Finances

August 28, 2024 Published by Grand River Chapter - By John Hayes

Capital Projects – List to Save Money

For many condos, utility bills can easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So, trimming consumption by even a few percent can save real money. But how do you go about doing it?

For many condos, utility bills can easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So, trimming consumption by even a few percent can save real money. But how do you go about doing it?

As a retired Engineer with a lifelong interest in using energy efficiently, one of the first things I did when I found myself on my condo board was to analyse our utility bills to understand where the money (over 40% of our operating budget) was going. 

The next thing was to research the opportunities for reducing our consumption. I found a couple of easy things and some hard things.  Below is a summary of my findings. 

I compared water bills from two current years to the first two years of water consumption after our building was fully occupied, data the municipality provided. This highlighted that after a decade, our consumption had increased by 30%, equivalent to $25,000/year. A single-running toilet can run 750 litres a day down the drain!

We installed low-cost, remotely monitored meters (from Alert Labs) on our main and cooling tower water meters. Besides giving us detailed logs of our water use, the system software also estimates water losses due to leaks. 

Then, we added a plumbing inspection to the annual fire inspection when staff enter every unit. The leak volume dropped by 80% even before the first inspection, as many owners addressed leaking toilets before the corporation made the repairs and billed them.

The next obvious target was lighting, as many areas in a condo are lit 24/7. I calculated that converting our 24/7 lights to LED bulbs could be worth $15,000/year. This can be as simple as changing out bulbs or as complicated (read expensive) as reworking or replacing fixtures.

There are companies that will do LED upgrades and finance them such that your loan payments match your energy savings, i.e., they cost the corporation nothing. While this may sound attractive, the downside is that you pay loan interest for some time before you get the benefit of reduced consumption. With a 16-month break-even point, we opted to work the upgrade cost into our budget.

Less obvious is the electricity consumed by our building’s many pumps and fans. These are often large electricity consumers, but while there are often ways to reduce the consumption, they are usually capital-intensive. Adding a VFD (Variable Frequency Drive) to control an existing motor can reduce energy consumption by as much as 30%, and can offer even greater savings as they may allow the pump or fan to run slower while still meeting your building’s requirements.

We’ve done this twice now, but only when having to upgrade equipment for other reasons. It wasn’t practical to replace our booster pumps with a new and expensive solution just for the energy savings, but when the original equipment got to end-of-life, we made sure we selected energy-efficient equipment. Upgrades like this can often be paid for from the reserve fund because the “improvement” aspect of the replacement is in line with current building practices.

Water softeners use a lot of water that gets flushed down the drain every time they regenerate. Modern softeners don’t use less water than old ones, but we have considered changing our systems to only soften hot water (roughly 1/3 of the total water used). This could save over $6,000/year in water and salt costs, so when our existing softeners reach the end of life, we will look closely at replacing them with a much smaller system that only softens our hot water.

The makeup air units that blow fresh air into our building use a lot of electricity and gas. An energy audit highlighted that air ducts generally leak quite a bit. It’s reasonable to assume that as much as 30% of the air blown into them leaks out before it reaches the end of the ductwork. We also found that the airflow into our hallways is as much as two or three times higher than necessary. Sealing the ductwork, updating the motor controls, and slowing down the fans could save us $40,000/year and cost three times that to implement. This is a project we are considering, and one where it makes sense to us to consider financing it because of the high capital cost.

The rest of our gas is used in our boilers for building heating and domestic hot water. Like our booster pumps, it will be important to make good choices when they have to be replaced, but the potential savings don’t warrant replacing boilers with years of life left in them.

What opportunities are there in your building? There are companies that will do energy audits, usually at no cost, to highlight potential savings and what would be required to realize them. These audits can be invaluable for identifying savings opportunities to consider in your short and long-term planning. 

John Hayes,
Business Analyst (Retired),
Mergatroyd Systems INC.