Your Roof Is Hiding a Massive (But Fixable) Energy Problem

If your building's energy bills feel like they're running on autopilot, it's time for a wake-up call. John Stevens, founder of Alternative Sustainability, reveals how rooftop exhaust fans could be costing your building up to $70,000 a year. He breaks down how newer fan technology can slash energy use by up to 87%, with a return on investment in as little than 1.6 years. Whether your building has five fans or forty-five, Stevens explains how boards can phase in replacements gradually without blowing the budget. Habitat's Carol Ott conducts the interview.

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Transcript

Ad1: [00:00:00] Problem Solved is sponsored by NYC Best Property Management. NYC Best Property Management partners with co-op, condo, and community association boards, developers, and high-rise property owners to provide expert guidance on operational decisions and budget strategies, ensuring efficient and effective property management.

At NYC Best Property Management, we go beyond just managing properties. We focus on creating a place where you truly feel at home. Together, we make living easy and enjoyable. Contact info@nycmgt.com to learn what NYC Best Property Management can do for you 

Carol Ott: Trying to shrink every kilowatt hour your building uses can be an exhausting journey, and in this case, exhausting is the right word.

Because if you go up to your building's roof, you will find a landscape of machines running day and night, machines that literally exhaust air from the building. In some buildings, those exhaust [00:01:00] fans can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to run. Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about challenges facing New York co-op and condo boards.

I'm Carol Ott with Habitat Magazine, and today my guest is John Stevens, founder of the design manufacturing firm Alternative Sustainability. Thanks for joining me today, John. 

John Stevens: Thank you for having me, Carol. 

Carol Ott: So you've described yourself as a buildings guy, someone who can walk into a building and actually feel when something isn't right.

What do you mean by that? 

John Stevens: I'm not an engineer or an architect by trade. It's a family business. My family was in building management, construction, maintenance, so I was literally in a boiler room when I was very young. So I learned buildings and how to read them and feel them and see what's going on. I was a handyman by the time I was 17.

So I just learned very early on how buildings run and how to really get into them and how to know them. 

Carol Ott: So one place that you've pointed to is the rooftop fans, [00:02:00] and something probably most boards don't ever think about. This may sound like a very basic question, but what are those fans exhausting all day?

John Stevens: So they're exhausting air from the bathrooms. Your typical building has an air change system. There's fresh air coming into the building, usually through a ductwork, and it comes into the corridors and filters into the apartments, and it gets exhausted mostly out of the bathroom and sometimes out of the kitchen.

So you have a constant rotation of fresh air coming through. But most of them are bathroom exhausts. 

Carol Ott: And how many fans on the roof does a typical co-op or a condo have? 

John Stevens: It depends on the size of the building and how many lines they have, how long it is, how many apartments on each floor. But a typical bathroom exhaust will have one full line of bathrooms going up and down.

I have buildings that we're doing that have only five fans. I have buildings that we're doing right now that have 45 fans. So it can drastically change. 

Carol Ott: And they run 24 hours a day? 

John Stevens: They [00:03:00] have always run 24 hours a day, 'cause obviously anybody can use the bathroom any time of the day or night. But recently, for energy-saving purposes, the city has stated that exhaust fans can be turned off from midnight to 6:00 AM.

Some buildings may wanna keep them on all the time. Some buildings wanna take advantage of the energy, knowing that there's very little use in those hours. But the option is now there to turn them off for six hours a day. 

Carol Ott: So let's talk about dollars. If a board- Wanted to weigh this decision, whether that makes any sense.

So in a typical building, how much electricity are the fans actually using, and how much is that costing? 

John Stevens: If you look at each fan itself, it may not seem like a lot. One single typical fan may use 25, 30 kilowatt hours a day. So it may not seem like a lot, but it adds up over the course of the year.

And then if you have a building with 10 or 20 fans, you have buildings that are using upwards of 20 maybe 100 kilowatt [00:04:00] hours per day with all the fans added up. When you ta- talk about over the course of a year, you're talking about 100, 150, 200,000 kilowatt hours a year. It really does add up. 

Carol Ott: And can you translate that into dollars for me?

John Stevens: Sure. So when we're talking about the savings, the rooftop exhaust system is the largest continuously running system on any building, so it's also one of the most neglected, meaning that out of sight, out of mind till somebody says they don't see feel any air coming through. So they get worn, they have belts, the bearings grease, they make a lot of noise.

So as they get worn, they use more energy. But you're talking about it may only be a few hundred dollars a day per fan for a group of fans on a roof, again, depending on the size. Fans range anywhere from 12-inch square to up to 648 inches, so there's some very large ones if you have a tall building. But if you're talking about a building that's using 200,000 kilowatt hours a year when all the fans are added up, that's very common.

You're talking about approximately [00:05:00] 65 to $70,000 a year just for your fans. 

Carol Ott: So 

John Stevens: what- typically electrical cost is approximately 10 to 15% of the total budget of running a building, so that adds up. 

Carol Ott: And what are the options for improving the efficiency of the fans? 

John Stevens: So up until recently, there, there hasn't been a new type of exhaust fan built in, in well over 50 years.

You have what's called a downblast fan, which most people have heard referred to as a mushroom fan because it looks like a mushroom cap on top of it. 

You also have a blower fan, which is usually much stronger, larger, and they have a lot of ductwork associated with it. But those are the two that have been around for a long time.

Using not the engineering, but actually how the buildings work and bringing my building knowledge into it, I wanted to come up with something else, just a better flow of the air, easier to get out, more soundproofing. So that's when one of the things that we designed at Alternative Sustainability was the T7 series.

In the past, if you want to get a more efficient fan, in the last five to six years, you could change the motor to an [00:06:00] ECM motor, which is a DC-based. Little bit stronger and it saves energy. Otherwise, there weren't too many options because the mushroom fans are very inefficient the way they move air.

Our fans are much more e- efficient with a more direct path for the air to come out. We're using what's called an axial fan, ECM motor, which is a DC-based axial fan. That means there's no belts to break and loosen. There's no bearings to grease. There's no shafts to loosen up. You don't have all those parts.

So one big thing about that is they're maintenance free. That alone saves a lot of the money from not having to do all the maintenance every year. But they wear out very quickly. So basically, by putting all these things together and then having you may have heard of VFD, variable frequency drives- 

Ad1: Yeah

John Stevens: which allow the motors to ramp up slowly. Our fans now have built-in control panels as well. The old fans, you have an on/off switch maybe if you take off the cover. So our fans are much more efficient with a better airflow. So just the flow of the air [00:07:00] and the control panel, we're looking at an average of in the 62 to 63% less energy used.

So where your typical fan might use 25 to 30 kilowatts over the course of a day, our fans are averaging, let's say our average 32-inch fan, for instance, is averaging only about 13 kilowatt hours a day 

Carol Ott: It's the same amount of air draw? 

John Stevens: Same amount of air draw. So the engineers make these exhaust fans to go on top of the roof, and they size them with their calculations to remove a certain amount of air.

If you need to change the air, you want more air or less air, you have to take it apart and change the shiv and the shaft and the belt and the pulley and everything. Where ours, the control panel, like I said, gives you so much flexibility. Besides a, an on/off switch to kill all the power and safety breakers, we have the built-in VFD.

We also have speed control. So sometimes ducts get dirty, and you want to increase the air a little bit, the CFM, the amount of air being exhausted from the bathrooms. [00:08:00] You just push a button and just turn up the speed a little bit, and now you have more CFM. Literally, instead of hours and hundreds of dollars of materials to the old style, you just push a button and you're done in two seconds.

Carol Ott: So give me a sense of cost and payback if a building were to go down this route. 

John Stevens: So all of our fans, they don't come with all the options. They all come the same way. The fan, the vibration eli- eliminating material, sound-deadening material. Because one thing also people complain about is when the upper floors are in their apartments, they hear the fans rattling on the roof sometimes.

That's all gone away now. They're much quieter. So if you change one of the fans, you have two options, 'cause every- the controls and everything comes a part of it. Just the operation of the fan, the more efficient operation of the fan alone is cutting 62 to 63%, and that's keeping that 24 hours. Now, if you decide, because our control panels also have a built-in electromechanical timer, so should you want to take advantage of the new regulations in New York City and turn it off from 12 midnight [00:09:00] to 6 AM, very easy-to-use timer.

You can do 1 AM to 4 AM, whatever you decide. But if you take advantage of those six hours, now that 63% on average is going up to anywhere from 82 to 87% s- reduction in electricity. That's a significant savings. We have buildings that have five fans that without the timer being used with 64% reduction, with the timer 73% reduction.

Those five fans cut the energy used in a building by 53,500 kilowatt hours, which equates to approximately $15,500 

Carol Ott: How much are these fans? 

John Stevens: They're they're the s- approximately the same. But the some of the well-known fans are good quality fans. We're at the comparable pricing, so approximately the same cost.

Even with the control panel, we're approximately the same price. So for instance, another building that had excuse me, that small building with only five fans saving over 52,000 kilowatt hours a year and $15,000. That one had an ROI of only [00:10:00] 1.6 years. We had another one f- that had 10 fans. With the timer used, 82% reduction in electricity.

They're saving $19,000 a year. It's a two-year return on investment. We try and set it of almost all of our products, we have a return on investment of three years or less, which is Very uncommon. A large job that was saving $54,000 a year, they had 40 fans that we just did recently. They're saving $54,000 a year, and their ROI is 3.2 years.

Sometimes we're a little over, but still, two and a half, three, three and a half years, that's fantastic. And what we tell people is you don't have to... If you're looking, 'cause as we know, buildings in New York City, condos and co-ops, don't have a lot of money to spend- ... so they can't just do everything they want.

So they can't always say we're gonna spend 20 or 40 or $60,000 to replace all of our fans." What we tell buildings is, you don't have to. As those fans start to wear out on your roof, just replace one or two at a time." [00:11:00] Now, one by one, you're saving 5,000 a year, 10,000 a year. These are the only fans, if you use typical fans and a fan goes bad, and you replace it with the old standard, okay, you've got a bad fan, you replace it with a n- a new fan.

Good, you're done. But there's no return on investment. Our fans are the only exhaust fans that give you a return on investment. And again, because I'm in the building side, not the engineer side, I wanted to make them so that they're easy to install, easy to use for the people in the building, easy to maintain, and that's where this all came together.

Carol Ott: What does it feel like if you turn off the fan, say, for four hours every evening? For the average user, what is that gonna feel like when I walk into the bathroom? And I know now, in a lot of buildings, if I walk into the bathroom, I hear the exhaust. 

John Stevens: You- Most of the time, they won't know. Depending on the bathroom size and the makeup the apartment in the building, bathroom exhausts will move anywhere from 25 CFM to [00:12:00] 40 CFM.

A larger, full master bathroom might go up to 50 CFM, but usually the amount of air being pulled through that vent is so small that you typically don't hear it. So most people would not even know. As a matter of fact, usually when you walk in, the easiest way to check is to take a little piece of toilet tissue and put it up towards the vent to see if it's being held, but usually they don't even know.

Carol Ott: I see. Just give me an idea. If a board is going to budget for energy savings projects, where, in your experience, and I know you have this product, but where would a fan replacement rank on that list? 

John Stevens: I would say the way things are looking right now, and figuring costs and the options that we have, one of the problems that we feel we solve is there just haven't been a lot of good options.

And our company has numerous options, but they can... Y- you wanna do LED lights. Some engineers talk about re-insulating the building, which is a lot of money. Some talk about replacing windows, which is really a lot [00:13:00] of money. So when you're talking about affordability, something that buildings can realistically do, I would say it's probably second on the list because everybody ha- should be doing LED bulbs.

They should replace their lights to LEDs. That's easy to do. It can be done over time, all together, and it's not gonna break the bank. But I'd say that the exhaust fans are number one as far as best bang for your buck. But on that list, I'd say it should be number two because again, windows, insulation, changing out large boiler systems for hundreds of thousands of dollars to more efficient gas, solar panels, very long return on investment.

So when talking about best bang for your buck and the return on investment, I think they're right up there in the top three. 

Carol Ott: Terrific. Thank you, John. It's terrific advice for boards. That's John Stevens, founder of Alternative Sustainability. I'm Carol Ott, and this is Problem Solved, Habitat Magazine's podcast exploring the real-world challenges facing New York's co-op and condo boards.

In each episode, we look at practical solutions [00:14:00] from energy efficiency to governance to building operations with experts who share cost-saving ideas and board-focused strategies and lessons learned. If you're a board member with a story or a challenge you'd like us to explore, we'd love to hear from you.

Visit habitatmag.com or reach out using the contact information in the monthly print magazine. Thanks for listening. 

Ad2: You've been listening to John Stevens, founder of the design manufacturing firm Alternative Sustainability. If your board is looking for ways to save energy and stay ahead of building requirements, Alternative Sustainability can help.

They work with co-ops and condos to make sustainability more achievable, more affordable, and easier to act on. It's a practical path to better building performance and lower reliance on the grid. Visit alternativesustainability.com and see what's possible for your building