Shore Towers oversight waste: Example 1

From the first year I moved in, the winters have had a few brutal weeks at best, months at worst. My first winter also gave me my first electric bill, and I was stunned at how much it cost to keep my apartment moderately comfortable – no sweater required. One thing that I noticed was how cold the hallways were. On so many floors, you needed a jacket on to go get the mail.

The reason was surprisingly simple. There are huge gaps in the common space window doorframes by the elevators. A few floors had some remnants of ancient weatherproofing in the gaps that barely held back the draft, while others had a full ¼” gap, letting frigid air flow into the building like an unstoppable tide. My floor was one with the massive gap.

I took some initiative and used an old trick that worked wonders when I lived in an old, rent-stabilized apartment on 18th Street; I shoved a plastic bag in the gap. Inside an hour, the temperature in the hallways had risen significantly. More importantly, my own heater wasn’t working nearly as much to clear the chill. Sure enough, this minor step in the common spaces impacted my personal electric bill by as much as 10% the following month.

Needless to say, I did the same again this last, brutal winter. It's been there since the end of November. Nobody ever removes it; I think the whole floor is grateful for this common-sense solution.

Basic weatherproofing for all four seasons is part of any regular maintenance schedule. I invested a 5 cent bag in our common spaces and returned a $15-$20 monthly savings in my heating costs. It's very expensive to keep the cavernous common spaces and management offices heated in the winter, which are costs we as owners must absorb. Instead of common-sense cost-cutting management, we find excessive heating waste and a 10% increase in common charges in addition to the assessments.

We need to find fiscally sound solutions to decrease expenses without losing services or compromising the building's value.

What if a minimal investment of building staff time and proper weatherproofing materials were to cut the common space heating costs by 10% or even 20%? If we invest judiciously in such a program, our next two years’ should show a significant savings in common space heating costs; that money could be moved forward to help cover any Year Four expenses. 

There has been is no visible effort in the three years I have lived here to manage heat waste in the common spaces, short of shutting down some ground-level heaters when it gets too cold for them to be effective.

What is visible is my low-tech solution to conserving heat in the common areas on the 8th floor, which reduced my own electric bill during the winter:

Personally, I think $10 of proper material and 10 minutes of time would make it look much nicer.


UPDATE: After this was shown to members of the board, the bag has since disappeared. Nothing in terms of weatherproofing has replaced it.