Let’s start with a quick primer on air exchangers. Most new construction is rather airtight, and moisture inside of homes has a hard time escaping. High humidity means a better chance of nasty things like black mold getting a foothold and causing big headaches, figuratively and literally, down the road.
To mitigate the problem, air exchangers are installed with the purpose of taking fresh dry air from outside and blowing it into the home while recovering some of the heat from the stale, moist air from inside the home as it is exhausted to the outside.
It is also common to have a small electric booster heater attached to the air exchanger since the heat exchange process isn’t perfectly efficient, and the outside air getting blown into the home could be uncomfortably cold if the outside temps are chilly, as is often the case at 8,000 feet.
All of the recent affordable housing projects developed by Aspen Housing Partners — 517 Park Circle, 802 W. Main and 488 Castle Creek — have air exchangers installed in every unit, along with booster heaters.
“Installed” is loosely defined here.
I’ll start with one of the units I’ve looked at on 802 W. Main St. The tenant was complaining of high electricity bills and cold air being blown onto them from the vents. They had resorted to turning off the circuit breaker to the air exchange unit, with the consequence of the interior air getting rather muggy.
I brought over an ammeter and we looked at every circuit in the unit to see if there was anything unusual. Everything seemed normal; the only circuits that used significant electricity were the electric baseboard heaters and stove, which is to be expected.
We then opened the access panel into the ceiling to look at the air exchange unit. The issue became readily apparent: cheap, shoddy construction. The air exchanger was blowing half of the fresh outside air, and the recovered heat directly into the attic. The interface between the air exchanger and the heater was just a large gap, and the round ducting from the heater to the rectangular vent was “attached” with a 1-inch gap all the way around. This renter was essentially heating his attic with his baseboard heaters, which had to run more frequently in order to counteract the fact that little of the recovered heat was making it back into the unit.
The booster heater was not connected to any supply power — not just not plugged in, but literally without a wire to be plugged in. There is a piece of punch tape over the junction box where the wire should be, presumably because a project manager had noticed at one point that this is wrong, but then, apparently, nothing happened.
At a unit in the 488 Castle Creek project, the renter couldn’t get the apartment to cool down; it was always warm. Again, I accessed the air exchanger unit and found that their booster heater thermostat (which is not adjustable by the tenants if they don’t know it exists) was basically set to “hot.” The tenants were never instructed that these heaters were there, nor that there is a setting that the property manager could change. They are just stuck paying $54 a month for a 1-kilowatt-hour heater to run 24/7/365.
City code requires that all bathrooms have ventilation. That can mean a window, vent or fan. Since the air exchangers are being installed in the units already, it makes sense that the stale moist inside air be pulled from the bathroom, since that satisfies the code without also having to install additional venting for a bathroom fan.
In a unit at 488 Castle Creek, there is no ventilation in the bathroom. Nothing. In fact, a thorough search of the unit results in exactly zero vents pulling inside air to go outside. There is just one vent total, blowing hot air into the bedroom.
I called the regional sales director for the manufacturer of the air exchanger and heater module to get a ballpark figure for the wholesale cost of the equipment: $1,400.
Aspen-Pitkin Housing Authority fronted $25 million to Aspen Housing Partners for this experiment of letting the free market build and manage our workforce housing. Aspen Housing Partners is then motivated to build the housing at the least possible cost, because the sooner the cost of construction is paid off, the sooner they will begin making a profit. Illustrative of the perceived quality of the units by the locals who live in them is this quote from another renter I interviewed, who said that the contractor appeared to “low-ball the low-ball.”
Aspen Housing Partners hired a contractor who used taxpayer money to pay someone to improperly install something for which we paid around $1,400, which when properly installed, increases the energy efficiency of the units. This could be repeated in every one of the 45 units; APCHA certainly doesn’t know. Worse, the workers who live in the units have to shoulder the cost of the higher utility bills indefinitely. Will the developer pay to have every unit inspected? Doubtful. It’s free-market and they don’t have to spend money to fix things if they don’t want to. Was the management company, Royal American, in the dark about these problems? No. That’s a whole other column yet to be written. Has Royal American done anything to solve the issues? In the words of one tenant, who has given them a long list of construction flaws, “No. Not a single thing.”
Our money is being thrown down a hole and we have no oversight. APCHA has completely abandoned its mission of accountable management 10 ways to Sunday by emphatically claiming they have nothing to do with the mismanagement of the three properties and is pointing its finger at everyone but themselves.
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June 10, 2021 at 05:00PM
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