Aging condos get expert help with clean upgrades

In the underground mechanical room of an aging condo building in Vancouver, Stephan Baeuml paces around a dilapidated natural gas-powered boiler that is hemorrhaging heat, emissions and money. 

Riverview Court was built in 1991 and is showing its age. After a series of tests, Baeuml delivered his verdict.  

“It’s running at about 45 per cent efficiency, which means that more than half of your gas bill is going out the window,” the German-born engineer and energy advisor told Robert Chang, the strata president seeking to replace the decades-old boiler.

The first of Vancouver’s ubiquitous strata condominiums date back to the 1970s. It’s a type of housing where owners buy an apartment, duplex or townhouse in a building or cluster development and pay fees to maintain the building and common areas like tennis courts or BBQ pits.

Riverview Court, home to 31 units in the city’s Marpole neighbourhood, is among 8,000 aging condominiums facing expensive retrofits and replacements due to advancing age. 

But more than just another mounting cost-of-living expense, there is an opportunity to decarbonize existing buildings that across Canada account for almost 20 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions.    

It can mean replacing old natural gas space- and water-heating with heat pumps, installing efficient lighting and windows and finding a way to add EV chargers in buildings never designed to host such infrastructure.

Many condo dwellers are asking how they can replace aging infrastructure and strengthen the climate resilience of their homes – and do it at an affordable price.

These questions are often too big for strata councils — typically composed of volunteer owners, many with day jobs and family — no matter how dedicated they are. 

Free advice

That’s why residents at Riverview Court called Baeuml — a technical manager of retrofit implementation at the Zero Emissions Innovation Centre (ZEIC), which launched its Strata Energy Advisor program in BC last October. 

It’s a free program that guides strata-owned residential condos on how to lower emissions and boost efficiency through energy upgrades timed with necessary replacement projects.

On a rainy day in March, the Riverview Court council took Baeuml on a tour. 

He visited multiple units on all four floors of the building, and inspected everything from the roof to underground garage. 

He studied the building shell, scanned gas fireplaces, walls and underground pipes with an infrared camera to identify energy loss. 

He also asked questions.

About two hours later, Baeuml walked out of the mechanical room and declared: “I have everything I need.” 

He got back on his bike and rode to the ZEIC office to begin work on a decarbonization plan that would include options for the boiler, a list of available subsidies and a long-term vision for how future energy-efficient upgrades can be timed to the replacement of other aging building features.

While the advisor is critical to the program, residents who embrace implementing the green retrofits – so-called champions – are also key to getting the work done, he said.  

Long-time Riverview Court resident Michel Sim is a case in point: he learned about the Strata Advisor Energy Program and secured a council motion for the process to begin.

Strata strains

To many of his neighbours, replacing the end-of-life boiler poses a significant financial hit, requiring potential special assessments over and above monthly strata fees. But Sim sees an opportunity.  

When it’s time to do expensive replacements, condo owners need to think about the long-term costs of continuing to use fossil fuels.

“I believe natural gas is a sunset industry, and at some point, it is going to become more expensive,” he said. 

“I would find it very sad to lose the opportunity and to actually lock ourselves in for another 30 years of using natural gas.”

The Riverview strata council flagged the boiler problem early enough to do the research for its replacement.

“So let's think about climate as one of the variables that we should take into account, even though it might be a little more expensive,” Sim said.

In 2018, he was on council when a previous iteration of the same strata advisor program identified “low hanging fruit” for energy efficiency and all exterior lighting was replaced with ultra-efficient LED lights. 

Last year, after an immense learning curve — and initial skepticism of some owners — one resident installed a heat pump system as an alternative to baseboard heating and air conditioning. 

‘The apartment was unlivable’

Jessica Chan was the first resident of Riverview Court to install a heat pump for heating and cooling in September 2023. 

The pump — a box about the size of a small fridge —now sits on the roof, mounted atop a rubber base to help absorb the noise when it’s running.

Chan didn’t get the heat pump by choice. In the summer of 2021, her south-facing penthouse suite — a wonder of natural light with a big open patio, multiple skylights and windows on all sides — quickly became a liability for her family, including her three young children, when temperatures rose over 30 degrees for many days and did not cool down at night.

“My kids had to sleep under wet blankets. The apartment was unlivable,” she said, adding that the three ceiling fans and two portable air conditioners did not provide enough relief. “We couldn’t even sit in our house at midday.” 

Chan wanted a better solution.

She researched online and learned that heat pumps could cool the sunny unit in the summer and provide warmth in colder months. It also meant relying less on inefficient gas fireplaces in the winter as an alternative to expensive electric baseboard heating.

Initially five other residents expressed interest in the heat pump solution, but that number dwindled to just two over time. 

The learning curve was not the only barrier. Her father-in-law Baldwin, one of the strata members on the tour with Baeumi, recalled there was lots of opposition. “People were very NIMBY [not in my backyard]. There was huge resistance because of fear about the noise level,” he said.

Outdoor heat pump units are not noisy, typically generating about 60 decibels  — the background noise of a moderate rainfall. But some neighbours worried about sitting on their patios and hearing the sound from another balcony. 

Other residents were concerned the installation of heat pumps would require piercing the building shell in common areas and those owners would not be accountable for potential damage.

The solution to their concerns was to create a new strata bylaw that made clear the rules for anyone who wanted to follow Chan’s example. This included installing rubber padding to dampen noise, and a commitment to maintain the system. Chan and a neighbour paid $800 to get the strata bylaw written and passed at a special meeting.

All told, the heat pump cost about $12,000 —not including the strata bylaw — but Chan said it was worth it. Heating from her three heat pump air handler units, which look like oversized upside down home printers mounted on the walls, cost $100 less each three-month billing period than running two baseboard heaters. 

Unlike with the baseboard heaters, her home in winter has “a nice even temperature,” she said. And most importantly, they did not live in fear of the next summer heat wave.

If she had a do over, Chan would have not invited contractors to pitch the residents on the heat pump solution for her unit. Neighbours at the meeting did not trust the motives of the contractors, she said, adding that a talk from an impartial expert like Stephan Baeumi would have been more successful. 

Being first is always the hardest, she laughed. 

“Where the heat pump is now on the roof, no one knows it's even there. You can’t see it, and you can’t hear it.”

Sim wants to take it further. 

“I can only speak for myself in terms of what my aspirations are for the building. It would be to electrify everything and remove ourselves from fracked gas, even though it’s not necessarily a shared sentiment within the council,” he said.

For now, the focus is on the dinosaur gas boiler in the basement. It uses natural gas to heat water, which is stored in two large adjacent tanks for the entire complex. Facing at least a $30,000 bill to replace the boiler with an updated natural gas system, were there cleaner, more cost-effective options?

If they stick with gas, Baeuml said, there are new condensing boilers that are around 95 percent efficient. “That’s the very minimum they can do,” he said. “Ideally they can switch to an electrified solution to avoid fossil fuels altogether.” 

One option is to install a hot water heat pump system, which would be three to four times more efficient than the new gas boiler, and make use of the ample space in the underground parking garage to hold the required multiple water tanks.

Leaky boiler

Not long after Canada’s National Observer joined the building tour, Fortis BC confirmed that the old boiler was leaking gas, necessitating a temporary shutdown of the system, cutting off the supply of domestic hot water to the 31 units.  

The strata thought they were acting early enough to plan for the replacement, but suddenly they were scrambling to find a solution — with pressure mounting from residents to go with a faster natural gas option rather than a cleaner alternative that could take more time to implement. 

“This is why it’s so important to have a good plan on the shelf,” says ZEIC’s Darla Simpson, who says her organization is helping guide the strata through this crisis, which remains unresolved as of this writing. “It’s critical to making good decisions.”

All is not lost: with CleanBC’s current incentive of $2,600 per unit, Riverview's 31 units qualify for about $80,000 in subsidies, making a fossil-fuel free heat pump affordable. A gas backup would not be required either, Baeuml said.

But suddenly, time is of the essence.

Green retrofits like this heat pump solution are attracting a lot of new interest, said Tony Gioventu, the executive director of the Condominium Home Owners Association of BC,  a consumer association with 200,000 members, which is partnering with ZEIC to deliver the Strata Energy Advisor program.

About a year ago, his office would field one or two calls a month about condo energy upgrades. “Now we’re up to one to three a day,” he said.

This is part of a cultural shift in BC when it comes to upgrading strata condos. 

“For the longest time, energy upgrades and conversions were met with a fair bit of suspicion, because they were costly. The reality was nobody could afford it,” Gioventu said. 

The advisor can help by analysing data from mandatory depreciation reports, where stratas hire outside analysts to study their building and flag pending expenditures. Councils in BC must also provide an electric planning report by 2027 that assesses the building capacity to electrify and provide power for EV charging, heat pumps and more.

“So the advisor program is really about coaching people through the life cycles of their buildings, using their depreciation reports, their electric planning reports, and figuring out the ideal time and benefit when to do upgrades and conversions,” Gioventu said.

For example: if a building needs a new roof in a few years, that’s the perfect time to also improve the roofing insulation. Old lighting fixtures approaching end of life? Roll out the high efficiency LEDs.

The latter example strikes Gioventu close to home.

The recent replacement of LEDs in his large Vancouver condominium netted savings of $70,000 a year. Not only does LED provide better light with fewer light posts, the power saved can be put to better uses, such as heating water or charging an electric car.

Working together

Like in Marpole, it took dedicated champions to get green initiatives done at Salsbury Heights. The self-managed East Vancouver strata complex navigated the complicated process of getting EV charging installed for all 16 underground parking spots last year.

Simon de Weerdt, a longtime resident who bought a Tesla in September 2020, saw the need to get home charging right away, but he had to rely on a haphazard network of public parking lots and garages for another three years. 

“I was driving around Vancouver wasting a charge to find charging,” he laughed. “I really needed charging at home.”

De Weerdt joined four other residents — one who already owned an EV  — to put up $3,000 of their own money for an EV Ready Plan that sent an engineer/expert to their building to assess charging design options. 

While the five neighbours got most of their money back through a rebate, the project still took a lot of work. The initial plan was for individual owners to add their own chargers in the parking garage as needed, but in the end, the strata installed 16 new chargers.

What made it work was tapping subsidies from BC Hydro and the federal Green Economy Canada program that covered about 70 per cent of the costs.

The rest was covered by condo owners through a special assessment they approved in a vote. 

At Salsbury Heights, the subsidies largely placated cost-conscious owners who had no plans to buy an EV, but agreed that the charging infrastructure would be a plus if they ever sold their property.

“For an EV owner it’s wonderful,” said de Weerdt, an amateur inventor and former bus driver who loves technical challenges.

“I plug it in when I get home at night, and when I wake up, it’s ready to go.” 

The building now has six EV owners and potentially more to come, de Weerdt said. 

His advice for other strata councils grappling with EV charging? Identify champions, and more than just one, who are willing to share the long hours of research, planning and even upfront costs.

“It’s so important to have a group of interested people that is supportive,” he said.

His latest idea, no less daunting, is to find a way for residents to install their own heat pumps for energy-efficient heating and cooling. It makes that much more sense after the 2021 summer heat dome, when temperatures soared for weeks and hit the low 40s.

It’s inevitable that with climate change, this will need to be on the radar of strata buildings that historically have not needed it in Vancouver’s climate, he said.

The electrical planning report for Salsbury Heights, which must be completed by the end of 2027, will help determine if the building has enough electricity to supply heat pumps for cooling 16 units, or if owners will have to pay to upgrade the electrical system. 

“This is coming; we want to adapt to it,” he said of potential heat waves this summer. “We want to be ready so that when there are rebates and subsidies, we can get the best solution for the cheapest cost.” 

After the electrical report, the strata council will seek an expert opinion on heat pump options and research the subsidies and rebates to help make it happen.

“If we have another heat dome, and another 600 people die like last time, I think the government could make it mandatory to get heat pumps,” de Weerdt said. “We might need to be proactive and get ahead of that.”