The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) released a case study that stressed the importance of energy retrofits. Their findings were eye opening:
Energy Retrofits Benefit Property Owners
Property owners and managers can benefit greatly from reducing utility costs as well as gain an understanding of where problems arise. Energy efficient equipment such as smart thermostats, suite level meters, and properly sized boilers helped produce quantifiable reductions when using a monitoring platform, which helps to compare baseline measurements to newly installed equipment. With modern meters and monitoring in place, management can proactively diagnose and fix problems as they happen, compared to finding out during the next billing cycle.
Integrate Project Design And Implementation
FCM also found that typical projects had siloed project design and implementation separately, which led to accountability issues, delays, as well as budget increases. Integrating both project design and implementation in the beginning may take more front loading of time and effort, but it produced significantly superior results.
Energy Retrofits Benefit Tenants
After performing some qualitative research, the project found that most buildings had inadequate ventilation. This led to suites feeling uncomfortably hot, with tenants opting to leave windows open during winter months, wasting energy. The retrofits included heat recovery ventilation and properly sized boilers, water and electricity suite metering, low flow faucets and toilets, and in-suite air-quality monitors and thermostats. The retrofit doubled the volume of fresh air into the buildings, which provided an immediate and noticeable improvement for residents. Water meters installed in the bathrooms were able to identify leaky toilets, which generated additional utility savings, and allowed tenants to be a part of the conversation, and understand how they are using their energy.
Overall, the project reduced utility costs by more than half a million per year and also reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the equivalent of 963 tonnes of CO2. The project is expected to yield over 350% return on investment during the 10-year partnership.
Interested in how you can get started with energy retrofits? Contact us today and integrate your design and implementation process.
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