Co-op Board Installs Heat Pumps to Slash Emissions and Costs

In their drive to cut their buildings' carbon emissions enough to satisfy New York City's Local Law 97, many co-op and condo boards are installing electric heat pumps, efficient machines that can heat and cool a building without burning fossil fuels. As the electric grid gets greener in coming years, the thinking goes, carbon emissions will keep going down.

That was the thinking at Waverly Mews, a 120-unit co-op in Greenwich Village that had inefficient and expensive electric baseboard heaters. Each unit paid paid its own electric bill, and some shareholders were paying over $1,000 a month to meet their winter heating needs. Not surprisingly, the co-op had a D grade for energy efficiency.

“Clearly, we need to move beyond wasting energy and money like that,” says Sasha Soroudi, the co-op board president. The solution: tear out the baseboard heaters and install variable refrigerant flow (VRF) heat recovery units.

The VRF heat recovery system uses heat pump technology to provide both heating and cooling in each apartment. For each shareholder, this means that both heating and cooling will now come from new indoor units and thermostats. Window air conditioners that had cooled each apartment can now be removed, opening up valuable window space to more light and air. 

Based on efficiency data from the manufacturer, shareholders can expect to slash their winter heating bills by 80% and see savings of up to 30% on summer cooling costs. 

The VRF system has the added ability to recover and reuse heat that would otherwise be lost. “Not only can the system simultaneously heat and cool the building, but it can extract heat from one area and give it to another,” says Sina Jasteh, the founder of Efficiti, the engineering firm designing and managing the project. The project involves the installation of more than a dozen heat pumps on the roof, each serving multiple apartments. 

The hefty cost cutting is welcome news at the six-story, late-19th century building, whose residents are a mix of longtime residents on fixed incomes and more affluent newcomers. VRF heat recovery units typically allow for a more balanced system so that when south-facing apartments are hot on cool days, the refrigerant in the pipes can recover heat and exchange it to different lines in the building to heat colder north-facing apartments. “If it’s a really balanced operation, the fans on the roof units don’t even come on because they’re so efficient at transferring the heat,” Jasteh says. 

The building is expected to have enough electrical capacity to power the new system, without costly retrofits. But one of the anticipated challenges will be getting access to apartments to complete the work. The board is hoping to minimize inconvenience to residents by routing the piping through common areas, with the time spent in each apartment focused on mounting the indoor units and thermostats.

The project comes with a price tag above $2 million, and the board hopes successful applications for Con Edison and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority incentives will cover a significant portion of the cost. To pay the balance, the co-op is using a combination of reserve funds and its credit line from its mortgage lender. Efficiti is also helping the board explore other financing options.

“Having a variety of financing alternatives helps us calibrate how much financial burden our economically diverse community shoulders up front versus over time,” Soroudi says, adding that the work is expected to be completed before the end of the year.