THE FAIRFIELD APARTMENTS

My company, Stony Hill Real Estate Services is responsible for the acquisition, maintenance, and renovation of a portfolio of residential real estate which my business partner and I own. We only manage properties that we own.

Last July we purchased a twenty-eight-unit residential apartment complex, Fairfield Apartments, in Chicopee Massachusetts. This was the first complex that we have ever owned in which the landlord provides electric heat included with the monthly rent.

Typically, when we acquire a new property, we immediately begin to renovate the units to increase the value of the property. Part of our investment strategy is to add value to property.

As we started to plan out our renovations of our new purchase last July, we started to look at way in which we could lower our operating cost. One of the options we were considering was to install solar panels on the roofs of the building to help lower our electric bills. Electric heat in the Northeast can be very expensive.

We realize that the tenants in general are very lax with conserving energy. It has been our experience that when tenants are not directly responsible for paying their own utility bills, they for the most part have little interest or even consciousness of energy conservation. Typically, when the tenants leave their units for the day, they tend to keep their heat on at the same temperatures as if they were there in the unit.
These are cost that we have no way of controlling. We also noticed that tenants tend to set the temperatures in their units much higher when they are not directly paying the utility bill. The electric thermostats previously in our units can be set up to 90 degrees and it has been our experience that they will regularly set the temperatures above 80 degrees. With virtually no way of controlling our tenant’s bad habits with regards to their heating usage, our electric consumption at the property has become a major financial concern.

In direct relation to the issues explained above I had been searching for electric baseboard thermostats that would limit the maximum temperature that tenants would be able to set their heat at. In our other complexes that are heated with Natural Gas, temperature limited thermostats are readily available in the market. This has not been our experience with electric baseboard thermostats until we found your product.
Upon finding your Autonomy Stat, Model K701-1-DTSB we realized that we had stumbled onto a revolutionary product that would give us complete control of the heat usage in our rental units. By limiting the max temperature to 74 degrees which is 16 degrees lower from the previous thermostats that we had, we figured our savings would be significant.

Then came the next ingenious option with theses thermostats. The automatic setbacks!!!

These thermostats have put an end to our tenants heating their apartments to unreasonable levels while they are away for the day or even away for extended periods of time. With the adjustable setbacks, we have our kitchen and bathroom areas automatically resetting themselves back to 66 degrees and the bedrooms and living room areas setting themselves back to 66 degrees every four hours. These thermostats are working for us every single day. They are doing what we know the tenants are not doing. Turning down the heat!!!!

We know that when the tenants leave their apartments, within a couple of hours the thermostats are re-setting themselves to 66 degrees. And even when the tenant is in the unit, the thermostats are constantly re-setting themselves back to 66 degrees. It can be hours after they setback before the tenant realizes that they may want a little more heat, at which time they have go to the thermostat and manually set the temperature up again. The thermostats are causing the tenant to work to keep the heat up. Each of our one-bedroom units has four of these thermostats.

There is a third benefit to these thermostats. They are tenant proof!!! There are only two options for the tenants. They have the option of warmer (Max 74 degrees) or cooler controlled by one up and one down push buttons. That’s it. Nothing more for them to do. They can’t mess with the programming. There are no call backs because they don’t understand how they work. They are simple as can be to operate for any tenant.
At this time, we have installed forty of these thermostats. Our renovations of the property are currently on going. Once we have completed all our planned renovations, we will have installed 112 of these thermostats.

We figure that the savings will be so great that we will not be looking to install solar panels on the buildings. With 112 thermostats throughout our complex that are limiting the maximum temperature in each unit, and constantly turning the heat down every hour, one can only imagine the cost savings.

Thank you for getting these units to us and please keep making them. Your thermostats are a game changer for us and because of our discovery of them, we are now negotiating on another similar apartment complex in which we would install 192 of the same thermostats. Once the word gets out, I am confident that you will have trouble keeping up with production.

I have attached a picture of the complex and a renovated unit with these thermostats.

John Ferrera Jr.
Stony Hill Real Estate Services
Wilbraham, MA