201 East 79th Street

201 East 79th Street is a co-op in the Upper East Side neighborhood of NYC with a 2-pipe fan coil HVAC system.

201 East 79th Street had already completed huge energy-efficiency projects including LED lighting and facade upgrades. “The question we always have is, ‘Where can we save money?’” says Stefan Unger, former president and current member of the co-op board.

The building also installed a new chiller to run the central heating and air conditioning system. This last improvement, completed in 2016, recently became the focus of the board’s ongoing quest to save money. “We realized the next step,” Unger says, “was to make the heating and cooling more efficient.”

The board got in touch with James Hannah, the Managing Director, US at Parity. “There’s frequently an opportunity to increase efficiency in this type of ‘fan coil’ building,” Hannah says, meaning postwar buildings with a chiller and cooling tower that provide central heating and cooling. “You have a lot of water that’s being heated or cooled, then circulated to apartments. You’re also drawing in or exhausting air. These buildings almost always use more energy than they need to.”

Parity integrated with the existing HVAC controls and installed additional non-proprietary hardware including control panels, variable frequency drives (VFDs), and 20 in-apartment temperature sensors.

“That way,” Hannah says, “we can get real-time knowledge of the building’s heating, cooling and ventilation needs. Then we can make adjustments 24/7 to the settings for the building’s systems — the Con Ed steam valve, the chiller, the cooling tower, pumps and fans. We get everything to work in harmony to reduce waste.”

The real-time information our software collects serves as inputs for our algorithms and allows for automated efficiency adjustments to be made to the building’s HVAC control systems instantly.

A key player in this process is the resident manager, Anthony Maldonado. “Guys like Anthony know their buildings,” Hannah says. “If there’s an issue with a piece of equipment or a complaint from a resident, the super can make a manual adjustment or give us a call.”

Maldonado adds: “The system has made my life extremely easy. The main thing is preventive maintenance — it tells me something’s wrong before residents even realize it. Since we went live last summer we’ve been able to balance our systems so there’s no more over- or under-heating. And now we turn our fans and pumps down in off-peak hours. Instant savings.”

The upside is that the building will save an estimated$33,000 on its annual Con Edison electricity and steam bills, meaning the investment will pay for itself in less than two years. In the first year, we saved the building over $100K and gave them a 7-month ROI.

“This was a no-brainer for the board because it’s going to make the building more efficient,” Unger says. “The savings are guaranteed, and Parity’s fees come out of our savings. I think of this project as a streamlining of our building’s existing systems.”