Stop Throwing Money at Your Heating Bills

Imagine cutting your building's energy costs by 25%, while keeping residents comfortable and complying with Local Law 97. One Queens co-op did just that, saving $24,000 using smart heating sensors.

Izzy Friedman, director of technical services, and Daniel Berg, account manager at Entech, reveal how indoor temperature sensors can transform your building's heating system from a money-draining guessing game into a precision operation. Learn how these systems catch expensive problems before they become disasters, like the building that was hemorrhaging 1,100 gallons of water daily due to an underground leak that sensors detected within a week.

Beyond the immediate savings, Friedman and Berg explain how predictive maintenance can extend your boiler's life and eliminate those dreaded emergency repairs. No matter what kind of system you're running, this smart building technology can pay for itself in under a year while giving you the data to make informed decisions about your property's future. Habitat's Emily Myers conducts the interview. 

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!

Transcript

Emily Myers: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about challenges facing New York co-op and condo board directors. I'm Emily Myers with Habitat Magazine, and I'm joined by two members of Entech, Izzy Friedman, director of Technical Services, and Daniel Berg, account manager. Great to have you both here. 

Daniel Berg: Thank you for having us.

Emily Myers: So we are going to talk about what buildings can do to cut fossil fuel use and save on energy costs. And we'll discuss why it's so important to understand where energy waste is happening, and what can be done to make apartments more comfortable. So let's kick off with a look at a co-op in Queens that was keen to comply with emission targets under Local Law 97 and also save money.

Izzy, can you share a bit more about the building? 

Izzy Friedman: Yeah, so this building is in Queens. It's a six floor building, 136 units. And they have two steam boilers over there. In the first season that we put our system in, we saved them $24,000, which is 25% of their energy consumption.

Emily Myers: Okay, so the building has a gas fired boiler and a steam heating system. What were you actually doing, though? You were saving money, but how were you doing that? 

Izzy Friedman: So we were able to cut down on the boiler runtime to make sure that they're getting enough heat, but also not excessive.

Emily Myers: And I'm just gonna push you on that. So you are reducing the boiler time, but how are you doing that? 

Izzy Friedman: So we're controlling the boiler based on the indoor temperatures. What our company brings in is we have indoor sensors that we read the temperatures in the apartment. So we're not only running the boiler based on what the outdoor temperature is.

If it's cold, we're running the boiler, it's not cold, we're not. We are actually taking the indoor temperature to be able to adjust the cycles of the steam and to be able to make sure we're only giving heat when needed. 

Daniel Berg: Just to follow up on that a little bit, just how the system works is that, as Izzy said, in the old days we used to have an outdoor temperature and it would turn the boiler on.

So if it dropped outside below 60 degrees, the boiler would run constantly until it reached that 60 degrees and it would shut off. Through our system, we put a panel in the basement on the boiler. It runs everything. We put sensors throughout the building in various locations, from the top floors to the second to top floors to the lower floors, to get a real idea of what the temperature is in the building.

So even if the temperature outside drops to 50, the temperature in the building might be 70, so the boiler doesn't have to go on. Therefore, if the boiler doesn't go on, then we're not using the carbon, we're not using the gas, we're not using everything, so we're saving them money. So it's a little bit of everything.

We take the outdoor temperature, the indoor temperature, what the temperature is gonna be, and our people inside monitor that building and are able to adjust the heating as it goes along. Also, as I'm sure like everybody knows in the past, you used to go visit your grandmother, let's say in a building in Manhattan, you'd walk in, it'd be 50 degrees outside, but it'd be 120 degrees inside. So we changed that by putting sensors inside, so we know that it's 120 inside. The boiler's not gonna go on anymore. 

Emily Myers: Okay. So I imagine that this also takes some of the burden of the boiler reducing the load and perhaps maintenance costs?

Daniel Berg: Correct. The boiler will not be on as much. It won't be on 24 hours straight. It'll be off. The parts will not break as much. And Izzy's been doing this for 20 years. He can talk on that, where he's gone into buildings where the boiler's been on for 24 hours and they're replacing parts right away.

How many times have he gone into a building, Izzy, that, you saw this and you changed it up? 

Izzy Friedman: Yeah, we come in, a lot of times we'll see that the boiler's just run excessive without anything being controlled just because the outdoor temperature is cold. 

Daniel Berg: It's like anything in life.

If you have let's say in your house, if you have your dishwasher on 24 hours a day, it's gonna break eventually. Also, with our sensors, we don't just put sensors in the building, we put sensors in the boiler. We monitor the flame, we monitor the pressure. We monitor everything in the boiler.

So we're actually able to foresee where something bad is gonna happen, meaning the water temperature is dropping, it's not staying where it should be. We know that your water coil is gonna go down, or we see that the pressure in the building is building in the boiler, but it's not getting to upstairs.

We know that you have an issue with that pressure, so you have to call your plumber in. Or we see that, the amount of water that's going into the boiler on a weekly basis? It should be a 30 gallons, let's just say, just around number, but you're putting in hundreds of gallons.

Then you have a leak somewhere in the building, and we let you know when the plumber comes in and he finds that leak right away. 

Emily Myers: Okay, so what you're saying is that there are added benefits of the data that these sensors are producing, that the board can see that data and can do some detective work.

Daniel Berg: Correct. We're giving you so much data these days that people are looking at the data and they're amazed at what they find out with the data. They're checking their water bills. Because water bills are another issue that we're affecting. So they see that there's a leak, they can fix it right away instead of in two months when they get their water bill and they see that the water is tremendous. They're able to do preventative maintenance on the boiler. Instead of fixing something that breaks, they're proactive and they're adjusting it before it breaks.

So the boiler's not down. You don't have to rent a boiler on the street. You don't have to do all these things. And also, the biggest issue, and Izzy can speak on this also is that we take what the building needs, meaning the building needs heat, it needs temperature. People have to be comfortable, but the building wants to save money and it also wants to drop its carbon footprint.

So we work hand in hand with everything involved. We're not just gonna take your temperatures from 72 to 50 and see you later. No, we work with the building. We get the right temperature, we get the right feel. We also, and Izzy will talk about this, izzy goes down there, he points out things to the building when he is there and tells them exactly, Hey, your boiler's dirty.

It's clogged. You're gonna have an issue, fix this and you'll do stuff. So we're very hands on, on every different aspect of the building. We're not just selling you a system and walking away, we're your partner. Just if I can say something about Entech, Entech , we've been around for 25 years.

We're family owned, we're same owners for the past 25 years. Even though we're in over 8,000 buildings, we still have that small family atmosphere that we go with, that every customer is not a customer. It's really part of the family. When Izzy goes in, it's a family business.

Emily Myers: So what is the cost then for the building? 

Daniel Berg: So the cost really depends on the size of the building. It's very different, also, gas and oil buildings. Oil buildings have no rebates. Gas buildings, National Grid are giving rebates out this year still, so it brings down the cost. But you can say, let's say a smaller building could be around $10,000.

I'm not sure. The monitoring is a cost of a cup of coffee. That $10,000 minus the rebate. So the rebate could be big, it could be small depending on the units, depending on where you are, depending on your usages. We have clients that go for rebates and they tell 'em they can't get rebates 'cause they're on oil.

But then we find out, hey, you had a gas leak last year, you switched to oil last year. Let's apply for the rebates again. And we get the rebates for them. We don't stop. We work with our clients to figure out the best way that they can get the rebates. If it's an oil building, it's very simple.

There's no rebates. But we just switched over actually a very big commercial building in the city that's on oil. And the system already within the first month saved them a ton of money and they love it. It's not just a gas based system, it's oil, gas, whatever you need. We can do those systems as well as integrate in other things.

Emily Myers: And can I just ask about the co-op building that we're talking about in in Queens, you said that they saved $24,000 annually. What was the cost of the installation for that building? 

Daniel Berg: Sure. I'm not sure the installation on that one. It was a bigger one, a bigger rebate. I have to check . The cost of the building, it all depends. There are different types of costs, meaning if you're a multifamily owner, you look at the cost like that. But when you're a board in a condo, which we're talking about here, the board looks at it and, the return on investment on that building was with less than a year.

So whatever the cost was, they saved $24,000. The cost was not $24,000. So they're already ahead of the game. And most return on investments are less than a year. If you just look at what's going on outside right now, in February, in New York City, every day is like zero degrees. So if your boiler's running correctly, you're saving money.

If it's not running correctly, it's on 24/7. I had a client call me yesterday. His boiler was on 24/7 and he is like, we gotta get this building on that we just took over onto the Entech system. It doesn't make sense 'cause everybody's looking at gas bills and they're tremendous these days.

Emily Myers: Yeah. And you've touched on this but perhaps just to make sure that our listeners know, what are the, what kinds of buildings are best suited to the sensors that you put in? 

Izzy Friedman: So our system is really designed for any kind of system. We do steam boilers, we do hydronics, we do buildings that have multiple steam zones, direct steam from the city, district steam. Heat pumps, as well. We're getting into heat pumps now. So really it's any kind of system that the building management or the building owners are paying for the utility bills. 

Emily Myers: So it's a central 

Izzy Friedman: heating and cooling system? 

Correct. Anything that has a central system, that's where we come in and we could benefit them.

Daniel Berg: And the system works, desktop or there's an app that the managers will have it on their phone. The super will have it on their phone. Everybody will get alerts if the boiler's down. Everybody can decide who gets the alerts, who doesn't get the alerts and everything. I know like in a condo building, we're talking condos.

The board only wants to know if the boiler's down. If any other issues, they're like, go to the management, go to the super, but if the boiler's down this way, they can give answers over to the tenants because the first call that the tenants have are right to the board, what's going on here, what's going on.

And they don't have answers. This way they have answers and they can monitor it and go back and, save money. A lot of condos are looking at it like it's their money coming out and the rates are just going up. We need to cut back. 

Emily Myers: So then what are some of the takeaways for other boards listening to this this case study and just more broadly your services. 

Izzy Friedman: The takeaway is really that you wanna be able to run the building knowing what's actually going on with eyes and ears which our system brings to the table.

And you wanna make sure that you're running your building efficient, but at the same time keeping those owners comfortable. 

Daniel Berg: As you said, I like to say our sensors are sensors, but they added their cameras in your boiler room. You know you're gonna get a temperature of the boiler room, what's going on down there.

You're gonna get the water in the boiler room, you're gonna get the pressure in the boiler room. You're gonna know what's going on in the apartments. If somebody complains all the time about being cold in their apartment, we put a sensor in their apartment so we get a real feel on it. So the takeaways are, everybody thinks that the systems are just being there for local laws.

They actually help the building long term stay as well as it is. Keep it healthy, keep it going, prevent long-term costs. A new boiler is very expensive. So if we can prevent you from getting a new boiler, it's tremendous. 

Emily Myers: Yeah, obviously change is also hard.

But what you're pointing out is that there are savings benefits, I guess compliance benefits and perhaps maintenance benefits broadly. 

Daniel Berg: Absolutely. All three. It's a home run. Sometimes, you go into a building and they're, they have none of this, and then they look at this and they're like amazed at what the information they get the 

Izzy Friedman: data.

We just did in another building we had that we installed the system. We put a water meter, which measures how much water is being added to the boiler system. Within the first week, we noticed that there was excessive use of water, about 1100 gallons of water. We notified the super right away.

He had a thermal camera. He went around the basement and he found one of the tenants that was renting in the basement had a leak underground from the return line, which was running thousands of gallons a week. And he fixed that up the next two days. He fixed it up. He went from 1100 gallons a day to 200 gallons a day.

So that saves life on the boiler. You're not heating up extra water, and you're not bringing in fresh water, which corrodes the tubes. 

Emily Myers: Great. Thanks so much guys. 

Izzy Friedman: Thank you. Thank you for having us, 

Emily Myers: Izzy Friedman and Daniel Berg from Entech. Thanks so much. 

Izzy Friedman: Thank you.

Have a good day.