GREEN IDEAS

All too often, when co-op / condo boards and other buildings owners decide to go green, the first thing they want to do is install solar panels. But it doesn't matter how many solar panels are on a roof if the electricity they generate is wasted somewhere else in a building. Which makes more sense? Spending thousands of dollars on solar panels to keep lights on 24 hours a day, or having a green super implement strategies for efficient lighting and lighting controls?

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In December 2009, the New York City Council amended the administrative code to require owners of real property to submit a report to the city, benchmarking the energy and water efficiency of buildings. This was part of four legislative components known as the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan designed to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions from New York buildings. These laws require annual energy efficiency benchmarking that will be disclosed to the public and mandate a set of energy-efficient upgrades. The first component of these laws is known as Local Law 84 of 2009, which requires the benchmarking of buildings. This is probably the law your friend was referring to in your conversation.

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As a native Californian, Scott Miller says recycling is in his blood. So, it made his blood boil whenever he would see plastic laundry detergent jugs tossed into the trash bins in the laundry room at his Lower East Side co-op.

"The recycling area was just around the corner, but without signage and without an opportunity to make it easy to recycle in that area, it was all just going into a landfill," says Miller, who lives at the 1,728-unit Seward Park Cooperative.

It was one of the things that led him to volunteer last summer to take part in the Apartment Building Recycling Initiative, a two-hour program offered monthly by the city's Department of Sanitation (DSNY). There he learned about quick and often free fixes that can increase the amount of recycling and ensure that the proper things are going into recycling bins.

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It's a nice place to visit. It's even nicer to live there. Silver Towers, in Kew Gardens, Queens, is a combination of 377 cooperative apartments, 40 condominium units containing lawyers' and doctors' offices, several commercial stores and a three-level garage. Because of the mixture of co-op housing and condo retail space, the property is known as a cond-op.

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Co-op board president Michael Kaplan puts it bluntly about the condition of the HVAC system at the Garth Essex, a 346-unit co-op in Eastchester, a town in New York's Westchester County just north of New York City. "The equipment was from the 1960s. It was failing. We were repairing it all the time. To a certain extent, we had even started to reach the limit of what we could do with repairs. We were running on borrowed time."

The solution: the board swapped out the aging dual-fuel boilers for newer models, which lowered their bills through increased efficiency. But they also reduced costs by completely changing the way the building was heated and cooled and provided hot water.

The end result? The co-op reduced its water consumption by 25 percent and its costs by half. Fuel usage has dropped by 53 percent, and maintenance costs to the HVAC system have plunged 40 percent.

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I’m a retired banker who worked at one company for 41 years. Clearview Gardens is a 1,788-unit garden apartment co-op complex located in northeastern Queens, situated over 88 acres. I was there before I was married and now I live here with my wife, son, and daughter. Altogether that spans 30-plus years.

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April 20, 2011 — Electric-vehicle charging stations are slowly sprouting across America, as a New York City co-op demonstrates how relatively easy it is for a co-op board or a condo association to go green, supply an amenity to residents, and embrace the future all at once. Like bars installing TV sets in the 1940s and ‘50s, or people flocking to tablets like the iPad today, EV charging stations like the one at left (click on image to enlarge) are, from all indications, a reasonable investment — especially with the ChargePoint America program that the Manhattan’s Seward Park Co-op and others are using to subsidize costs.

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August 16, 2010 — When the co-op board at the 16-unit building at 54 East First Street in Manhattan asked its managing agent to shop for a new mortgage so the co-op could refinance and take advantage of lower interest rates, it fortuitously found one that not only did that, but allowed the co-op to fund necessary upgrades and make the building greener simultaneously. Your cooperative apartment house or condominium can do likewise — even in this tight lending times.

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Nov. 11, 2009 — Michael J. Wolfe of Midboro Management is a property-management member of the Green Building Initiative Committee of the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ. Along with 12 supers from buildings he manages, Wolfe is himself taking the free weekly class in environmental training to lower energy use and cost. This is the second of five weekly reports.

Day 2 – Thursday, October 29, 2009. Today was an illuminating day as the morning began with "Lighting, Electricity and Plug Loads." It may not sound exciting, but it was. After all, today marked the 130th anniversary of the light bulb! We discussed lighting sensors, types of lighting and master metering vs. submetering.

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Nov. 2, 2009 — I am a property-management member of the Green Building Initiative Committee of the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, which represents building supers and others. The union's Thomas Shortman Fund is sponsoring this environmental-training initiative — called "1 Year: 1,000 Supers" — in an effort to train at least 1,000 supers and handypersons to be greener and thus bring energy and cost savings to your building and reduce your carbon footprint.

My company, Midboro Management, has enrolled 12 of our supers into one of the initiative's first classes, and I'm writing this weekly account to walk board members and others through this smart, practical and free initiative.

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