NEW
YORKERS get to feel smug about a lot of things. We
have great food, arts and culture, the Yankees. We
can also feel good about our relatively low use of
energy, thanks to public transportation and our
small living spaces. But sometimes — sometimes — we
fail to notice where there’s room for improvement.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
LEAKS BE GONE The Nagle Apartments have been fitted
with new windows. Co-op-owned apartments are
renovated with energy-efficient appliances.
Thirty-nine percent of New York City’s greenhouse
gases come from residential buildings. And there are
New Yorkers who have looked hard at their homes, in
buildings of all ages and sizes, and found ways to
make them more energy efficient. Others are watching
their operating costs rise (along with global
temperatures), and want to know what to do about it.
“With new developments, it’s easy,” says Marc
Zuluaga, a senior engineer at Steven Winter
Associates, a consulting firm that works on energy
issues. “But in almost any building, there are
low-hanging opportunities.”
Every building is different, and predicting the
return on an investment in efficiency can be tricky.
Older buildings are not necessarily bigger energy
hogs than their newer neighbors, and some buildings
that went up in the last 10 years should be ashamed.
But the size and age of a structure can tell an
expert where to start looking for savings.
“You have to start with conservation,” Mr. Zuluaga
said. “Once you squeeze every last ounce of
efficiency out of a building — until you can’t make
it more efficient without knocking it down and
building a new one — then it makes sense to add
solar.”
To find out where energy savings might be found in
your building, an energy audit is in order. These
are available from private consultants or utility
companies like Con Edison.
A good place to begin is to make sure that all
systems are working as efficiently as they can.
“If you have the right thermostat in place but the
temperature sensor is in the wrong place, that can
have a huge impact on energy performance,” said
Jeffrey Perlman, the president of Bright Power, an
energy consulting group. “But it doesn’t cost a lot
to fix.”
From there, you can get more ambitious: you can try
to balance the temperature.
“Generally, buildings are heated to the tenant who’s
complaining the most because they’re cold,” Mr.
Perlman said. “To be more energy-efficient, you want
the whole building to get to be roughly the same
temperature at roughly the same time. A
well-balanced system can work wonders. And it can
save money as well.”
Last year, Mr. Perlman worked with Carl Wallman, who
owns a 19-unit rental building on East 70th Street
in Manhattan.
“For years,” Mr. Wallman said, “it really got me to
see windows open in the building and the heat
blasting away. Surely, I’m interested in the
savings, but really having the building run more
energy efficiently was important.”
Mr. Perlman’s team made some small fixes, like
adjusting the controls on the boiler and installing
a new thermostat for the ground floor, which had its
own heating system and was always cold.
In the 2007-8 heating season, the building used 11
percent less energy than it had the previous year,
before the changes. Mr. Wallman spent almost $19,000
on energy bills for all of 2007; if the tweaks had
been in place then, he would have saved about
$2,000.
“These are small buildings,” Mr. Wallman said, “so
the savings are not going to be in the tens of
thousands.”
But, he pointed out, New York is home to thousands
of small buildings. “These little buildings are
going to make a big difference.”
Mr. Perlman charged about $1,500 for the initial
energy audit, $1,200 for boiler upgrades and $500
annually for continuing monitoring and maintenance.
And with savings of just over $2,000 a year, the
project should pay for itself in less than two
years.
An enormous amount of energy is spent heating
buildings, and an enormous amount is wasted when
someone throws open a window to cool off a boiling
apartment.
Another way to bring building temperatures under
control is to regulate the heat in individual rooms.
A gadget called a thermostatic radiator valve
attaches to some steam and hot-water radiators and
automatically senses the temperature of the room. If
it gets too toasty, the valve clamps down.
These valves were installed in a 102-unit co-op
building on Fourth Street in the East Village about
10 years ago with the help of Henry Gifford, an
energy consultant in New York City. The co-op’s
yearly consumption of oil has decreased by 15
percent.
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Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
A supply duct in what Doug Mcdonald calls the
“homework room” distributes heat.
“I don’t think it was so much an energy conservation
thing at that time,” said Tom Ostrowski, the
president of the co-op board. “It wasn’t quite in
vogue at that point. But it was just a more
efficient way to do it.”
In the years since, however, Mr. Ostrowski’s co-op
has looked into a solar hot water system and batted
around the idea of replacing all the windows and
insulating the building. All of these options were
deemed too expensive.
So, for now, the co-op is replacing windows with
more efficient models one by one, and it has a plan
in place to install motion-sensing lights in
interior stairwells and trash rooms. But at the
moment, No. 1 on the agenda is to finish repair work
on the building facade.
“If I was an individual homeowner, I could say, ‘I
don’t care if I make my money back on solar panels,’
” Mr. Ostrowski said. “But I can’t. I can’t say,
‘Hey, one hundred other people! Follow my dream!’ ”
Other buildings have had more success getting larger
projects under way.
The Winston Churchill, a large postwar co-op at 2500
Johnson Avenue in Riverdale in the Bronx, is making
12 upgrades, including adjustments to the
air-conditioning system, ventilation improvements
and new lighting.
To cover the cost, the building secured a $1.695
million loan, and the New York State Energy Research
and Development Authority brought down the interest
rate from 6.5 percent to zero percent with a payment
of $336,122 to the lender. This program, the
Multifamily Performance Program, is not currently
accepting new applications while it re-examines the
criterion used to evaluate projects. The authority
says it will resume the program but does not have a
target date.
“We had been working under the assumption that the
energy savings would be such that the loan could be
paid back by those savings,” said Steven M.
Hochberg, the board president. “It looks like that
is, in fact, going to be the case.”
So far, the building has completed 5 of the 12
planned upgrades. It has, for example, switched to
natural gas from No. 6 oil, an extraordinarily dirty
fuel. “It’s like the garbage of oil,” said Mark
Singh, the building superintendent at the Winston
Churchill.
The co-op has also installed a new mechanism for
making hot water, separating that system from the
one that generates energy to heat the air.
“Mark would have to run his large boilers all summer
long to make hot water for the building,” said
Michael Scorrano, the managing director of the
En-Power Group, which is overseeing the project for
the co-op. “It’s just way oversized for what you
need.”
These new systems were installed this summer, so the
building has yet to go through a full heating
season. But Mr. Scorrano estimates that in the
summer the building will experience a 50 percent
reduction in fuel use, which had cost about $700,000
per year. In the winter, he expects that reduction
will be closer to 15 percent. The cost of the new
hot water system for the 333-unit building was
$300,000.
“You read a lot of articles on saving the
environment,” Mr. Hochberg said. “But most people
are only going to save the environment if they can
save some money in the process. And it seems to have
come together.”
For some people, however, making their homes as
green as can be is a goal in itself.
Stephen Vernon is the president of a 112-unit co-op
in Inwood called Nagle Apartments that has tried
hard to become more environmentally responsible. The
residents of the three-building complex started
simply about five years ago by upgrading the
lighting with motion sensors and more efficient
bulbs. Then they moved on to larger projects.
“Our goal,” Mr. Vernon said, “was to do green
projects that made fiscal sense.”
Start Small and Think Long-Term: Saving Energy
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Published: November 20, 2009
(Page 3 of 3)
Almost all of the windows were replaced and new
radiator valves were installed, at a cost of about
$860,000. To cover the costs of these and other
upgrades, the building took out a two-part loan and
the development authority brought down the interest,
leaving the residents with an average rate of 4.31
percent.
Through a combination of selling apartments that the
co-op owned, interest on investments (it owns some
Treasury bonds), and energy savings, the
improvements were made without an assessment or
maintenance increase.
These days, the building’s boiler spends a great
deal of time resting comfortably on the lowest
setting, and gas consumption has decreased by around
40 percent.
Now, the building is looking into putting in a green
roof — layers of plantings and soil.
Green roofs keep the top of a building cool and
provide a layer of insulation. They also retain
rainwater, which can help keep the city’s sewer
system from being overwhelmed in a heavy rain. But
some consultants say that you’ll get more bang for
your buck keeping the roof cool with white or silver
paint and that a building will be better insulated
with traditional materials like fiberglass. Green
roofs are, however, much nicer to look at — and hang
out on — than the alternative.
Another initiative that the co-op is undertaking is
environmentally friendly renovations. As rental
apartments become vacant, the co-op makes them over
for sale. It uses recycled materials where possible,
installs energy-efficient appliances and decorates
with low- or nontoxic paints and finishes. One of
these apartments, a 900-square-foot two-bedroom, is
on the market for $359,000.
The sales agent, Matthew Bizzarro of Stein-Perry
Real Estate, who also lives in the building, says
that he has priced it a bit higher than comparable
apartments in the area. Traffic has been good, he
says, and has included people who say the green
factor appealed to them.
Some energy consultants are skeptical of renovations
that focus on using recycled materials rather than
the best materials for long-term energy savings.
“It’s always good to use paints that are low in
volatile organic compounds,” Mr. Zuluaga of Steven
Winter Associates said. “Where I do sort of take
issue with those types of projects is when the focus
is on recycling rather than using materials to make
a better building.”
At this point, it’s hard to say whether people will
pay a premium for a home that’s been retrofitted to
be green.
“I think over time there will be a modest premium
associated with this because of the lower operating
costs,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of
the appraisal group Miller Samuel. “But right now
the reason it’s hard to discern whether there’s a
premium is because it’s usually one component of an
extensive renovation.”
Lisa Detwiler, a broker at the Corcoran Group, has a
listing for a property that matches that
description: a town house in Brooklyn Heights. The
owner, Doug Mcdonald, gutted it and then put it back
together with energy-efficiency in mind.
The house is on the market for $5.95 million, a lot
of money for a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. But
Mr. Mcdonald says that he is confident his home will
command a premium, in part because he has been able
to charge $4,000 a month for its two-bedroom garden
apartment, more than comparable places in the
neighborhood.
He said he got that price because tenants liked the
idea of living in a place that is well insulated and
low in volatile organic compounds, chemicals
commonly found in paints and finishes.
Throughout the brownstone, the lights, windows and
electrical system are all designed to conserve as
much energy as possible. The materials used in
construction were recycled wherever possible, and
the roof is painted white to keep it cool.
The house is also wired for solar power, but Mr.
Mcdonald said that while he expected the price of
solar panels to come down soon, the economics did
not yet make sense to him. And before you worry
about making your own energy, he added, you have to
be sure you’re wasting as little as possible.
Two of the biggest energy savers in the town house
involve temperature. Each floor of the five-story
house has its own heating and cooling system, so
only the areas that need adjustment get a blast of
warm or cold.
The insulation is also an energy-saver. Mr. Mcdonald
used a spray-on foam called Icynene and a fluffy
blue material made from recycled denim called Bonded
Logic, and says he usually heats just the bottom
floor and lets the warm air rise.
The electric bill for four stories of the five-story
brownstone averages $183 per month — the rental unit
is metered separately. And the gas bill, which
includes heat and hot water, averages out to $83 per
month.
“Waste reduction should be part of the purpose of
good design,” Mr. Mcdonald said. “It’s like in golf:
you don’t want to waste any energy at all. It’s a
long sport, and anything you waste ends up coming
back and working against you.”
Because You Can’t Knit the Building a Sweater
Making an old building more efficient can be a
daunting prospect. Here are a few tips:
• One place to find energy savings is to avoid
venting out more air than necessary — the boiler
will just have to work extra hard to replace the
temperate air. A leaky elevator shaft, for example,
can act as a chimney, sucking warm air up and out of
the building. And in many postwar buildings,
ventilation and exhaust fans suck more air out of
the building than necessary.
• An important part of long-term conservation is
using equipment properly. The Thomas Shortman
Training Fund, the arm of a building workers’ union
that provides classes to its members, offers a
40-hour class for superintendents on
energy-efficient building management
(www.1000supers.com).
Simple, inexpensive adjustments to consider:
• Low-flow shower heads and faucet aerators.
• Motion-sensor light switches and efficient bulbs.
• Thermostatic radiator valves, which keep rooms
from overheating by regulating the heat coming out
of radiators.
• White or silver paint for the roof to keep it
cool.
• Insulation on exposed pipes.
