1000 Green Supers How-to Video: Timers

Some lights in the building stay on all day, and all night, long. They light the way and provide much needed security. But during the night, the halls aren't used nearly as much, so the amount of lighting can be reduced. To reduce the amount of lights, you can install a timer where at a certain point of the night, the timer turns the extra lights off and turns them back on when they are needed. It's another easy installation that results in energy and money saved. John Sarich, our Green Supers instructor, takes you through the process of installing timers and the benefits for your building in our newest Green Supers video.

1000 Green Supers How-to Video: Improving Indoor Air Quality

We all spend a lot of time indoors, but what if staying indoors was worse for your health than being outdoors. Well, it's true. Check out today's 1000 Green Supers video on indoor air quality and how to improve it. Instructor John Sarich will discuss how the air is different indoors compared to outdoors and how making simple changes to the products that you use, you can make indoor air healthier for you, your staff and your residents.



If you haven't seen our other video on Occupancy Sensors, check it out:

1000 Green Supers How-to Video: Occupancy Sensors

1000 Green Supers How-to Video: Occupancy Sensors

How many times have you wished that someone would just turn the lights off after they leave a room to help save on electricity costs? In this week's Green Operators video series, "Occupancy Sensors" solves the problem by showing you how to install motion sensors that automatically turn lights on and off when someone enters or leaves a room. As our expert, John Sarich, says, it's one of the easiest ways to save money in your building. In this video, John will show you how to install the sensors and how to choose the optimal place for installation.

Wait till you hear how much John continues to save by installing motion sensors in his building!

Introducing the 1000 Green Supers How-to Videos!

Welcome to the first in an ongoing series of Green Supers how-to videos! Here we will show you how to make your buildings greener and more energy efficient. These videos will show you steps you can take to save your building on energy and energy costs.

In this first video, you'll meet John Sarich, the resident manager of New York City's William Beaver House and a member of the 32BJ Thomas Shortman Training Fund. In a series of videos we will show you over the next few weeks, John will take you step-by-step through various projects. The first project, which you will see next week, will be on installing motion sensors in your building. We'll show you another video on installing timers and another video on improving air quality. These videos are a great start to making your building greener. Enjoy!

John Sarich saves money with motion sensors

Building operator & 32BJ member John Sarich of New York City's William Beaver House has developed a plan to institute energy efficient O&M in his building, which will save an estimated $30,000 every year for a total investment of around $30,000. The last we wrote about John, we had discussed the upgrades in the lighting of the building's fitness center. After seeing the money-saving success he had there, John moved on to upgrading the lighting in the garage and adding motion sensors in the common areas. First a little background on the project:

How many total lighting fixtures there are in the garage?
136 fixtures
How many watts does each of those fixtures use?
Two 32 watt bulbs per fixture (T-8s)
On how many of those fixtures did you install a motion sensor?
We installed 128 fixtures working off eight sensors.
The lights were on 24/hr before the motion sensor, correct?
Yes and now more than half are probably off 22 hours per day.
At a cost of only $880, John has implemented changes that will save the building $11,362 per year.

In the stairwells, John installed motion sensors on 25watt T8 fluorescent lights. Before he did this, 94 lights were on 24 hours per day. After, 47 lights are now on 24 hours per day for security reasons, but 47 lights are only on one hour per day. The cost: $1875. The savings each year: $4595.

John Sarich stops climbing ladders and saves money

Every time John Sarich needed to change the light bulbs in the fitness room at the William Beaver House, the resident manager had to climb a ladder to reach the 25 foot ceiling and the recessed lighting fixtures. After noticing that he was making this climb often, he knew there had to be a better way. After attending classes on energy-efficiency, John decided to replace the incandescent bulbs with energy-saving compact fluorescents (CFL). "I relamped the entire fitness center and even wrote the date on the CFLs," says John. "I realized after six months, I wasn't going up there nearly as much."

John ultimately replaced 18 200watt and 8 150watt incandescent bulbs with equivalent CFLs (40watt and 26watt) for an estimated savings of $6445 and an estimated cost of only $250.

After seeing his success, John's next idea was to put some of the fitness center lighting on a timer. "The lights were on 24/7, so I put the ones on a timer where there was very little activity going on." In total, about one-third of the fitness center lights are on timers now."

Going one step further, John installed motion sensors in the recycling stations, where the lights were left on 18 hours per day. "I figured out that the lights only needed to be on 20 minutes of 24 hours in a day."

John credits his knowledge and motivation of going green to 32BJ. "The whole thing started with 32BJ with their free courses," he says. "I took the Introduction to Green Building and learned about waste - I hate waste."

Once he completed this course, he still kept going and took other green courses. "I took something back to my building with each course I took and I learned about other green topics from other supers, such as what green chemicals they were using." He calls his time with 32BJ as a wealth of information.

Tune in with us next week as we learn what green features John included in his garage and how much money it's saving!

Step 1: A Green Building Business Plan

The first step in making any building more efficient is to identify locations and behaviors that waste energy. John identified 10 projects -- some easy, some difficult -- that he thought he could feasibly accomplish over the next year and we'll check back in with him to see how it's going. When looking for worthy projects, he searched for areas in his building that:

1) Get very little traffic
2) Have lights on 24 hours day
3) Use incandescent bulbs and
4) are excessively hot

He also searched for toxic products or products that were being used and produced excessive waste.

Once he looked these areas over, he estimated how much money and energy each project would save and how much each project would cost. He put all of this information together and developed his initial green building business plan (check it out for ideas and inspiration of your own). Each of these projects require more research (which we'll talk to John about as the weeks go on) and he may not be able to complete all of them, but it gave him a great starting point.

A Word From Our Sponsors

The 32BJ Thomas Shortman Training Fund and Urban Green Council are pleased to partner with John Sarich and the William-Beaver House to demonstrate the power that a green operator has to "green" a building. We look forward to showing you the changes that John is making in his building. We'll have interviews with John and videos and pictures which we hope will inspire a wider community of large multi-family building operators to make their buildings as energy efficient as possible.

The 32BJ Thomas Shortman Training Fund offers training to 80,000 members of SEIU Local 32BJ working in the property services industry. The Training Fund is a joint labor-management organization, cosponsored by Local 32BJ and the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations.

The Urban Green Council is the New York Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Urban Green's mission is to lead the advancement of sustainability in the urban built environment, and serve as a model for other cities through education, advocacy, collaboration and research.

Welcome to the Green Operator

Hello and welcome to the Green Operator, a site devoted to improving the energy efficiency of our nation's buildings by providing building operators with the skills to implement energy efficient operations and maintenance (O&M). Building operators are the building service professionals that are responsible for all aspects of O&M in large multifamily residential buildings.

Energy efficient O&M is the practice of ensuring that all systems within a building are running at peak performance. This includes the testing, cleaning, and intelligent use of a building's heating, cooling, and ventilations systems. Additionally, energy efficient O&M includes the air sealing of a building's envelope, the use of efficient lighting and lighting controls, and minimizing water use.

We hope this site will help teach and inspire building operators everywhere to maximize the sustainability of their buildings and elevate an entire profession to meet the needs of an energy efficiency 21st century.