thankfully, no workers were hurt, and radioactivity was not released to the public. The Washington Post cited a 2015 report by Vanderbilt University’s Civil and Environmental Engineering department that warned the old tunnel had “the potential for significant on-site consequences.”
Professor Jeff Terry contends that it is common practice for the Energy Department to defer maintenance across the state. As a whole, “Washington needs to invest some $190 billion over the next 20 years to catch up on long-deferred maintenance and improvement of basic infrastructure.”
Commercial property owners and homeowners can relate as they, too, often delay necessary maintenance and improvements. Fortunately, the consequences are not always as dire as a collapsed nuclear facility.
In most cases, deferred maintenance will cause property owners to miss out on energy cost savings due to energy inefficiencies of the building (e.g. an old HVAC, poor insulation, etc.) (known as the “cost of delay”). The upfront costs of addressing these issues may be daunting, but NEIF makes it a priority to help customers finance projects with zero out of pocket costs. Our diverse group of lending partners allows plenty of monthly payment options to make sure monthly payments are less than monthly energy cost savings for most projects. With no out of pocket cost, and immediate savings, there’s no longer a reason for your customer to defer maintenance on their property!
It is time to break the cycle of deferred maintenance, a practice that will only cost your customer in the long run. Propose a financing solution today to help your customer upgrade their facility and start saving immediately.
Contact our clean energy finance professionals or explore our online finance portal to see how the National Energy Improvement Fund can save you money and energy today.
Call us at (720) 724-7673
Email us at commercialfinance@neifund.org
