FacilitiesNet posted a helpful how-to article on calculating HVAC lifecycle costs. We've reposted the link here for your reading pleasure.
How to Calculate Life-Cycle Costs and Justify Energy Efficient HVAC Upgrades
When top management wants to postpone replacement of HVAC equipment, the facility department may be asked to get “one more year” out of the existing equipment. Worse, this request may be repeated the next year, and again in years after that.
While maximizing the useful life of existing equipment is typically the most financially prudent option, serious issues can arise when the equipment ultimately fails. A run to failure approach is not necessarily a problem. Any piece of equipment, even critical equipment such as computer room air conditioning, can be run to failure as long as adequate backups systems are in place to mitigate the risk to operations, but this typically means completely redundant systems. In comfort cooling systems, there typically are no such back-ups in place.
