Zero Emissions Retrofit Opportunities and Roadblocks
This presentation reviews the state of the art in multifamily retrofits. The goal is to eliminate emissions, thereby eliminating climate policy risk. What if natural gas became 10 times more expensive? What if gas stoves no longer complied with the state sanitary code? Better to address these issues preemptively. We share our best knowledge of:
- Insulation and air sealing.
- Windows and doors.
- Heat pump water heaters.
- Minisplit pros and cons (air source heat pumps).
- Ground source heat pumps.
- The difficulty with ducts.
- The difficulty with drop-in boiler replacement, and
- The magnetic appeal of induction cooking.
Attendees will learn why retrofits are harder than new construction, but also what to do about it.
Slides, Past Video and Training Material
Webinar: Zero Emissions Retrofit Opportunities and Roadblocks
Zero Emissions Retrofit Opportunities and Roadblocks
Presenter:
Douglas Quattrochi - Doug
Moderator:
Naomi Richardson- Naomi
[Start 0:00:00]
Presentation
Doug: Welcome to this MassLandlord’s webinar. For those of you who don't know, MassLandlords is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association. Our mission is to create better rental housing by helping owners run profitable compliant, quality businesses. We're democratically governed by 2,500 dues-paying members across the state. We've got another 7,000 subscribers and 330,000 annual site visitors, and there's a picture of just some of our team members.
We'll get started with today's agenda. We're going to cover everything we can about zero emissions retrofits and that's different from new construction and then we'll take Q&A at the end. We do have a lot of ground to cover. I want you to know the slides are being posted, and this event is being recorded, so without further ado let's get started.
Zero Emissions Retrofit Opportunities and Roadblocks. For those of you who don't know my name is Doug Quattrochi. I’m the executive director of MassLandlords.
Our goals for this webinar today are to understand emissions at a high level and understand why emissions have to reach zero and understand the legal framework in which landlords in Massachusetts operate and then we'll take a deep dive into all the strategies I know of to reduce emissions in an existing multi-family without gut renovating it. If you're going to do a gut renovation, the problem becomes so much easier but we're going to look at where we can reduce emissions and places where we get stuck with an existing building. Then I’ll have some notes at the end about solar and carbon capture and some other topics.
You can see on the screen there there's the URL where the slides will be posted.
The big ideas for today we can reduce emissions without gut renovation, but retrofitting all the way down to zero emissions is going to be pretty hard and therefore it makes sense for landlords, owners, and managers of existing housing to support efforts that are working to make new construction and gut renovation have zero emissions because it's a new construction and gut renovation that's going to give us the leeway to work to reduce emissions in existing buildings.
Starting at zero is relatively easy if you've got a clean slate but getting to zero from somewhere with existing emission infrastructure is really tough. Another way to say this idea visually is think about the kitchen on the left versus the opportunity on the right. On the left, you're looking at an existing gas stove with existing baseboards and somebody's living in the unit and it's clearly dated but you know it's per the code and it's fine and it's safe housing and people can live there. What can you really do without being hugely disruptive? Whereas on the right-hand side, if you're going to do some of the installation we're talking about, some of the new electrical circuits, running ducting, or running many split lines it's all much easier because you can get in the walls and it'll come out looking like new.
Our focus today is really on the retrofit side. Let me start by setting the groundwork a little bit and make sure we're all on the same page about what it means to reduce emissions. So we're all familiar with the term from owning a car probably or we know people who do own cars if we don't own one ourselves, your car has to pass an emissions test each year. That's really about reducing smog, nitrous oxides, and soot produce. This heavy stuff like what we see in the picture and you get this smog and it's really bad to breathe, but now we're on the next level of emissions reductions.
For today we're particularly talking about stuff that's invisible. Carbon dioxide, unburned methane or natural gas, refrigerant and water vapor are all things that buildings can emit that will tend to increase the global average temperature and that's what's driving climate change. Of course we care because climate change really is in a position to ruin everything. Even if you're not near the coast, we're already seeing in Massachusetts increased rainfall and rainfall-related flooding far inland up at elevation in basements that never used to be wet before. We've done webinars on that in the past.
What we're seeing if you're in the coast is that coastal flooding is basically a certainty. The First Street Foundation is a nonprofit that uses the latest flood maps. Their flood data is now incorporated on Redfin and realtor.com who assess the flood factor in every listing, and you can see this is an April 2022 Back Bay, Boston condo listing, which if you read it carefully it says the likelihood of 12 inches of flood water to this building within five years is 98 percent. That is a mind-blowing statistic. If you're the owner of that condo, I sincerely apologize. I’m sure you will sell it because a lot of people are not knowledgeable, but because you all are here and are gaining this knowledge you will not buy that condo unless you're sure that you have enough flood insurance to cover what is now certain to happen.
The reason Back Bay is certain to flood is because of what happened in New York with Hurricane Sandy 10 years back you had 30-foot storm surge at Battery Park. If a hurricane hits Boston head on, which is possible, Back Bay is in trouble. Of course, even if we're not directly hit, climate change is going to reduce the livability of other parts of the world. It’s going to send a lot of people to Massachusetts, which overall is a pretty safe and stable place to live. That's going to strain our infrastructure and our resources. Not that we're unwelcoming, but that's going to be difficult for us to accommodate.
[0:05:18]
As we see, overall temperatures increase weather variability increases, which means we'll go through faster freeze-thaw cycles and we'll have rain and it will ice over. It will be much harder to manage properties. We're already seeing in places like Holyoke these urban heat islands where the code requires heat beyond into June 15th but starting in March it's too hot for people and they want air-conditioning and we've seen for now five or six years a low mold litigation because properties are holding too much moisture. we're not getting those hard thaws, the hard freezes through the winter that reduce the overall mold spore count in the area, so there's all that normal stuff.
Plus we have the Global Warming Solutions Act, which now for 14 years has said by 2050 we're going to be at least 80 percent below 1990 level emissions. In 2020 they put some teeth behind this by releasing this Building Sector Report, which didn't get nearly enough attention. They used the word intervention 25 times. They say decarbonization of commercial and residential buildings will require an intervention in nearly every home and commercial structure. Here you have the order from today two years ago Earth Day 2020 executive order for net zero emissions, and that says we have to be effectively zero by 2050.
Now people are working on carbon capture. I’ll mention this at the end, but there's no economically feasible way for us to actually go do that as small landlords and say we'll offset our emissions by paying somebody else to capture those back, so what it means is at some point the state may start to take away our heating equipment and it's much better to be proactive about it and do it ourselves on our own terms.
Just to put one final point to this there are bills currently before the legislature that are expected to pass that would allow banning new construction and gut renovation to use gas or to add new hookups, and that's a pretty sensible thing from our perspective because that's easier to do, but people are starting to talk about would we use eminent domain to take out boilers in different properties. You already do see something like this with oil tanks Boston Globe did a story two months ago where a homeowner had $185,000 of state-imposed remediation costs because their oil tank leaked, so the message there was get oil tank insurance or a rider that covers it.
But of course the general question for landlords is if they're going to pass a law that causes anybody to rip out a boiler on unfavorable terms, wouldn't it be landlords first? the answer is maybe in Massachusetts yes. But it's not all negative because there's actually a huge business opportunity here as we've been saying for a couple years now because everybody else is still used to paying for gas heat, you can offer heat included and if you use these new technologies especially if you couple that with solar panels, it'll be free for you to offer that heat so you can charge heat included rates and get a return on your investment because everybody else is expecting the alternative is i have to pay this gas heat anywhere. So we've got an article up on the site, “Can Massachusetts landlords Charge for Solar?” The answer is yes you can through this heat-included approach. There's a lot of sticks potentially coming over the next 30 years and there's this carrot still where you can monetize the free heat so there's a lot of reasons why you should look at this, and it's really good that you're here now to hear about this.
Let me go through some examples in detail. Let's start with a typical gas boiler, so this is typically what we think of when we have emissions here. You've got this very high efficiency unit. It’s bolted to the wall. It’s got a tank for domestic hot water, and it's got just PVC pipe. The most efficient boilers don't need to go out a chimney. They just go out that pipe because it's a very low temperature gas.
Now people will say gas is clean. That's true in the sense that it's low soot it doesn't produce smog in an area, but it's not low emissions. Even if you have 100 percent efficient, you're still emitting stuff. The reason is because efficiency talks about how much of the latent chemical energy in the gas gets turned into heat for the unit, and so 90 percent efficiency means I got 90 percent of the energy out of the gas. Even if you have a hundred percent efficient, you have to burn that gas and you're going to produce on average three to six tons of CO2 per household per year in Massachusetts. A well-insulated apartment between two other units is going to emit on the low side three tons per year, and a standalone single family will be on the high side six tons per year, but that's basically the cost of heating with gas. If you have oil or wood or anything else you're still emitting as well; anything that burns is going to emit carbon.
[0:10:07]
What is a ton of carbon dioxide? Well it's the space of air described by a square telephone pole so you take that telephone pole out in the field somewhere and you tip it down and you move it forward and you get this giant box so that's one ton, so each household in Massachusetts is emitting three to six of these pure CO2 every year just to stay warm. If you add in the total household consumption including other things like electricity and dryers and stoves and all that, the average Massachusetts footprint per the EPA is 6 to 12 tons per year, so we've got a ton of emissions here to get out of housing and a lot of us focus on cars but housing also is a big factor.
There's a lot more than just burning stuff that causes emissions, so here's the table of stuff that's really relevant for housing providers. Emissions can be caused by carbon dioxide yes, but there's a whole bunch of other stuff with an equivalent global warming potential or higher. So they looked at when this gas goes into the atmosphere, how much does it warm the planet over 20 years, so carbon dioxide is said to have a version of one, a global warming potential of one because that's the baseline.
Some people are trying to pipe hydrogen gas through existing gas lines to have an alternative fuel but that has a higher global warming potential if it's unburned, so that's not necessarily a slam dunk and methane gas, which is natural gas that has a global warming potential of 50 to 100 times carbon dioxide. You would think well if i burn the gas i make carbon dioxide, that's true but we have tons of methane gas leaks in Massachusetts, about 10,000 in any given year so there's a map of the methane gas leaks. We've got a ton of that going out, and all the refrigerants that we use in these heat pumps that are supposed to help us for climate they have an even higher global warming potential, 1,000 to 10,000 times more than carbon dioxide, so there's a lot of reasons why emissions and buildings are going to continue to be or increasingly discussed.
Seeing these numbers for refrigerants might make you think, “Well, a refrigerant is just awful,” and the answer is not compared to combustion because you don't expect the refrigerants to get out of the loop if the loop is well-sealed and all your brazed fittings and everything is real tight, you're not going to lose that refrigerant, so you can expect on an ongoing basis that your refrigerant emissions should be zero. But of course if you do have a leak, you need to recharge your system. The amount you need to put in is the amount that you leaked out, so let's say a typical household or apartment is going to need 10 pounds of refrigerant of some kind roughly, if you had that entire system drained out to the atmosphere, you'd have 60 tons of global warming potential using the worst refrigerant on the market.
That's really discouraging because you could think, “Well I’d be better off burning and combusting natural gas and having all this refrigerant leak,” and if you have a leaky system that is true you're better off just burning the gas. But the reason refrigerants and heat pumps are being used and as a solution to climate change is because there's an awful lot of work on reduced global warming potential refrigerants, and so that's technically feasible. We're definitely going to see that. We do expect given a whole bunch of refrigerant cycles in use, we'll able be able to get those emissions down to be zero even in leak scenarios. That's basically the groundwork for this for this hour here.
We're switching from burning stuff, which always produces emissions no matter what, to using refrigerant loops to move heat around, pull it from outside, pull it from the air, pull it from the ground and heat our houses that way. It’s a better idea as long as refrigerant doesn't leak, so we'll talk about specific examples here.
We want to also mention that besides just conditioning the space heating our apartments, we've also got to think about other places where we emit stuff and so one of those is cooking.
A lot of us have gas stoves in our units and a lot of times you turn it on and it doesn't quite light, you can smell a little puff of gas, that's the un-combusted methane, and that times all the households in Massachusetts makes for a ton of methane emissions and given that methane's global warming potential is 50 to 100 times, higher gas stoves are actually really bad for the environment. Even if you do burn all that methane perfectly efficiently, you still produce the CO2.’
Stoves are going to be discussed and we'll also discuss domestic hot water, water heaters and the electricity grid just briefly. All right so that's where we're headed.
I’ll give you a summary right now of all the things that you can do to reduce emissions without a gut renovation, and so we've got rows of options for improvements to make and columns indicating rough costs and rough emissions reductions. These numbers are very rough. They depend on where you are in the state, what your building looks like, and what's going to be the actual solution, but it gives you an idea. It gives us something to talk about, so for instance at the start of the list, insulation and air sealing we'll talk about that first; then we'll do new windows and doors.
Then we'll do replacing an 80 percent gas boiler with a 95 percent efficient boiler that would be considered a good upgrade by today's standards or replacing that however efficient boiler with min-splits, we'll look at that. We'll look at replacing gas stoves with induction. We'll look at replacing gas water heaters with a heat pump water heater is different from an electric resistance heater and we'll look at landlord thermostats.
[0:15:40]
In all these scenarios, you can see these are big ticket improvements except for the landlord thermostats here. These are $10,000 changes to the property and we're using a three-decker as an example. I know we don't all own three-deckers. If you want to think about it on a per unit basis, you could kind of divide by three, but you'll lose some of the economies of scale, so your price might be actually higher. If you have more units, you don't have to multiply by like if you've got nine units in the building, you don't have to multiply by three because you'll get more economy of scale, so you just picked a three deck or a random set point.
There are rebates available. I’ll point you to those and so for instance insulation air sealing can be rebated down quite substantially. Actually it can go down to zero if your renters are Section 8 in a building, they'll cover 100 percent of the insulation costs.
Then we show some emissions reductions, so there's some stuff you can do that will partially reduce emissions. There's some stuff that you can do that will fully eliminate them with an asterisk and the asterisk just says there's two caveats here. One is we mentioned refrigerant leaks, so if you have refrigerant leaks you've kind of not helped but then also if you purchase a non-renewable electricity supply we'll talk about that later, the power plant's still going to be emitting on your behalf. But these things are definitely the most impactful the question is are they cost feasible for you
Let's go through this table. That's what we'll do this hour and we'll look at these different options in detail and hopefully you'll come away with at least one thing that you think you can do to implement to reduce emissions at your properties. We'll start at the top with installation and air sealing. The goal here is not to stop burning but to reduce the need for that combustion that you've already got in the house, so what they'll do is they'll fill the voids between the studs with cellulose that stops air moving around, stops air transferring heat from outside to inside. They'll cover the unfinished attic floor with cellulose or they'll fill rafter voids if you don't have an attic space, and typically now they'll conduct a sill sealing operation where they will foam and fiberglass around the basement sill that stops air from getting out from outside into the basement and or up the walls. Mass Save will also weather strip doors, so they'll put this weather stripping around three sides typically and stop leaks to and from the building.
Installation air sealing has a huge pro because landlords can get up to 100 percent off at Mass Save depending on the renter income, but even if your renters are market renters, you can still save 75 percent off, so that's great bang for your buck and nearly every building can be insulated more than it currently is. Even if you've got like an addition, part of it was done in fiberglass in the ‘80s they can cellulose the rest of it, they're very flexible. They can do anything. You're going to see an average emissions reductions of about 30 percent, you know it's not it's not perfect but it's not bad, and you and your renters will see lower heating bills and experience greater comfort, so that will be higher retention.
On the downside, to use this Mass Save program, your renters have to cooperate. We're going to talk with that in a second. They have to give you their bills. It will take a while to schedule. It honestly took me a year to get to get my house my three-decker insulated. You got to not slip through the bureaucracy is the problem, and then there's a knob and tube part. You cannot install insulation around knob and tube wiring. It’s a fire hazard. There's a limited rebate available. I’ll tell you another option as well to get rid of the knob and tube.
Here's the basic process for insulation and air sealing. Talk to each renter. Get a copy of their utility bill. It can work if you pay the utilities, too. You just have less paperwork to do. You've got to schedule a no-cost home energy assessment at Mass Save. They'll always recommend insulation if you haven't had it done before. They might give you free thermostats on the spot, it depends. They used to do light bulbs. They're not doing that anymore. I don't think all the LED light bulbs are already in place pretty much.
They can redo insulation if you've had it done before by Mass Save and there's a reason like you renovate it and it fell out or something they can put it back. Then you take your recommendation to a Mass Save-approved contractor. You hire the contractor. They bill you for your program portion, they bill the state for the rest, and so it's very little out of pocket costs. You don't have to buy it and then get a rebate. It’s just they take care of it directly.
The two ways I mentioned insulation air sealing could go wrong are if you have electrical meters on the outside of house like if i flip back a couple slides, this wall here could not be insulated from the outside and you have to remind the folks doing the work they have to get into the unit. They have to drill into the walls on the inside and then they don't patch that up fully so you're going to have to have somebody else or do it yourself to patch those holes. Then the knob and tube wiring thing can be a real blocker. If you get an old building, they will not put it in until an electrician signs off that all the knob and tube is gone.
[0:20:35]
However, there's a new thing called the Expanded HEAT Loan, which will give you zero percent of up to $50,000 to remove barriers to weatherization. That means you can borrow the money to rewire your entire building and get off the knob and tube and put in circuit breakers and all that just so that you can insulate and then they'll pay for the installation still free mostly, so that's a huge opportunity there. If you can justify that HEAT Loan, the terms are typically seven years but that probably will get you over the hurdle there so that's really important to know about and that's new this year.
If we look at the insulation line from our summary table, it might cost you to do a three-decker $20,000 to $50,000, but you're going to get that for mostly free maybe $5,000 to $10,000 depending on whether you have to pay for the electrical, and so on, and your emissions are going to reduce between 20 percent and 40 percent, so that's a really impactful thing to remember. There's no reason why any unit shouldn't have insulation. That's the first thing.
Let's talk about the second thing, new windows, and doors. I hope you know that the most efficient window is not a double-hung window with sashes that go up and down. It’s a casement because a casement like a door presses firmly against weatherstripping all four sides. It makes a very airtight seal. The issue of course is that casements are tougher to use in a rental.
Let me talk about the pros first though. If you switch to casement windows or high-efficiency windows, you'll have better sanitary code compliance. The code in Massachusetts says that renters must be able to open and close windows and doors without excessive force and that those must all be sealed against weather and vermin, and if you get new windows you've taken care of that. Generally it'll make your renters happier and more comfortable as well.
But windows and doors are a small amount of the heating loss for a typical unit, typically no more than 10 percent to 30 percent and if you've already got vinyl replacement windows, your heating loss from windows and doors is in the 5 percent to 10 percent range. Typically if you want to tighten up an old door, weather stripping will do 80 percent of it. You've also got to be really careful with material choice.
If you get a vinyl replacement window, which is very common and a renter drops an air conditioner on it, the weld joints at the corner will crack and now you've got no seal at all and the sashes don't move or whatever so that can be really disappointing. Pro landlords will get wood or they'll get metal clad wood, but that's very expensive so now your material costs are much higher and you're going to pay a lot more per window.
Also if it wasn't obvious before the window screen in the casement has to be inside so the casement can swing out and that makes casements kind of rough in a rental because they're very easy in front and center for renters to damage. They don't even have to be trying to interact with the window and the window can be closed against the weather and still they can damage the screen.
One other thing, a pro tip to keep in mind is that casements don't come in the same size as double-hung windows, so if you want to renovate a building with casements to be super energy efficient, you're going to have these gaps at the bottom like the casement window that was tall enough to fill that gap is too wide and that's because they've got to have a kind of minimum boxiness for the casement to stay in alignment out and in and not bend and stuff. In this case the landlord has put in cement board underneath. It will be painted gray to match but it's just one of those little annoyances that you're going to switch to casements you've got to remember that.
Overall though, I think you'll see based on our table, casements are not a strong recommendation, new doors are not a strong recommendation because they're going to be mad expensive to install in a three-decker for instance, and there aren't really substantial rebates. We're really hoping to be a window loan program. If somebody's aware of it and you can point me to it let me know because I may be wrong about this, but in previous years there certainly hasn't been and your emissions reduction is small because you don't lose a lot of heat out your windows and doors. They're just a small area relative to the walls and the attic and all that. That's our second option for emissions reduction.
Moving right along we'll talk about our third option. What if we actually just replace the boilers, right? So on the left we've got these Weil-McLain 80 percent efficient boilers, very durable, long in service. On the right, we've got that high-efficiency boiler again.
Is this really worth doing? Well, yes it could be. It will lead you to taking down the chimney. You can lose a lot of heat through the chimney so if you're eventually going to renovate this place, you want to tear down the chimney. Having a high-efficiency boiler vent out the side by the driveway or something is a great thing because now you don't need the chimney at all and it leverages all your existing unit equipment, so you can use your same baseboards, you can use your same radiators. You don't have to get into the units at all to renovate a new boiler.
[0:25:18]
But on the downside here, the law is very clear as we talked about. Massachusetts has to be net zero emissions by 2050. It’s 2022. A boiler lasts for 30 years, so if you install one today it's not going to be allowed to operate past 2050 unless you actually have a way to buy an offset for it, and right now there's no way to do that so that's kind of a risky strategy.
I would really only recommend you reinstall a new boiler if you've got a no heat emergency situation and you can't save your current boiler you can't make it work because I don't know what the implications are of that net zero emissions law whether they're going to allow you to operate because you installed it or it's going to have to come out or what. Also this emissions reduction is pretty small relative to the cost.
You look at our table again. You could spend much less on three different boilers. You could spend much more but the idea is it's in this $15,000 to $30,000 range for a three-decker potentially to do all your boilers over, and your rebates are going to be pretty limited, $2,700 potentially maybe times three. It’s still going to be a five-figure improvement, and you're only going to reduce emissions 10 to 20 percent. You're getting a lot more energy out of the gas, so your costs will be a lot lower but you still have to burn the gas to get the heat in the first place, so your emissions reductions are not that great. You might save 30 percent to 50 percent in cost though because they're very efficient. All right, that's our third option.
Fourth option, what if instead of replacing a boiler—any boiler, old, new, oil, gas—what if we just went right to mini-splits? A lot of people are talking about this now, and it's very trendy. A mini-split is a condenser outside and then there's an inside unit. It’s basically just a refrigerator split into two parts. Every refrigerator is cold on the inside and by making the cold in the inside cold, it makes your kitchen warmer actually. Typically you don't notice because the box being cooled is so much smaller than the rest of the kitchen, but the idea with the heat pumps is that you do notice. Now it pulls energy from the cold outside and dumps it into your inside units here, so that you can be you know warmed in the winter and then it runs backwards as well and you can have air conditioning in the summer.
The pros of this approach, you can offer air-conditioning with the apartment. That's a hugely desirable amenity. If you offer air-conditioning, you get more qualified applicants. You’ll be able to charge higher rents. You'll fill the apartment faster. You'll have lower turnover. That's a huge deal, and your emissions will go down to zero unless as I mentioned you have a refrigerant leak you expect not to emit anything to provide all your heat and cooling.
There's a huge downside to mini-splits especially with older buildings and older rental housing. Unless you insulate and air seal first, it's pretty likely that the mini splits are not going to be able to move enough heat. They might be very efficient but they won't be able to get enough heat into the unit when it's really cold outside. Everybody recommends you insulate and air seal your unit first before you explore mini splits.
Also this is not nearly enough talked about, but the filters require cleaning. Every one to six months, you have to get into that inside unit here. You have to clean this thing, and under the State Sanitary Code, landlords are legally required to keep the heating equipment working; that means we have to clean. It means we have to go into those units. Now you could ask a renter to do it, but if the renter says no, then you got to do it or you're going to send somebody in and that's really annoying.
The other real drawback to these mini-splits is there are less mature technology than those boilers, which will last for sure for 30 years maybe with a new thermocouple, maybe with a new vent damper, but they're good for a long time. The condensers are not rated for the same lifetime. They say the last 10 years, you might get 20 out of them but they're not like a gas boiler yet, so they're somewhere in that shorter lifespan.
Also if you have any plans to repaint or reside the exterior of your building you got to do that first before you put the mini-splits on because most of the cost of the mini-split is the plumber to put in the copper lines. Typically they run outside the house in a retrofit, and they'd have to come all off to redo the siding, so you've got to get that squared away first.
I’ll show you another thing. You probably know about mini-splits, but you may not. They have to blow on to what they're heating and cooling, and so for instance if you've got a bedroom door that's closed and you don't have a mini-split head in the bedroom, there could be a 10- or 20-degree difference in that room compared to the rest of the apartment. That could be really bad, and these old buildings like this is an 1890 closed floor plan for an apartment here, this is really tough to heat with mini-splits. Let's say you're going to leave the porch and staircases unheated here, then you've got to get into the bedrooms. You've got three bedrooms here and you've got to do because all these walls here, you can't have this one bedroom serve all that. You can't put one here that serves all that. You've got to have kind of three to go past all those walls.
[0:30:23]
The only economy here in this floor plan is the kitchen one if placed right here can blow into the bathroom, which the door is open for most of the time one assumes, and so you can get a little bit of boost in that space, but in general anything that predates an open concept floor plan is going to be pretty hard to heat and cool with mini-splits and if you think about how your baseboards or radiators work, there's one in every room for a reason, so that's a really important consideration.
If you do this in an old building, the HVAC tech might recommend you do backup combustion, and the pro of that, is that you know you can't freeze up in the winter. But now if you've got your old boiler sitting in the basement you've got two systems to maintain, and if you don't use the boiler, it could get rusty or fail or something.
Maybe the pilot light goes out and now you turn it on and it's not working and your renter doesn't know how to turn it on and all these problems, you still have those emissions and now with two thermostats you get into this thermostat conflict situation, which can be pretty common in rentals where the renters got the thermostat for the main apartment set for 71 and the boilers running to keep the place at 71. But at night they're a little bit too warm so rather than turn the thermostat down, they turn the mini-split down and now the mini splits trying to cool while the boiler is heating, it's an education problem really. People need to know not to do that but it's very possible if you have a kind of dual system, so that’s not ideal.
What would be the dream would be to have this heat pump somehow heat your baseboards and radiators so you don't have to get into the unit and change the way you're heating upstairs. Just do it all in the basement, but what we've learned is that the baseboards are typically designed to transmit heat to 180 Fahrenheit, and the only heat pumps we're aware of that can get even up to 160 use a refrigerant that's not allowed in the United States at the moment. There's one that would be allowed, but the manufacturers not bring it to the US market yet. They're focusing on Europe because Europe's generally 20 years ahead of us on heat pumps.
The other thing is baseboards don't currently get to do your cooling because if you run cool water through a baseboard to try to get to the air cool, first of all ideally you'd want that baseboard to be up at the ceiling so the cool air flows down over the fins like the hot air flows up over the fins but you'd also get this mad condensation issue.
There is one person I know of. His name is Mark Siegenthaler. He’s working as a consultant with Caleffi Hydronics, and he has a system that will run cool water but monitor the dew points all along the way so that if at any point the water temperature would get too low to cause condensation, they'd keep the water temperature up, so if you've got an 85-degree Fahrenheit day outside and you want the apartment to be like 75, you can do that and run water that's cool enough because basically in the 70 range not cool enough to trigger condensation. We're pretty sure there's going to be some big developments in this space, cooling via baseboards, but you have this really cutting edge and you have to go find the Caleffi books to read about that.
I’ll just make one more note here. Some of us are aware of the difference in heat pump technology. You pull heat out of the air or you can pull heat out of the ground, and the air source approach is pretty inefficient. If you've got a 20 Fahrenheit degree day your refrigerant has to be below 20 Fahrenheit to pull that heat in from outside and that makes the refrigerant loop do an awful lot of work and it can't get that low and it can't pull that much heat. Also those air-source heat pumps can get iced over more commonly in the other parts of the country, and in this part of the country we get just total snow just covering it up, so you've got to shovel around them potentially or mount them high enough up.
But a ground source is potentially much better because it pulls heat energy out of the ground. Your refrigerant doesn't need to get so cold; it can be very efficient, and also move a lot of heat. And so again the dream would be to do some kind of ground source thing that avoids all the air source problems and you've got a ground source loop that powers your existing baseboards and radiators. There's something like it being done in the Framingham pilot by Eversource, but it's not using existing radiators. It’s installing ductwork and mini-splits and so on.
In general, there's a lot of heat pump considerations and the technology is very much in flux. People are trying to figure out how do we do this most optimally.
Returning to our table there, if you replace your boiler of any kind with mini-splits, it's going to be an expensive project, but there are substantial Mass Save rebates for it up to $10,000 home or something like in the low couple thousands per ton depending on residential versus commercial and you will get all the emissions out of your unit, so that's something that's worth looking at depending on your situation.
[0:35:18]
We've talked a lot about space heating. Let's switch gears a little bit, and let's just talk about cooking.
One thing you can do to reduce emissions is replace your gas stove with an induction stove. An induction stove does use electricity, but it's not an electric stove. The old electric stoves, even the ones you buy today, they're all the same model. They heat the coil and that coil needs to get hot first and then it can start to heat the pan, and there's conduction transfer and there's a little bit of convection.
Electric stoves will take seven minutes to boil a quantity of water that would take a gas stove three minutes to boil, but an induction just one minute. The reason is because the induction stove sends the energy directly into the pot, there's no waste heat. That's demonstrated by this kind of alarming picture where you've got a newspaper under a pot of boiling water, so it's not like a fire in a gas stove or a really hot electric resistance coil. The energy gets put directly into the pan, which goes directly into the water, and there's so much less waste heat with induction, therefore it's so much faster.
An induction stove is really actually a lot better to cook on. It’s fast in boil water. It’s very easy to clean because they have the glass surface there, so there's no anything that food can fall into. It’s zero emissions and we're seeing a lot more in sanitary code complaints indoor air quality is not a concern when you've got an induction or an electric stove. It is a concern for gas stoves. People with asthma and COPD will have a harder time living in a unit with a gas stove especially if it's unvented, so there's a general push to move towards electric induction.
On the downside though, you have to have cookware that responds to that magnetic fields, you need to have it with an iron core or a fairway knight core and you will have to have a dedicated 30- or 50-AMP circuit, same as any electric stove. They make inductions at 30 they make inductions at 50. The 50 are more powerful and the most fun to cook with, and you may want to have a plumber cut and cap the existing gas line. Typically all the electric stoves still have the same cut out at the back for the electrical plugs. You can still push and flush, but you may just if the pipe is accessible and someone might want to play with it for some silly reason, you may just want to cut that and set it back into the wall.
One other note about induction stoves in a rental, a lot of people don't have induction cookware, so you might be tempted to say, “Well you know free gift at least signing I’ll give you a basic set for 100 bucks,” and that can be very appealing, and it can help people you know cook an egg there for first morning in the apartment but you got to work on renter education potentially because they've got to know you've got to use nylon or wood utensils. These starter sets are all Teflon coated or non-stick coated, and they will just ruin the cookware set and eat all that and that's potentially a liability I think.
If you're going to do induction, just make sure people know they got to come with their own cookware or the stuff they're going to get from you is a gift. At least signing is going to be pretty sensitive not saying cheap although it is very affordable, but they could use the right utensils.
If you look at the cost to replace the gas stove with induction, it's really all about running the circuits and getting the stove. You can get an induction stove for between $500 and $1,000. If you get like one of the appliance deals at a box store it'll be down the $500 range, which is competitive with an electric stove. Running the circuit is the most expensive part. An electrician might charge you $2,500 to get a circuit up to the third floor or something like that and there are no rebates for induction stoves at the moment. It will however reduce your stove emissions by 100 percent. It doesn't reduce your heating emissions, but it reduces your stove emissions. All right that's an important thing to remember for cooking.
Then let's talk about domestic hot water here.
You can replace a gas water heater with a heat pump water heater. The gas water heater is on the left here. It’s shown you've got this vent going up to the chimney, and then the heat pump water heaters on the right are much taller. It’s got a refrigerant loop on the inside and it pulls energy out of the air. The air in your basement is warm because you've got a gas boiler down there potentially with some waste heat, but also because you've got floor heat, so the floor is a constant 50 Fahrenheit more or less all year round. That's what the below grade temperature is and so the heat pump water heater is pulling the energy basically out of that, so you can operate very effectively there for free and it's not anything like what the electric resistance heaters cost to run, so that is a zero emissions thing. These new heaters are almost all smart, so you get an app that will tell you hey you know I’m about to leak water all over the floor. Really handy to know that in advance you can go in and shut it all off at the end of its life.
[0:40:00]
On the downside, you're going to need another dedicated 30-amp circuit to run these things, which is kind of annoying because they only draw about 20 amps when they're in boost mode. That's when they're using electric resistance as a backup when a lot of renters are drawing on the hot water. There's a lot of industry work to move towards just needing a 110 plug, so a basic electrical plug because these heat pumps really draw less than 1 amp when they're in heat pump only mode. When they don't need boosts they're very economical to run.
You will need about 80 cubic feet of air in your basement or wherever you're installing it because these things need to breathe and need to circulate air around a little bit. They're also taller, so they're going to need a full height space basement or space or whatever it is. Lastly, the heat pump water heaters need condensation drainage same as any refrigerator. A lot of basements do have a floor drain in them but, if you are unlucky and you don't have one, you're going to need a pump to get that up to the nearest inlet to your main drain, so that's going to be you know something to consider. It might not be a slam dunk; it might be depending on your setup.
Heat pump water heaters do have a Mass Save rebate so the major cost here is going to be the cost of the unit is going to be somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 after the rebate. The contractor gets the rebate directly, so you don't have to pay out of pocket and then wait for reimbursement, and then you're going to have to pay to run the electrical lines. Now if you've already got electric resistance, you're going to see much lower cost than this because you've already got the dedicated lines to those heat pumps or to the electric resistance tanks, and you can just get these in for the cost of the tank and so in that case it's a very easy thing to go do. You will reduce your domestic hot water emissions by 100 percent if you do this. All right so that's our domestic cut water retrofit option.
Then lastly just returning to heat. This is kind of the cheapest option, but it potentially could have the biggest savings. Just make sure the heat goes off whenever the renters are asleep. We've written at night here. Obviously if your renters work a different shift, they can set schedule differently, but basically if you're leaving the heat on 100 percent all the time, then you're going to have a 10 to 20 emissions reductions or more just by turning it off when renters are asleep. So on the positive side here, these smart thermostats, they can learn renter schedules. You might not even have to talk to the renter to set it. The Nest thermostat can figure it out for instance, and you get very high bang for your buck because these things are so cheap.
Pro tip for landlords. Don't install this mid tenancy if your renters are the ones who like the heat on 24/7 especially if they’re paying for it. They might actually rip out your new thermostat and put in their old one or buy one themselves that they can control, so that's not good and I’ll just say don't buy nest for multi-family they make it really frustrating. You've got to have either a different login for each thermostat or any renter who has access to the Nest has access to all the thermostats in the house, which is not the way it should be.
So there are other landlord-specific thermostats. You search for landlord thermostat. I think Ecobee has one, and that will be much better. Mass Save heavily incentivizes thermostats 80 percent off. There's a sale for Earth Day. We have no rebates or anything from them. We don't get a kickback for saying that, but just look at it because these are up for sale online now and you'll reduce your emissions for a unit 10 percent to 20 percent and reduce somebody's costs, your renters or yourselves, your own.
In conclusion here, as we as we move towards the end of this overview, this menu of retrofit options, you can kind of divide the after rebate costs by the emissions reduction and see kind of is this worth doing and so in this case with the math we've done here lower is better; therefore kind of the biggest bang for your buck would be a landlord thermostat or a smart thermostat that turns the heat off when the renters are out or asleep.
Your second biggest emissions reduction is actually going to come from your heat pump water heater in terms of emissions reduced per um per dollar spend because these things are pretty new technology. We did a whole webinar on this a while back, so yes that's something well worth looking into.
Then induction stoves not talked about nearly often enough. Compared to the heating systems, you get so many benefits from eliminating gas at the stove sanitary code benefits and emissions reductions benefits so that's really worth looking at, too.
Then beyond this you get into the expensive stuff. Mini-splits on our list take place before installation air sealing in this kind of cost ranking only because they reduce emissions 100 percent, but if you want to leverage the public funding available, insulation and air sealing is definitely the way to go. Every building should be Mass Save insulated and air sealed, no doubt.
But of course every building is different, so given your scenario your priorities might totally change like here's a building with a lot of exterior detail and tall windows, and if you're a mini-split tech and you're thinking how am I going to run these lines up here, you basically get nowhere to do it visible here. You can't run them up the porch. You can't run them up here because they've got these little bump outs. You can do a bump out maybe just on the corner, but then where does the head go? You've got not enough flat surface to get ahead into the first or the second floor there, and then you've got the bathroom here. This is a really tough house to mini-split. You might find you're talking to a technician and they say this is not a good house to mini-split and they might be right.
[0:45:22]
One thing you do want to keep an eye on though is that there are very few contractors or installers out there who really get that this law is happening and we have to be zero emissions by 2050, and so you might have to talk to five or more people to find one that's going to understand what you're trying to do with emissions reductions. Maybe the first four or the first eight you talk to will want to install new gas equipment and they might discourage heat pumps as unworkable. Lots of landlords use heat pumps have installed them and they work fine so you can definitely do it. You just got to keep talking to folks to find one that will work the way you want them to work.
Let me give you a couple other things, food for thought, and then we'll conclude and take questions.
One note on solar panels. If your goal is to reduce emissions. don't spend money on solar panels because you can reduce emissions from your electricity supply with the stroke of a pen. Massachusetts law allows everybody to pick their supply and you can pick 100 percent renewable if you want and that doesn't require you to pay. You might pay 30 percent more on a bill for your electricity, but it doesn't require you to pay $50,000 for a photovoltaic install for a three-decker.
If on the other hand, your goal is to reduce the cost of your electricity for instance this is a real MassLandlords member, Winton Corporation out in West Springfield, they provide heat included in the rent with electric resistance heat that's very expensive. They put these solar panels on. It’s far above their expectation in terms of how well it's reducing their costs, so solar panels can be really impactful for reducing your electricity spend, but they're a second order effect for emissions reduction.
One other note, I mentioned carbon capture at the beginning. Some people tell me, “Well, we don't have to worry about it because they'll be able to pull the CO2 out of the air.” Maybe, but currently there's nobody in Massachusetts who will take your money to pull your carbon out of the air, and at current industrial rates it's still $1,800 to $3,600 per year ongoing. If you look at that capitalized out, mini-splits and other energy efficiency improvements start to look pretty cheap compared to paying that for each unit per year.
In Massachusetts, they may start taxing us at this rate. They may do something to try to drive us towards this, so you're really ahead of the curve here and doing the right thing by looking at this stuff proactively because it only gets worse. For people who don't adopt these clean technologies now, it’s only going to get worse and there isn't going to be a kind of carbon capture Hail Mary pass at the very end that kind of just makes it all go away. It’s going to be so expensive somebody's going to pay for it somehow.
In conclusion, new construction, and gut renovations really where it's at for reducing emissions because you can start zero. You can design your building to work with mini-splits. You can run the induction stove, electrical lines. You don't have to pay for any gas and boiler stuff, so that's really easy. Retrofits are legit hard, and so I encourage you to do what you can now and I want you to know that we're actively working on improvements to this current state of the art where we can use existing radiators and baseboards, maybe even get cooling in with it, which would be really miraculous, and so that's where we're going. There's just an awful lot of work, a fundamental technical work to do before we get there.
Questions and Answers
With that i will um switch over to Q&A here. All right and I’ll look at some questions here in the chat and some formal questions sent in via Q&A.
The first question I see for Tony. “It sounds like if I replace oil furnaces with heat pumps, I have to replace my cast-iron radiators. Is that correct?”
You don't have to replace them, but if you are using heat pumps, the cast-iron radiators would not be used, so they just sit there gathering dust.
“What's the cost to replace oil with heat pumps for three-decker, similar to the 80 percent to 95 percent efficient furnace?”
Yes, so in in those scenarios where we're saying, “Here's we'll replace a boiler with heat pumps,” we're just leaving the boiler sitting down there. We're not paying for the cost of removal or anything. Whether you're starting with gas or oil or wood pellet, whatever it is it's just the number you see is the number to install the mini-splits and just leave the current stuff sitting there.
Finally, “Why not wait until Eversource offers the geothermal grid?”
Well, that's a good question. I mean you definitely could hope that they will do that but remember there are huge parts of Massachusetts that don't have any gas infrastructure, so if you're outside an urban core where Eversource is potentially going to implement a geothermal grid, there's no expectation that they would introduce one in your area. That's only to reduce their maintenance costs on existing gas lines.
[0:50:02]
You can say, “Yes I’ll wait for this and hope for this,” and that's not a bad strategy. In the meantime, you get your insulation done. You get your landlord thermostats. You do everything you can do.
“References of people who've moved from oil to heat pumps would be great.”
All right, we'll find some for you. I know some folks who put in heat pumps. I think they started with gas probably, but I’ll connect them with you.
Joe asked, “Can you discuss the options for whole house heat pumps using existing ductwork forced-air in a dual-fuel configuration?”
Yes so if you have existing ductwork, I mean that's um that's a great situation to be in, and so when we're talking retrofits here, we're thinking this is a house built in 1890, 1910 or something like that, there was no ducting installed. But if you've got existing ductwork, you've got a huge option for improvements. You probably already have air conditioning that runs through that that air handler or several air handlers. If you got a gas boiler, you could use an external heat pump to go in and do that, you can do ground source potentially if you've got the space for it, so you can do that. You're going to run into the issue of installers will say, “Why are you talking to me about this? You've got a gas furnace and you've got the air conditioning. It’s perfect.” But you will find somebody who'll help you do the heating part with heat pumps as well.
Then Joe asks, “What could be some reasons HVAC professionals want to discourage heat pumps?”
Well i think everybody likes to do what they're good at and your job is less stressful if you're doing something familiar and we've been installing gas for so long. You know it's what a lot of HVAC folks were trained on and is familiar and it's reliable. That's the thing that's majorly different between the gas and the mini-splits I guess because the refrigerant stuff it sometimes breaks, and it breaks in strange ways. You've got these spinning parts and you've got pumps and so on. The gas stuff is pretty static. You've got one circulator pump per zone typically and you've got a fire somewhere, and so there's not so much that breaks. There is stuff that can break vent dampers and thermocouples and so on.
But a lot of the HVAC techs will feel that gas is more reliable because they feel they have a lower attention to it. The fact is they've got no heat gas service calls all winter long all the time and they only just remember the refrigerant stuff because the refrigerant stuff is new and stressful. They got to figure out okay what's going on here. They might need a computer to help diagnose which pump is broken, that kind of thing so it's not really that the refrigerant stuff is worse. It’s just that in terms of the tech's experience and everybody's familiarity with the technology, there's no doubt that gas is more comfortable. We're all more familiar with it and we know the way it fails and how to fix it very quickly. I hope that's helpful.
Okay, Paul asks in the chat, “What is the website to look at this information about flooding?”
The website is going to be just realtor.com or Redfin. Those are the listing site that lists flood factor on a per lot basis, so any property that's for sale, you'll see that and if you want the actual maps, you can look at First Street Foundation. They're the nonprofit that pulls together the data that feeds Redfin and Realtor.com.
All right, I see another chat. Tim says, “Another option drew submissions encourage your time to participate in community solar as well as landlords making the switch for common electric accounts.”
Yes, so the idea here is you have some local generation and you can invest in in that and that's similar to what i said with you can change your supply at the stroke of a pen. If you want to have electricity provided by a renewable source, you can do that in Massachusetts for no upfront cost.
I see John asks, “Any options for apartments that have big direct fence square gas heater?”
Yes, so you get the gas-on-gas heater or something. I mean that's it's the same kind of scenario as a gas boiler. You just got different equipment to sit idle, so you can go to mini-splits, and the mini sweats are probably an easier option for you because those gas-on-gas heaters or direct vent gas heaters. They didn't use the baseboards or radiators around the edges, so you don't have a lot of infrastructure and investment in routing heat around the outside, so mini-splits are probably an easy thing for you to work towards.
Brent asks, “Your presentation focuses on boilers. I should make it clearer whether you get a boiler or furnace?”
It’s the same thing. We just sit that idle and the mini-splits cost is the mini-splits cost. It doesn't matter what you're starting from really unless you've got the ducting, in which case that could be much easier?
David asks, “Thoughts on improvements to buildings currently using oil as fuel with baseboard heating. Would you recommend going straight to mini-splits if the building isn't physically conducive to putting in mini-splits? What options are there changing to change your oil gas is better than keeping oil?”
Yes, David it really depends on what you're going to get for a rebate to do that gas boiler because generally gas is more efficient and less heat producing, so there are incentives to switch to gas and you get to use your existing baseboards, and you just take a little bit of risk. You've got a 30-year gas boiler. You know it's going to have an end of life in 2052. That's only two years after the end of emissions in Massachusetts, so probably it's okay to install a gas boiler at this point if you've got oil if you can't do mini-splits.
[0:55:33]
Paul asked about steam.
Yes, same kind of thing. They can retrofit those radiators use forced hot water, but then you still haven't got your emissions out because there's no heat pump that will do the radiators with forced hot water, so that you're looking at mini-splits again if you really want to reduce your emissions, otherwise you've got to sit pat with your steam for a while.
Brent says, “An HVAC tech told me the city electrical service could not support everyone going to heat pumps, the number of transformers, etc., etc.”
Yes, that's a real issue if everybody switched all of their heating to electrification all at once, then the grid would melt in the summer, the wires would be too hot too much electricity going through, so that needs to be addressed and there's not a good solution for it. But the fact is right now they generally don't restrict service upgrades except in a few neighborhoods like I know 56:26 Harvard square, Cambridge, they've got really old transformers there and so if that's your neighborhood, you might be stuck, but generally the rest of the state you can get an electricity upgrade um and they don't really prohibit it, so you can do these mini-splits if you want right now and there's nobody's going to say otherwise. It becomes more of a systemic issue when everybody starts to leave this and that's one of the huge unanswered issues not for landlords per se but for policy makers how do we get to zero emissions by 2050 because this grid upgrade problem is real.
Joe asks, “For smart thermostats, can you use your tenant's wi-fi connection?” Yes you can, but in that scenario it's again much better to have a thermostat on your own wi-fi network so you can control it and that means like if you're going to install cameras, you might have wi-fi in the building you use that network, but if you go with a landlord thermostat in particular, they have these different home network things like Z-Wave or Zigbee you get a thermostat you control on your own proprietary network and if it's Z-Wave or Zigbee it goes right through the walls and metal doors and stuff in a way that wi-fi does not, so best practice would not be to use your tenant's wi-fi connection and get your own home network for your landlording.
Greg asks, “Does anybody have experience with Paradigm because we’ve been contacted by Paradigm to look at installation of mini-splits in a 20-unit building at reduced or no cost?”
Greg, I do not have experience with Paradigm, but if anybody else does please chime in here, and I would um just make sure my two cents anytime somebody contacts you, that's a cause for concern. If you went out and reached out to them, that would be one thing but if they're contacting you just make sure you understand the source of the funding and their angle on it so that um you know it's not going to end up being more trouble than it's worth. Greg, I’ll take a note to look into Paradigm for you and see what I can tell you about it.
All right, we've got one minute less left. Any last-minute questions about reducing emissions in existing buildings?
Naomi, chime in if you see anything that I’ve missed otherwise I’ll assume we're good.
Naomi: No.
Doug: All right, thank you. All right then. We'll right on the dot at one o'clock. We will end there. Please make sure to leave us feedback on today's webinar at masslandlords.net/yellow. This will be posted with slides and recordings soon so you can share with others who aren't able to be here. If you have any questions about anything we covered or anything else that you need help with, email us at hello@masslandlords.net, we'll point you in the right direction.
We’ll end there all. Take care and happy Earth Day
[End 0:59:59]
