Senior living and HOAs: shared meters, shared savings

The load profile

Senior living communities and HOAs carry a load profile most property managers have never looked at closely, because the common-area meter is a fixed line in the budget rather than something anyone actively manages.

The shape is distinctive. There is a modest around-the-clock base load from corridor lighting, elevators, security and office equipment. On top of that sit several loads that are large, intermittent, and driven entirely by resident behavior nobody coordinates.

Shared laundry rooms are the biggest one. A bank of electric dryers at 5 to 6 kW each, in a room where six or ten machines can be running at once, produces a 30 to 60 kW spike out of nowhere. And residents in these communities do laundry on remarkably consistent schedules, which means the spike recurs at the same time most days.

Pool and spa heating adds another large block. Clubhouse HVAC runs on an event schedule. Community kitchens, fitness equipment and increasingly EV charging fill in the rest.

Load factors on common-area meters frequently run in the 20 to 35 percent range. That is candidate territory.

Why it is a good candidate

The controllable share of load is unusually high. In a typical commercial building most of the load is lighting and plug loads the controller cannot touch. On a common-area meter, laundry, pool heat and clubhouse HVAC can be the majority of the peak, which means a controller has a lot of room to work.

The loads also have genuine slack. A dryer in a shared laundry room is a different case than a dryer in a private home, because in a shared room the machines can be rotated. Nine of twelve run at any moment, and which nine changes every few minutes. Every load finishes, every cycle completes, and the peak never reaches twelve machines at once. Pool heat has enormous thermal storage: a heated pool loses temperature so slowly that deferring the heater through an entire on-peak window changes water temperature imperceptibly.

There is also a rate-class angle that shows up repeatedly in these properties. A shared laundry facility that crosses a demand threshold gets billed on a commercial demand tariff instead of a much cheaper rate. Holding it below that threshold can move the entire facility back onto the better rate.

And these buyers make decisions in a way that suits a verified-savings product. HOA boards and senior living operators want documented results, a defined payback, and no impact on residents. All three are things we can speak to directly.

Which loads get controlled

Laundry equipment as a rotating group, which is the primary target in most of these properties. Pool and spa heaters, which are large and highly deferrable. Clubhouse and common-area HVAC. Common-area electric water heating. EV charging stations where present, which are large, schedulable and among the easiest loads to defer since vehicles sit for hours.

Individual resident units are a separate question. In multifamily properties where the owner controls in-unit equipment, PTAC units and in-unit water heaters can be brought under control with power line carrier receivers at each load. That is a bigger project and it requires the property to actually own or control the equipment.

Elevators, life safety systems, medical equipment and anything with a resident health function are never controlled. That is not a preference, it is a rule.

What the buying process looks like

Identify the meters first. These properties often have several, and only some are on demand rates. The one serving the laundry room and clubhouse is usually the one worth looking at.

Interval data on those meters for 12 months, which will show the laundry spike immediately.

Tariff analysis with specific attention to rate-class thresholds, since the threshold game is frequently the larger opportunity in these properties.

Site inspection covering the laundry room electrical layout, pool equipment room, clubhouse mechanical, and the main distribution panel. Multiple buildings usually means multiple installations, and the equipment list reflects that.

Then a board or ownership presentation. These decisions get made by committee, and the proposal needs to survive being read by someone skeptical. We would rather give you defensible numbers with ranges than a single optimistic figure that falls apart under questioning.

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