If sustainability is a part of your branding, the holidays are your time to shine. Did you know that from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, Americans toss about one million extra tons of trash each week? The additional waste is mostly holiday packaging, wrapping, and shipping supplies. Americans are particularly wasteful with energy during the holidays, too. Households in the US consume more energy during the holidays that some countries do in a year. Multifamily properties can set new precedents for the holidays. Below are six tips to make your property more environmentally friendly and cost efficient. By implementing conservation techniques and rewarding resident participation, we can break the tradition of holiday waste. Sustainable Switches, Great and Small Do you have a healthy budget for sustainable upgrades, or are you’re advocating for Mother Earth with your bare hands? Below are a few tips for budgets of any size. Make the Switch to LEDs If you haven’t already made the switch to LED lights, do so. This includes your holiday lighting. According to Eartheasy, the average business can save about $3,700 per year, per 25 bulbs. Each LED bulb last up to 200,000 hours, meaning that you replace bulbs and strings of lights less often. Step Up Recycling After the holidays, host recycling hauls for residents. For example, invite residents to bring their outdated electronics down to a truck near the leasing office. It’s then a single trip to recycle tablets and smart phones for the entire community. (Many electronics store offer recycling services.) You can also invite a tree specialist to the property to clear Christmas trees. Some companies will bring a mulching truck and recycle trees on the spot! Improve Utility Billing Some residents decorate like there is no tomorrow. Others leave town or skip the décor...

The heart of Taipei City is about to become the nest of architect Vincent Callebout’s eco-friendly, energy-saving pioneer concept. The Tao Zhu Yin Yuan (The Retreat of Tao Zhu) tower, also known as the Agora Garden, is blossoming in the XinYi District. Located just a few blocks from the LEED-Platinum certified Taipei 101, the world’s eighth tallest building, Tao Zhu Yin Yuan was conceived as a twisted tower that sucks up carbon emissions in downtown Taipei. The 455,694-square-foot structure is a double-helix inspired by the DNA structure. It is this inspiration source that makes the tower a symbol of life and harmony with nature. A vertical forest The 306-foot building will be inhabited at 20 levels that stretch and twist themselves at 90 degrees. Every floor is rotated by 4.5 degrees clockwise as the tower moves up. Viewed from different angles, the building has four different forms—a triangle, figure 8, cone and reverse triangle. Luxuriant vegetation that springs from every balcony will engulf the building as the community will be covered in 23,000 trees and shrubs. The selected essences will mostly be eatable in order to make each inhabitant gardener in its own vegetable consumption. Suspended orchards, organic vegetable gardens, aromatic and medicinal gardens will multiply the jardinière along the global periphery of each apartment. The plants will continue inside to the tower’s hallways, complete with a glass floor. The design also includes rainwater recycling. Moreover, an 11,000-square-foot photovoltaic pergola will be placed on top of the building, helping it become a self-sufficient one. All condos will feature 270-degree views of Taipei’s Central Business District, double-floor designs, completely column-free interior space and column-less floor perimeters in order to provide total flexibility in interior planning. The building will include car parks, a swimming pool, a...

With the ability to collect, analyze and communicate real-time energy information, Pulse Energy adds the power of data to Yardi Energy arsenal. The Power of Data Over the last few years, Jeff Rambharack and the Pulse Energy team have worked to collect data on over a million businesses throughout the US and Canada. That data drives the company’s overall approach and helps provide Pulse clients with strategies tailored to their unique challenges. The company works with utilities and individual businesses, focusing on solutions specifically for different industry segments. “We provide personalized messaging for individual businesses,” explains Rambharack. “We support over 130 different verticals for businesses segments, and we provide personal messaging within each segment. We recognize that every business is different, and we work to identify sources of energy consumption and provide targeted recommendations layered on top of our in-depth analytics we’ve developed to analyze each business’s energy consumption.” Rambharack believes the biggest benefit of this data aggregation is that it allows an energy usage analysis at every level of a company’s organization. By being able to provide personalized insights about of those levels of aggregation, Pulse clients can pursue more effective energy management policies and procedures to reduce energy waste and improve energy efficiency. “Just being able to provide insights and say ‘Hey, you should go look at building X, because we think it has some efficiency problems,’ is so valuable to our clients,” says Rambharack. “Maybe we discover that they are leaving their systems on at night or running their AC and heating simultaneously. Our analytics and extensive database help us detect these sorts of oversights and provide valuable energy consumption insight to our customers.” Tracking Usage against the Baseline One of the most valuable tools for energy management involves developing an accurate...

For facility managers, seasonal changes are always a challenge. External temperatures fluctuate. Occupant attire straddles the coverage spectrum. You can tell by the flood of emails that you receive (and the dirty looks that you get at lunch) that occupant comfort is not optimal.  It doesn’t have to be that way. Occupant comfort is a tricky science. As a facility manager, you balance the temperatures between 72° – 76° F for your office spaces because you know the workers will be sedentary. In more active environments, like retail and schools, you drop the temperatures between 68° – 74° F. You know that these temperature ranges will keep about 90 percent of the occupants happy, which is the industry standard. Yet the ASHRAE recommended temperature ranges are broad enough to cause discomfort amongst the 90 percent, especially during changes in season. Biological differences play a role in comfortable conditions. Yardi LOBOS® (Load Based Optimization System) for commercial properties makes it easier to achieve optimal occupant comfort while saving energy even during seasonal transitions. LOBOS is an intelligent HVAC energy optimization software platform that can help you maximize efficiency, by automating demand management, peak load reduction. and demand response events. It does this by sending temperature, pressure, and speed set point adjustment signals to the existing HVAC components every 60 seconds to produce just enough cooling resources to satisfy the cooling demand in the spaces The LOBOS Cloud automatically stores HVAC trend data that operators find useful in creating a host of ad hoc reports of system operation and performance. The LOBOS software suite gives you a complete understanding of how your building is performing and automatically makes subtle real-time adjustments to maximize occupant comfort and energy savings. Adding LOBOS to an existing HVAC system typically...

In efforts to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions, commercial real estate leaders are turning to sustainable building and management techniques. While there are countless products and services on the market to improve efficiency in these areas, few offer an unobtrusive option that is designed to interface seamlessly with existing  HVAC control systems in most modern buildings–LOBOS is different. Whether it is a newly constructed building or a recent renovation, even the greenest buildings can achieve greater energy and cost savings with LOBOS. Yardi subsidiary Enerliance produces the Load Based Optimization System (LOBOS), an advanced software platform that layers on top of existing HVAC control systems to dramatically reduce energy consumption in large buildings and campuses. The system provides automated energy efficiency reset control strategies, real-time automated demand response functionality (“Smart Grid”), system fault detection and diagnostics, and continuous commissioning.  By adding LOBOS to the Yardi Energy solutions bundle of offerings, our customers can enjoy the maximum gains in energy efficiency and savings possible today. Scot Duncan, Enerliance founder, commends the relationship between software and utilities, “LOBOS is delivering owner-friendly, tenant-friendly demand reduction which benefits the community, owners and occupants alike. This is a great example of the facilities community working with the utility to prevent brownouts and blackouts, reduce the need to build new power plants, and to manage energy costs for the facility,” says Duncan. LOBOS is a comfort based system. That is, it monitors and controls cooling, heating and air handling systems to improve occupant comfort while simultaneously reducing utility costs for building owners and tenants. To date, LOBOS has been installed in over 400 buildings and has delivered more than $7 million in annual energy savings to clients, or nearly 143 million kWh. The results have garnered an honored position for...