Building Technologies and Construction

Improving a building’s resource efficiency starts by gaining an understanding of building performance, identifying opportunities for conservation and developing a roadmap to get there.

UL Solutions offers energy services for healthy buildings to help building owners identify areas for optimization in accordance with performance and resource efficiency goals:

• ASHRAE Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 and Net-Zero energy audits identify conservation opportunities and create a road map for implementation. 
• Retro and re-commissioning (RCx) services assess building systems and performance to determine the potential to reduce resource consumption.
• Certified commissioning agents (CxA) can help optimize controls and calibrate sensors and functional testing equipment to help reduce utility costs, improve operating performance and boost indoor environmental quality (IEQ).
• Ventilation assessments help determine if a building meets ASHRAE Standard 62.1 minimum standards. 
• Energy and water consumption benchmarking services compare a building’s usage against similar buildings so owners can better understand building performance and identify opportunities for conservation.
• Commissioning (Cx) services support your efforts to design, build and operate new buildings or major remodels in alignment with stringent performance targets and project requirements.
• Through monitor-based commissioning (MBCx), we engage in real-time monitoring during design and construction to assess the performance of newly installed energy and water consuming systems within the project or building.
• Energy modeling services empower building owners to make strategic decisions to help maximize system efficiency, meet green building certification requirements, comply with codes, benefit from utility and financial incentives, and advance tactical building construction decisions.

Provide confidence to tenants and occupants by taking a comprehensive, science-driven approach to evaluating and improving the health and wellness aspects of indoor spaces. UL Solutions offers indoor environmental quality (IEQ) services to help building owners and managers:

• Proactively monitor IEQ.
• Identify and resolve indoor environmental disruptions.
• Uncover mold and moisture issues.
• Protect properties from potential liabilities related to mold, moisture and IEQ problems.
• Develop Legionella risk and water management plans.
• Demonstrate building performance for green building certifications, which can help to further boost trust in the indoor environment.

We also offer the UL Verified Healthy Building program, which offers an independent source of reassurance of the health and wellness of your buildings. Our quantitative review process includes performance testing, on-site inspections, and verification of policy implementation to discern air, water, noise and other building metrics.

Architects, engineers, builders, specifiers and manufacturers face the challenge of innovating to protect against extreme weather while meeting demands for increased safety, performance, transparency and energy efficiency. UL Solutions experts can help you select the optimal envelope system characteristics and test building envelope product and system performance against extreme conditions. We can simulate wind-driven rains, hurricane and tornado winds, as well as extreme hot and cold temperatures, to assess and verify the performance of building envelope products and systems before, during and after construction.

We can also validate the performance of building envelope windows, doors and fenestration products with lab-based testing and modeling. We offer testing for compliance with industry-recognized standards, including those for weather tightness, air tightness, thermal properties, structural and mechanical structural performance, security impact, operation, strength, and durability. We evaluate safety and performance to applicable standards, regulations and industry benchmarks.

Building owners and managers need comprehensive data about building performance and the effectiveness of smart building technologies to make improvements.

Our SPIRE™ program’s holistic, objective framework spans power and energy, health and well-being, life and property safety, connectivity, cybersecurity, and sustainability criteria. Our SPIRE™ Self-Assessment tool can help you understand your building’s performance by providing high-level ratings on key performance criteria, preparing you for a verified assessment.

The SPIRE™ Verified Assessment offers a complete on-site smart building evaluation and the opportunity to earn a Smart Building Verified Mark and plaque to showcase your achievements.

SPIRE™ provides actionable insights to help you enhance your buildings’ performance and efficiency, lower costs, mitigate physical and cybersecurity risks, address occupant concerns and enhance overall asset value.

Look for products with product carbon footprint verification, Environmental Product Declarations, or UL Marks including UL GREENGUARD and ECOLOGO®, which indicate that a product has been tested and complies with relevant standards. You can quickly find products with substantiated environmental claims via UL SPOT Product Database that contains information about 130,000 sustainable products.

We offer comprehensive advisory services to support the pursuit of building sustainability certifications, including LEED, BREEAM, WELL and Fitwel.

Our UL Verified Healthy Building program helps demonstrate the health and wellness of buildings by providing science-driven verification for tenants and occupants. The program assesses and addresses the indoor environment with emphasis on indoor air, water quality, hygiene, acoustics and lighting.

Our Zero Waste to Landfill (ZWTL) claim validation recognizes efforts to manage waste in innovative and environmentally responsible ways.

We can evaluate smart appliances against certification requirements and specifications for official smart energy programs, including the ENERGY STAR® Smart Home Energy Management Systems program.

While smart technologies have the potential to improve building design, occupant safety, security, comfort and operations, they can introduce interoperability and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) challenges and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in automated controls and robotics also escalates concerns about data privacy. To address these concerns, we offer safety, security and interoperability testing and certification services for smart building control systems, ventilation, appliances, water, lighting, physical access management, fire safety and more.

Today’s savvy occupants and investors also want proof that a building’s smart systems meet health, wellness and performance expectations. Building owners and managers need performance data showing improvement in occupant comfort and sustainability metrics. We offer comprehensive services — including audits, commissioning, assessments, benchmarks, validation and certification — to help you understand and improve your facilities’ resource consumption and waste management. We also offer tools, frameworks and guidance to assess health- and sustainability-related performance metrics.

Some of the biggest cybersecurity challenges in smart building technologies include:

• IoT devices with weak security protocols becoming easily exploitable targets.
• The deployment of ransomware over IoT networks, which has the potential to disrupt building operations.
• Effectively storing and protecting data collected by sensors.
• Exposure of smart building systems to third-party vendors with insufficient cybersecurity practices.
• Authorized personnel misusing access privileges to cause damage.
• A lack of adequate cybersecurity training that could lead to accidental breaches.

Cyberattacks on smart buildings have the potential to disrupt HVAC/R, lighting and other functions that impact occupant comfort, well-being and safety. Attacks can also expose sensitive information about the building and its occupants to data theft or leaks.

With so much at stake, it’s important to work with cybersecurity experts to help address cybersecurity challenges before they present a threat.

UL Solutions smart building cybersecurity services can help smart building product and system manufacturers, system integrators and building owners enhance security across the smart building ecosystem. We can help you define where you are in cybersecurity maturity, understand what to do to develop secure devices, and manage people’s and products’ digital identity. We can also help you improve internal cybersecurity capabilities and processes, validate security built into products throughout the life cycle, and differentiate your products in the market based on security.

We also offer testing, certification, gap analysis, training and advisory services for cybersecurity of life safety and physical security systems.

For more than 130 years, UL Solutions has been partnering with the buildings and construction industry to help evaluate and demonstrate fire safety and compliance. 

We leverage our deep expertise and history of trust to offer third-party testing and certification services to evaluate the compliance of building and construction materials, systems and assemblies with fire and smoke safety and environmental sustainability requirements. Our services also help confirm the safety, performance, reliability and security of fire-resistant rated designs used to achieve code-compliant installations where building codes require hourly rated designs.

We also offer inspections of firestopping systems, fire doors and fire dampers, leveraging our extensive understanding of these life safety systems throughout the entire construction process.

We offer certification and customized testing services suppression equipment, including products for residential and commercial sprinkler systems.

UL Solutions building inspections evaluating code compliance and other performance-based code inquiries. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Supporting architects in concept review, document review, risk assessment and level of protection
• Helping consultants identify and verify code-compliant options to address problems.
• Working with building management companies in the assessment of data quality, verification of safety policies and mapping policies to standardization maintenance.
• Supporting building owners to validate commissioning, maintenance and service self-assessment data quality and identify gaps and future costs.

Through our modular building inspection services, we witness the construction of modular units before shipping. We observe various building systems in operation to assess whether buildings and fire, life safety, mechanical, plumbing and electrical systems meet applicable code requirements.

We offer testing and certification services to the requirements of UL 9540 to help manufacturers establish that the ESS meets the safety standards for design, construction, testing and operation outlined in the International Fire Code, International Residential Code, the NFPA 1 Fire Code and NFPA 855.