“Read the F*cking Manual!”

Chris McGinnis is a former IBM systems engi­neer who has lived at Two Charlton Owners Corp, a 16-story co-op in SoHo, for the past 35 years. After getting inspired by his younger sister, who worked in battery sales, he decided to learn more about how elec­tricity can be a cleaner energy source for entire building systems; soon, his newfound passion tran­si­tioned into an interest in decar­bonizing his own home. 

Since then, McGinnis has led his building through a series of effi­ciency upgrades, starting off small with LED bulbs, subme­tering, and radi­ator covers, then moving on to bigger fixes like helping the boiler run more effi­ciently, upgrading the elec­trical room, and installing charging stations for elec­tric vehi­cles in the co-op’s garage. 

Skylight sat down with Chris to talk about his detail-oriented process, and how his work mantra — ​“Read the F*cking Manual” — has guided him through imple­menting change in his building.

This inter­view has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Skylight: To start, will you tell us a little bit about your building, and your rela­tion­ship with it?

Chris McGinnis: Our building was commis­sioned in 1966. It’s got 176 units. It’s 16 stories above ground, one story below ground. It’s a combi­na­tion of studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms. I moved in with my wife, or my girl­friend at the time, in 1990, and then we got married four years later. We had a son in ​‘96, and then in ​‘97, we moved upstairs — we bought 6L and 6M, and then combined them. After all the combi­na­tions, there are 150 apartments.

What kind of energy powers your building?

We’re a two-pipe steam building with two gigantic firebox boilers in our base­ment that generate steam. We’ve done many upgrades. [The boilers are] dual fuel, meaning we have a 10,000-gallon oil tank and low-pres­sure natural gas. We typi­cally run off natural gas since it’s more cost-effec­tive, but if our booster takes a hit, we can flip to oil. We’ve done a lot of work to main­tain those boilers because heating is a major priority. 

Our cooling comes from air condi­tioners — specif­i­cally, a through-wall air condi­tioning system where you just slide an A/​C unit into it. During the winter, our domestic hot water comes from our boilers, which have coils to heat the water. In the summer, we use a Camus system with water tanks. Under high demand, we can also feed hot water directly from the Camus along­side the tanks, though that almost never happens.

Was your involve­ment in retro­fitting moti­vated by your rela­tion­ship to the Passive House move­ment and getting inter­ested in how energy works in build­ings, or was there some other reason?

That’s a very insightful ques­tion. So the reason I became inter­ested in elec­tricity and stuff in general is my little sister, who’s 16 years younger than me. She was one of the top battery sales­people in the world. She was phenom­enal. I come from an IBM back­ground, so I knew tech. I wanted to be able to commu­ni­cate with my battery geek‑y sister, so I had to learn [about] power stuff. And then as I started talking to her about elec­tricity, I real­ized, ​“Oh, I can learn this, because it’s kind of like tech.” 

The way I do things is RTFM — Read the F*cking Manual. I down­load the manual, read it, learn how it works, then figure it out. Then I ask ques­tions like, ​“Oh, this is how you were going to set this up, but shouldn’t we be doing it this way?” I constantly do that.

I believe in reading the manuals because even with the best teams, if you read things in detail, you’ll pick up nuances and be able to ask the right ques­tions. Understanding the tech­nical details allows me to manage projects better and ensure quality. It’s hard to manage things that you have no clue about at all. 

The more I dove in, the more I became inter­ested. One thing led to another, and I really wanted to have an impact. 

Then I started investing in real estate, which is a family busi­ness. So I was asking friends, like, ​“What’s the best way of building prop­er­ties?” Then that turned me onto Passive House. [Editor’s note: the Passive House move­ment is an approach to resi­den­tial construc­tion that achieves energy effi­ciency by insu­lating a building’s exte­rior including roof, walls, and windows, to main­tain a consis­tent temper­a­ture and reduce energy use. The move­ment, which started in Germany, has since informed archi­tec­ture across the world.]

How did your building decide what to attack first, in terms of decarbonizing?

We’ve tried to approach decar­boniza­tion strate­gi­cally. One of the first projects was replacing hallway lighting. We had 152 fixtures with compact fluo­res­cent bulbs (CFLs) that used 37 watts each. We replaced them with LEDs that use just 3 watts per fixture on average. The LEDs have prox­imity sensors that throttle from 30% to 100% bright­ness when someone approaches. By law, we have to provide at least one foot-candle of light to the floor. At 30%, we were compliant, so we kept it there.

I returned to the board about ten years ago, around when I retired, and at the time they were consid­ering new burners and boilers. When you ask a company that sells boilers if you need a new one, the answer is always yes. But we had [engi­neer and energy effi­ciency specialist] Henry Gifford assess ours, and he said our existing boilers were already 83% effi­cient, while the new ones were 84%. Spending three-quar­ters of a million dollars for a 1% effi­ciency gain didn’t make sense. Instead, we focused on better main­te­nance. We ended up hiring a new team to do the boiler main­te­nance. And they’ve been phenom­enal. Now our boilers are about 87% efficient.

We also started analyzing our building’s [elec­trical] energy use even before Local Law 97 (LL97). I took a Passive House training years ago and met an archi­tect, Ben Southworth, who intro­duced me to his brother, McGowan Southworth. [Editor’s note: Southworth is the co-founder and pres­i­dent of Daisy Chain, a company that assists multi­family build­ings with decar­boniza­tion and LL97 compli­ance.] 

McGowan had been working on solar energy projects in his building in Sunset Park, and discov­ered that adding a master meter with sub-meters would have made the system even better. If a building is already direct-metered, you can swap out existing meters for third-party meters that inte­grate into a central­ized system. 

So in 2018, I convinced my board to install an elec­trical meter in our building’s elec­trical room, moni­toring all major power consump­tion points. We used a Leviton box, which incor­po­rated a Triacta meter. This allowed us to track and analyze power usage at a detailed level. So prior to Local Law 97, we were already on this.

It’s very hard, it seems, to make a plan for a solu­tion when you’re getting contrasting advice from different places. This goes back to your comment about the boiler guy who says, ​“Get a new boiler,” when in fact a replace­ment wouldn’t offer much of an improve­ment. So I’m really curious how you decided who to trust with these projects. What made that deci­sion for you? 

What I seek is truth-tellers: People who have real knowl­edge, and want to engage. The truth-tellers don’t know every­thing, but they will tell you that. They also tend to be very good at what they do.

Our elec­tri­cians, Response Electric, have a leader named Reaz Mohammed. He and I would talk in the morn­ings, some­times at 5 or 6 AM for an hour, just talking things through. He wants to get it right from the begin­ning. Response Electric is one of maybe four compa­nies in the city that can revamp your elec­trical room without ever taking the building down. That means they have to run things in parallel and plan metic­u­lously. If they do it wrong, someone could die, so the stakes are high.

A lot of it comes down to knowing the details, under­standing how things flow, and having a team that wants to work with you, not just say things like, ​“Yeah, yeah, yeah, what­ever. We’re gonna just do what­ever we want.”

How did you convince everyone else in your building to get on board with the vendors that you have vetted and deter­mined safe to work with?

In 2018 or so, we had a major elec­trical problem in the building. An elec­tri­cian went into the meter closet on the 11th floor and started tugging on almost 60-year-old wires. They arced, blowing up the whole meter closet. 

Response Electric came in after the previous company had screwed things up, and they were phenom­enal. Within three days, they had three floors back up and running. After that, we gave them our next project — replacing circuit breaker boxes throughout the building, in all but 10 of the units. 

They did that project and not one complaint. A total record. I was like, ​“Wait a minute, you went into every apart­ment and we had not one complaint? We have people who complain three times a day for nothing!” But they were so profes­sional, and they figured out a bunch of things that were funda­men­tally wrong with our elec­trical system, so they recti­fied all that. 

The same goes for McGowan, who helped with our sub-metering system and paper­work for the Public Service Commission. He’s still involved with our future projects, like installing solar on our roof. I won’t do anything major without them because I want to know who’s working in my building and infrastructure.

Tell me a little bit more about the financing. I know you mentioned NYSERDA was helping with incen­tives, but how did you finance all these projects?

NYSERDA, Con Edison, and other orga­ni­za­tions publish incen­tive programs, so every year, I check in with contacts at Con Ed to get the most recent plans. Often, engi­neering or elec­trical compa­nies will handle the paper­work for incen­tives, or we’ll hire a specialist. McGowan, for example, became an expert in financing through his expe­ri­ence as a co-op pres­i­dent. He figured out how [we could] combine subsi­dies, tax relief, and IRA bene­fits to maxi­mize savings. 

For the specific projects you’ve taken on, have all of them been net zero cost due to incen­tives, or have you used reserve funds?

Almost none of them are net cost zero, but they all have an accept­able payback period. For example, when we installed thermal enclo­sures — cozies — on our convec­tors, the payback period was about three to four years. 

I ask because financing is usually such a big concern for people consid­ering large-scale upgrades. How much did each unit have to contribute? 

Almost every­thing I’ve talked about came out of our capital reserves. We have two different bank accounts: An oper­ating account, and a capital account. We try to keep at least a million dollars in our capital account, and then we have at least a million-dollar line of credit. And then for projects that are bigger than that, every 10 years or so, we have to do an assessment. 

We try to run in such a way that we are growing the capital in our capital account. We do that by making invest­ments [in projects like decar­boniza­tion improve­ments] which drive down our oper­ating expense — we try to be in a posi­tion where we’re running our building at a lower cost than every­body else. 

I think you’ve already thrown out a lot of great advice, but do you have any specific advice for others who are hesi­tating to take action towards retro­fitting their own buildings?

A lot will just depend on the specifics. But I would say that really what’s needed, in my opinion, is dili­gence. If some­body is just willing to be dili­gent — they don’t have to do what I do to the extent that I do — but you have to figure out a way of finding trusted teams. There’s plenty of really good people out there, but there’s lots of scoundrels. If you get in bed with a scoundrel, nothing good is going to happen from that. 

We’ve spent a lot of time vetting and figuring out that Kelvin (formerly Radiator Labs) is really good. Do projects with Kelvin! We figured out that Response Electric is really good; do elec­trical work with Response Electric! They’re going to get it done, and it will work. Daisy Chain, founded by McGowan Southworth, knows their way around elec­tricity and sub-metering and solar. 

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