A school principal gets a call three days before the first day of classes. The air conditioning is dead. The compressor seized overnight, and the repair will take two weeks and eat the entire textbook budget. She'll later find out that a single quarterly inspection would have caught the problem months earlier, when it could have been fixed over spring break for a fraction of the cost.

That story plays out thousands of times a year in schools, churches, and businesses across the country. The equipment changes, but the pattern is always the same: an HVAC system that everyone took for granted suddenly demands attention, money, and time that nobody planned for.

The Hidden Cost of Neglect is for the people who make the decisions about buildings but have never been given a reason to think about the mechanical systems running inside them. K.F. Powers breaks down what your HVAC system actually does, why “running it until it breaks” is the most expensive maintenance strategy there is, and what the research says about how indoor climate affects the people your building serves.

A Harvard study of ten million students found that each degree of classroom heat reduces learning by roughly one percent — and that low-income students are hit three times harder. Comparable research on office workers found that improved air quality nearly tripled cognitive performance scores.

This book won't turn you into a technician. It will show you how to:

   * Stop getting blindsided by preventable failures
   * Cut your total HVAC costs
   * Evaluate whether your current maintenance approach is actually protecting your building — or just running out the clock on expensive equipment
   * And Much More....