Melissa Kelly

What really impressed me about COOKFOX's green roof was how participatory it was. There are a lot of beautiful biophilic visual choices in their new office space, but the green terraces seem to take the idea to another level by encouraging action as well. The potential of using green spaces to provide the same functionality as a community garden is really inspiring when applied to a workplace, and I was acutely jealous compared to our very sterile office. 

I found it challenging to do this audit as an apartment-dweller with little to no control over most of the items listed in an energy audit. 

Here's what I know about the building:
- Thermal properties: We have a thick mass wall with a thermal lag time of about 12 hours, which works great in the summer for night cooling and way too well at keeping in heat at any other time.
- Ventilation: Natural ventilation, no fanpower
- Heating: A clunky old boiler and uncontrolled radiators, aka the scourge of NYC. Since we've lived here, they replaced the controls from always staying on during winter to turning on when the basement hits 45. It's not a great solution because some apartments still overheat while others may be comfortable, and retrofit valves would be much better, but I think it's an okay approach in terms of not wanting to barge in and replace everyone's radiators. They could be saving SO MUCH money though! One thing I did during our first winter here is insulate our radiators with a radiative barrier. I think it's probably keeping about half of the radiation into our space. Likely some of it is escaping through the exterior wall, so I'm not sure how much energy savings that strategy is really contributing.
- Water use: Using a good old fashioned bucket test, our shower runs at about 1 gpm or so.
- Lighting: Our installed LPD is pretty high because there's two lighting "scenes", but we generally only use one or two lights at a time, so our operating LPD is around 0.1-0.15 W/sf and usually just in the evenings or on cloudy days like this one.
- Refrigerator: The "energy saver" rating of our fridge is below average, but not too extreme, which is probably lucky as a renter. It's still the largest energy user in our apartment, and definitely a source of overheating in the apartment.

I found an EnergyStar checklist for renters: 
https://www.energystar.gov/products/top_10_tips_renters

We're already following almost every applicable tip except the following:
- Insulate the room air conditioner or remove it in winter: We don't do this because the infiltration helps with the overheating in winter, and we're naturally ventilating anyway. We have an EnergyStar unit with a special "Energy saving" mode, but found that it almost never works, so we end up manually cycling it on and off instead.
- Using a power strip as a turn off point: Almost everything that's not used all the time (like our microwave and stereo) is unplugged, but we could get some smart power strips to help better manage this approach.

What ideas did I get from this?
- I'd like to look into getting some smart power strips for the appliances we do leave plugged in. It would be great to have something with a timer for our router!
- I'm going to try to clean the refrigerator coils and see if that improves efficiency at all