Designing Sustainable Heating Systems For Condominiums

Given the fact that the cost of energy will continue to consume a significant portion of their operating costs, has not the time arrived to begin devising some new ways of designing and controlling the heating and cooling systems going into condominium buildings? A good starting point would be to start designing a common system to serve the entire building instead of individual plants for every living unit. Clearly, the capital reserve study for the condominium association would need to address the new concept.

The townhouse configuration offers a good example. Here the design approach has been to consider each unit as a small home - five units, five home heating systems. You might argue that, given our preference for independence, each homeowner should have an inalienable right to control the destiny of his or her individual comfort level. But if the future unit owner had been in on the building design phase and were told that an engineered common heating system feeding all units could provide that degree of comfort at reduced future energy costs and at little to no increase in purchase price, I think we know which way the vote would go.

It's commonly understood that boilers operate most efficiently when running at full capacity. Suppose we had a single, high-efficiency, condensing type boiler properly maintained to run at about ninety-five percent efficiency. We're going to allow that common boiler to run at its rated capacity, supplying hot water to each unit's radiation for the ninety of the time when it is capable of meeting the common demand. We will meter the amount of heating water supplied to each unit for billing purposes. Each individual unit would also have a small boiler riding on the common system. It will fire up to modulate the temperature in the individual units only when we have an extreme cold snap, thereby satisfying the different inalienable opinions of comfort of different owners.

An alternative might be a second common boiler that fires up to meet infrequent higher demands. The result would be reduced heating energy costs for our newly defined client - the development, and ultimately each unit owner. An astute developer might consider all this a marketing plus. But of course, he or she would need to intentionally steer the design in this direction. But before people are motivated to even begin thinking along these lines they need some data that sets at least some general feasibility parameters.

What are the comparative costs of individual heating systems versus common systems in specific building configurations? What reductions in operating costs can be expected and what would the rate of return on investment be? How much would it cost to retrofit an existing building? Could the latter cost be factored into a capital reserve fund plan as an improvement? The hardware is on the shelf. Some work needs to be done in system design and (here comes the hard part) selling management.

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