Booster Shot: How Boards Can Save Money by Tweaking Your Water Booster
May 6, 2014 — Checking your water booster could be the easiest way to save your co-op or condo money. Of course, it helps to know what a water booster is.
Are you in a building taller than six stories? Then you probably have a booster, which is a pump that keeps the water pressure going above a certain height, Since street water pressure in New York City is usually adequate up to about six stories, taller buildings need a booster or roof tank or a booster, or sometimes both. The taller the building, generally the more powerful the pump. So how do you save money with that?
In its most basic form, a booster consists of one, two, or three pumps controlled by a pressure sensor. If the pressure is above a certain point, the pumps shut off; when it drops below that point, the pumps come on. The problem is that a booster of this type is almost always "on" because as soon as the pump shuts off, the pressure drops and the pump starts up again. In fact, in many buildings, the pump is just left on manual ("hand") and runs 24/7/365 without a break.
I've seen many that
should never have been
installed in the first place.
I was at a five-story building recently where the booster pump was set to hand operation and was going full blast all the time. The piping was insane; it ran up through the basement ceiling to the first floor, came back down, went through the booster and then went up and down a second time. There were other inefficiencies as well.
Small Tweak, Big Payback
A one-horsepower pump running 24/7 uses about $1,300 in electricity in a year in Con Edison service territory. If the booster could be adjusted so that it ran only 18 hours a day, you would save about $340 annually. For larger pumps, the savings are even greater.
Frankly, it should be possible to cut back to even less than 18 hours a day. In fact, in some smaller buildings, it may be possible to simply shut the booster off: I've seen many that should never have been installed in the first place.
Generally speaking, it should not be expensive to have a booster technician come in and tune up the unit for more efficient operation, so payback should be fairly quick. Here's a chart that outlines potential savings:
Illustration by Marcellus Hall
Adapted from "Energy Detective: The Case of the Bothersome Booster" (Habitat, May 2014). Tom Sahagian is Senior Program Director, Technical Services, at Enterprise Community Partners.
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