Five measures to get to 2035 Local Law 97 compliance

 Local Law 97 image credit: The Cotocon Group

 What I keep getting asked is what is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to make sure my building is local law 97 compliant through 2035. The answer is, there are five measures that are by far the most cost effective way possible.

Measure 1: Insulating Your Heating System

The first and by far easiest is to just make sure your central heating system is properly insulated. Otherwise, when you're generating the heat, or taking it from the city, that heat is immediately lost in the main line pipes instead of getting to the apartments themselves.

Measure 2: Master Venting & Steam Trap Maintenance

If you have a steam system, it's critical to make sure you have proper master venting and that your steam traps are working. What ends up happening is air gets trapped in those pipes, which makes it really hard for the steam to make it upstairs. You have to run the boiler a lot more to get the same level of comfort in apartments. We can prevent that by putting air vents on the system that release air but keep the steam in. The faster you can get steam to apartments, the less you need to run your central heating system, and the less energy you'll use.

Measure 3: Smart Heating Controls

The next critical element is to ensure that you have smart heating controls. Smart controls use indoor sensors to make sure your heating system can run the absolute minimum amount at any given time of the day. To get your building perfectly comfortable for tenants, if you're using an old-school timer based control, you are almost certainly overheating your building and wasting a ton of energy.

The next couple of measures are definitely more cost intensive.

Measure 4: Hot Water Heaters

The first is installing gas-fired separate hot water heaters. So instead of having to fire up giant boilers just to create hot water in the summer, you can run much smaller, more energy efficient hot water heaters to create hot water for the building throughout the warm months.

Measure 5: High Efficiency 4-Pass Gas Fired Boilers

The last measure is by far the most cost intensive, but if your building can't get to local law 97 compliance through 2035 without it, it's the first thing I would do after doing all the other measures, which is to replace your existing boiler with much more energy efficient, modern, four pass boilers running off of gas, not oil.

Four pass boilers allow the heating to run four times through the water to get the maximum energy exchange. That makes it much, much, much more efficient. By then running on gas instead of oil, you're further reducing your carbon emissions.

Lastly, making sure you're choosing a boiler that's the smallest boiler possible that will sufficiently heat your building is going to substantially reduce your energy bills.

Five Measures Will Get Your Building Compliant through 2035

These five measures combined can get virtually any building to local law 97 compliance through at least 2035 and possibly 2040.

The unintended benefit, if you implement Local Law 97 the right way, is that most of these measures can save you a ton of money every year, and, in fact, will pay for themselves in just a handful of months or years.

What that means is, you're not only making your building greener, you're actually saving a lot of green in the process.