Installing heat pumps in a fully-occupied co-op

For Eric Einstein, co-op board pres­i­dent of the International Tailoring Company Building, over­hauling his building’s heating and cooling appa­ratus was akin to swap­ping out the engine of a plane mid-air. 

“This is a fully occu­pied building with people living their lives, and we were changing the under­lying tech­nology that was powering their comfort,” said Einstein. ​“So yeah, it was tricky.” 

Engineers had their work cut out for them. This was the first time Ecosystem, the company contracted for the project, had worked in a resi­den­tial building in New York City. From the moment Ecosystem and the co-op signed the contract, the reno­va­tion process took close to two years to complete. During the construc­tion phase, Ecosystem’s team spent roughly five days apiece in each of the 172 units, replacing the 34-year-old fan coils with brand-new hybrid water source heat pumps. 

This meant having to work around the building’s nearly 300 residents.

“We needed our engi­neers in the building,” said Ben Milbank, senior project devel­op­ment engi­neer at Ecosystem. ​“This wasn’t some­thing where you could be like, ​‘Here’s the IKEA instruc­tion manual on how you do this.’”

Ecosystem orig­i­nally told the co-op board they would need five days of unfet­tered access to each person’s unit. But the board wasn’t thrilled with the idea of making people vacate their apart­ments entirely. So, after months of contract nego­ti­a­tions, the two sides struck a deal: Residents and their pets would leave their apart­ments from 8 AM to 5 PM for five days to allow subcon­trac­tors to get the work done. 

The construc­tion company also came up with what Ecosystem senior busi­ness devel­op­ment manager Jaime Pereira described as a ​“robust apart­ment protec­tion regi­ment” to safe­guard the units from damage and dust. In prac­tice, that meant cordoning off the work zone in each unit with plastic curtains – no small feat for a building with 13.5‑foot loft ceilings. 

“It made it a labyrinth for a lot of people, a plastic maze,” said Paul Cabana, a co-op board member who has lived in the building for 11 years.

To keep resi­dents up to date throughout the life of the project, the board brought in AKAM, their prop­erty manage­ment firm’s project manage­ment group. AKAM handled all major commu­ni­ca­tion efforts, a task too unwieldy for the volun­teer board members to manage on their own.

Before the project launched, resi­dents got an email detailing what to expect and a rough time­line of when each apart­ment was sched­uled for its five-day visit. They also got a short reminder closer to the date. 

The board simul­ta­ne­ously main­tained its regular commu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels — a twice-a-year meeting with share­holders and a bi-monthly newsletter — to give tenants prac­tical infor­ma­tion and updates on major milestones.

Things didn’t always go exactly according to plan: There were occa­sional coor­di­na­tion issues, misun­der­stand­ings regarding the time­line, and delays in infor­ma­tion sharing, said Levani Sidiani, former senior project manager with AKAM. In some cases, it took workers longer than five days to finish some units, which proved disrup­tive to some building residents. 

“I think it took every­body by surprise just how unpre­dictable the expe­ri­ence could be, apart­ment by apart­ment,” said Cabana. The layouts in the building vary widely, which added an extra layer of complexity for the construc­tion team.

Regardless, any hoops they had to jump through were well worth it in his eyes, and Cabana appre­ci­ated that everyone took their time to ensure things were done prop­erly. ​“The scale of the upgrade so exceeded the hassle of instal­la­tion,” he said.