Engaging Residents in Energy Efficiency: Park Terrace Gardens’ Green Committee

Want to reduce your energy and water costs in your cooperative or condominium?  Tired of ongoing energy and water issues clogging up your email inbox and board meetings? Or are you just not sure where to begin?

A few years ago, Park Terrace Gardens in Upper Manhattan decided to form committees that focused on specific issues. This sparked the creation of their Green Committee lead by four passionate women – Osi Kaminer, Kim Schwab, Bev Solow, and Leslie Zema.

What Does a Green Committee Do?

It’s a group of residents that…

• Serve as a resource and contact for the board, shareholders, property manager, and super to address residents’ energy efficiency and sustainability needs.  
• Understand the building’s energy needs.
• Research and enlist energy and water management experts, like Bright Power.
• Assess savings opportunities and the best next steps in collaboration with experts, building staff, and board members.
• Collaborate with the coop management, elect to move forward with a plan of action, implement savings measures, and keep the board up-to-date throughout the installation.
• Review project success and savings with the board and shareholders once the project is complete, including a way to ensure ongoing savings year after year.
• Continually learn from other buildings’ energy initiatives.

Green Committee Goal: Keep residents comfortable while keeping energy costs down.

Park Terrace Gardens Green Committee at Work

Through completing their own utility benchmarking, Park Terrace Gardens became aware of the building’s needs to reduce inefficiencies. Needing to comply with local energy auditing laws, the board, by recommendation of the Green Committee, brought on Bright Power to complete a comprehensive energy audit that dug deeper into the property’s opportunities to find sustainable savings. The energy audit report helped elucidate and pinpoint long-term issues and allowed the board cost-effective options to implement energy and water savings measures. The Green Committee was critical to the success of this project and overall process, coordinating with the energy experts while collaborating with the board and shareholders to ensure smooth sailing. As a result, the measures below were completed at the property and the savings are monitored using EnergyScoreCards.

Upgraded boiler and balanced the steam distribution system

The Green Committee counted over 80 windows that were left open during heating season! Since the upgrade, the Green Committee used portable temperature sensors to educate residents on the changes they can make in their unit to get the most out of the retrofit, like moving furniture or heavy curtains away from radiators.

Weatherstripped exterior doors and in-unit AC systems

To tackle this effort and get the return on their investment, the Green Committee created gift bags for each resident complete with weatherstripping designed for windows with A/C units, detailed installation instructions, and handwritten personalized notes to each resident.  The committee saw huge success with this campaign and are sure the personalized touch made all the difference. This measure has greatly reduced the amount of air infiltration coming into the building, minimizing the amount of energy wasted in both heating and cooling seasons.

Installed LED lighting

The board sponsored a giveaway of 5 LED bulbs for each unit in an effort to attract shareholders and reduce energy costs. The Green Committee set up the building’s conference room with different types of LED bulbs to demonstrate to the tenants that LED lights can have the same – or often times better – lighting output as other energy-intensive bulbs.  Through education and live demonstration, the committee changed the opinions of shareholders. In tandem with a common area lighting retrofit, the building saw the lighting retrofit reduced 15% in electricity cost reductions in the first year!

Installed faucet aerators

The Green Committee shared with the building shareholders how and why they were making the change – using the audit report as a crutch to validate the investment opportunity (payback was under 6 months!). Supplemented with informational flyers and thank you notes, the committee was able to make a big impact.

Advice From Park Terrace Gardens on Starting Your Green Committee

1.  Regularly educate and communicate with board members and residents.
Committee member, Osi Kaminer, says that their commitment to consistently educating the board is the key to their success.  She also says that having a committee member serve as a board member to liaise between the two groups is crucial.  This ensures the committee gets in front of the board regularly and can continue to push forward the Green Committee’s agenda outside of meetings.

Osi attributes their success with residents to the constant communication and open access to committee members. The committee created a group email for shareholders that would forward to the Green Committee and the property manager.  They also publicized their phone numbers and welcomed regular contact.  This personal communication reminded the other shareholders that the committee members were residents themselves, making shareholders more receptive to the Green Committee’s suggestions.

2.  Don’t shy away from shareholders who complain.
Osi is clear: the committee’s goal is to ensure everyone is as comfortable as possible.  While they know they may not be able to make everyone happy, they can make everyone comfortable.  

Investigating a shareholder’s complaints about a cold unit sparked a visit where the committee learned that a previous tenant had removed a radiator from the unit.  And, in discussing this with the shareholder, the committee learned that there were other units facing the same issues.  If they had simply said “the boiler is set above the temperature required by law” and moved on, they would never have learned about the missing radiators in multiple units.  

3.  Understand the Board’s Goals.
Have the committee start with a list, provided by the board, of items they may want to explore and address. Let the committee investigate and share back their findings with the board.  Keeping your goals aligned will be a constant reminder – you are both on the same side with the same goal.

4.  Look to Others’ Success.
This Green Committee attended many workshops and connected with other buildings that completed or were undergoing similar projects.  By learning from those who already have gone through the process, the Park Terrace Gardens Green Committee knew about potential roadblocks before they hit them.  And, they were able to show what a project might look like on the other side, exciting the board and shareholders.

Read more detailed information about the steam system upgrades in this Building Energy Exchange case study. 

How might you recommend a Green Committee for your coop or condo? Share your story with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or email us at info@brightpower.com!