When apartment residents have to wait 15 to 20 minutes for hot water to reach them, it’s not only a nightmare but it’s wasteful and expensive. In this episode, Peter Varsalona, principal and vice president at RAND Engineering & Architecture, outlines the fix at one Manhattan condo to recirculate the water at a faster pace and cut costs in doing so. Peter Varsalona is interviewed by Habitat's Carol Ott.
Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!
When apartment residents have to wait 15 to 20 minutes for hot water to reach them, it’s not only a nightmare but it’s wasteful and expensive. In this episode, Peter Varsalona, principal and vice president at RAND Engineering & Architecture, outlines the fix at one Manhattan condo to recirculate the water at a faster pace and cut costs in doing so. Peter Varsalona is interviewed by Habitat's Carol Ott.
Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!
Carol Ott: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about problems that have been solved in New York's co-op and condo buildings. I'm Carol Ott, publisher and editor in chief of Habitat Magazine. My guest today is Peter Varsalona, an engineer and principal at RAND Engineering and Architecture, a New York firm specializing in building restoration and new design.
People who live on the top floors of apartment buildings often have fabulous views and great light. What many also have, though, are long waits to get hot water. Peter's here today to explain how one building tackled this problem. Welcome, Peter.
Peter Varsalona: Hi, Carol.
Carol Ott: Give us a brief history of what was happening at this West Side condominium.
Peter Varsalona: This condominium was having a long-term problem with domestic hot water supplied to apartments. It was taking 15 to 20 minutes or so for hot water to reach the upper floor apartments and still approximately 10 to 15 minutes for hot water to reach the lower level apartments. The biggest problem here was that they had no dedicated hot water recirculation system. They only had a single pipe of hot water supply to each unit.
Carol Ott: Let's back up. Explain to us what this means.
Peter Varsalona: Basically what it means is that hot water that's delivered to the apartments is sitting in the hot water supply riser until it's used. And until it's used, the water will eventually start to cool down and not be as hot. Now, historically, they had a much higher domestic hot water consumption in the building, and the water would be used and would be reheated and refilled into that supply line. But what we found over time is that hot water demand is reduced and the water gets cool.
Owners have to run their faucets, their showers, a very long time to get hot water. This isn't a problem in newer buildings or substantially renovated buildings or even older buildings that have since retrofitted return systems. This building never did, so it took a long time for the hot water to be evacuated from the pipes, and therefore it took a long time for hot water to be received, particularly on the upper floors.
Carol Ott: How complicated was it to fix the problem?
Peter Varsalona: Very complicated, because when you're doing, let's say, a new condominium, everything's codified. You need to install a return loop for your unused hot water. For substantially renovated buildings or buildings that may have upgraded their plumbing systems, they've incorporated that work, but in an older building where this hasn't been performed, you now have to open up walls, ceilings to access the piping. In some cases, you may be disturbing materials that have asbestos in them. In some cases you're not only exposing these finishes, but you're going to have to provide protection.
Then you're going to have to connect to the top of these risers and bring a line all the way back down to the boiler room and circulate it back to the mixing valve so that it can be reheated for hot water. The big issue is that you need to work in every apartment in order to make this work, and it was just so costly and disruptive. The condo never did anything about it. They asked us for an evaluation and to see if we can come up with something a little different.
Carol Ott: What you just described sounds like a nightmare. So tell me what you came up with, how it got fixed and how much it cost to fix it.
Peter Varsalona: Certainly. Rather than focus on working in every single apartment — this happened to be 55 units — we came up with a way to figure out how to recirculate that unused hot water in a way that would focus our work on the common areas in the building and try to stay out of as many apartments as humanly possible. We had looked at the building and over the years they did do some work. One thing that had retrofitted in the past was a replacement of their domestic hot water overhead main at the top floor. Instead of opening up the roof, they had installed it along above the roof in its own insulated enclosure.
So we thought, hey, there's an idea. What happens if we installed our circulation loop alongside that line on top of the roof? Therefore I wouldn't have to be necessarily opening up every apartment. We thought if we extended the hot water supply risers — usually they all stop at the ninth floor; this is a nine story building — if we extended it up through the roof and connect it to this new loop that we would provide, we would then have something going. And we figured that if we installed that loop, we could install, then follow up with one master return riser back down to the basement, which could then be linked up to the mixing valve.
So where we did is we found a location along an open stair. We found an area that we could run the main riser all the way down. Think about that. We are now working alongside an old staircase. We're working on the roof. These are not inside apartments, and we can extend that riser once we get down to the basement all the way to the boiler room.
Again, all in common areas, not affecting apartments. However, we did still need to connect from the top of the riser to the roof level overhead. So those ninth floor apartments would be impacted. But we figured, when we looked at the areas inside the apartments, these risers were in chases.
We were really just opening up the chase and extending the pipe up. So we weren't really affecting that many finishes. Most of these chases were accessible from closet interiors, so we would open up a plaster wall and then close it up. But we really were able to limit the disruption of finishes inside apartment and doing that really had a big impact on timing and cost, which would otherwise have been really quite extraordinary if we were working in all 55 apartments.
Carol Ott: How much did they end up spending for this fix?
Peter Varsalona: They were able to do the project for a little over $68,000. Our internal estimates had the job several hundreds of thousands of dollars if we were working in all the apartments.
Carol Ott: Whoa. Given that water has become quite expensive it seems like running it while waiting for hot water is not what any board wants apartment owners to do. For buildings with this circulation problem, are there multiple fixes that boards should consider?
Peter Varsalona: Certainly the way the building was originally constructed will have a big impact on the options you have. Most building owners aren't really facing this problem because they already have originally designed and installed return systems. But for older buildings that didn't and have either partial or no recirculation system, it's critical not just for occupancy and comfort to be able to get hot water quickly, you want to look at ways where you can reduce the amount of times your boiler is operating to heat up water. It's particularly wasteful to have unused hot water that has to be constantly reheated at larger temperature gradients.
If you're recirculating water, the maximum you're raising the temperature is maybe 10 degrees, which is not that significant. So you're not wasting energy continually heating colder water. It's a really critical element to a building. And anytime you could save a fuel cost it's going to help you long term.
Carol Ott: Okay. Very good information. Thank you so much.
Peter Varsalona: Oh, you're welcome.