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Success Story: Huguenot Park Apartment

Partner Information

Huguenot Park Apartment, New Paltz, New York
Annual Cash Savings: $1,302.00
Annual Energy savings: 11,038 kWh
Payback period: 1.8 years
Prevented 13,246 pounds of pollution

Service and Product Provider

Central Hudson Gas & Electric

Management Company Saves 30 Percent in Energy Bills

For Huguenot Park Apartments of the Wilder Richman Management Corporation in New Paltz, NY, being a good management company means staying alert for innovative ideas. When it comes to utility bills, that means looking for ways to reduce costs.

Free Audit Starts The Ball Rolling

In November, 1996, Richman responded to a letter from the electric utility, Central Hudson Gas & Electric, offering free energy audits. At no cost to Richman, an energy engineer took a tour of the apartments and recorded specific information about the lighting, heating, cooling, and water heating equipment installed in the office and common areas of the complex. Several weeks later the engineer returned to the site to discuss energy-savings recommendations.

Programmable Savings

The 8-year-old buildings are all-electric and were built with double-pane thermal windows with the recommended insulation levels. The common areas are heated using electric resistance heating elements, which make heating expensive for this upstate New York business. But the office and the community areas are only occupied 20 to 30 hours a week and are already well insulated, so the auditor recommended a clock thermostat programmed to automatically set the temperature back during unoccupied times as the most cost-effective option. Richman may decide to install a heat pump or convert to fossil fuel heating in the future, once the savings from the improved controls are maximized.

Lighting The Public Spaces

Since the apartment buildings were built in 1990, Richman could have assumed that they were too new to improve. Fortunately he didn’t: the auditor found inefficient lighting throughout the complex that could be upgraded to produce a significant profit.

Richman replaced the parking lot and security lights, which were mercury vapor, with high-pressure sodium (HPS) lights. This saves about $423 per year. And the warm orange light of the HPS fixtures provides a safer atmosphere for the parking lots.

There were also lots of incandescent lamps in exterior fixtures throughout the buildings, which were connected to a photocell that turned them on at night. All of these were replaced with screw-in compact fluorescents, saving Richman about $209 a year.

Gradually, the maintenance staff realized that the long life of these lamps meant that they could use that extra time for things that were more important than replacing burned-out bulbs.

The office and community center lights were 4-lamp standard fluorescents. Modifying fixtures like these is usually quite profitable, but because these fixtures operate less than 20 hours a week, the upgrade was not cost effective. Installing three new LED exit signs, on the other hand, saved about $62 a year. Because light-emitting diode (LED) exit signs can last up to 20 years, the maintenance staff will probably forget how difficult it used to be to change all those incandescent bulbs.

Save $262 In 30 Minutes?

Because the community area includes laundry facilities, hot water use was one of the larger fractions of the electric bill. For only $50, the hot water pipes from the water heater to the washing machines were completely insulated. This 30-minute project saves about $262 a year, principally because it lowers the gradual loss of heat that occurs through the copper pipes.

Richman implemented all the recommendations in the original energy audit, and in the process saved $1,302 a year in electric consumption. This is almost 30 percent of the electric bills for the common areas. Plus, the whole project had a simple payback of 1.8 years.