838 Park Place is a quintessential NYC walk-up. A brownstone apartment building located in Brooklyn, New York was experiencing all the common heating and energy issues; high energy bills, drafty windows, uneven heating, and banging pipes.
Annabelle Heckler is one of the owners of this co-op apartment building and just like any concerned owner, she questioned the effectiveness of her home. As a board member, she heard all the complaints about unevenness of temperature: some would say it's too hot and some would say it’s too cold.
Each time she would try to fix the problem, it would cost her thousands of dollars to fix her old boiler that just kept breaking. Annabelle was concerned about the comfort and health for the 8 families living in the co-op, and for herself who also calls this building her home.
With help from BlocPower, Annabelle was able to find a long-term solution. We found out that her boiler was defective when we conducted our site visit and used our resources for a complete energy, engineering, and financial analysis, we believed that Annabelle is perfect for a complete retrofit.
838 Park Place is a co-op building with 8 apartments inside in a historically sound district of Brooklyn. Each apartment has an area of 1600 square feet with 4 bedrooms. The apartments are stacked upon each other and the East Wing mirrors the West Wing.
For this building, we recommended installing solar panels and heat pumps to help with her boiler issue and to bring energy efficiency to her home.
Each apartment received 6 indoor heat pumps and 2 outdoor units. The construction project took one day with 6 workers to complete about 48 indoor heat pump units. It also took 2 days for workers to install 16 outdoor units.
For the solar panels, they received an installation of 84 solar panels which all together provided 25,460 watts of power. This will save Annabelle thousands of dollars in the long run. The original cost was about $140,000 but with an incentive they received, they will be paying only about 4.5% of that price for their retrofit.
This is a very good example of what we want to do at BlocPower. We aim to provide affordable energy efficiency to people who want to have a better space and home.
