Utility Tracking and Benchmarking Blog | WegoBlog

Imagine you walked into a retail clothing store at a shopping mall. There are no articles of clothing in sight, only a table in the middle with a few experts seated around it. You sit down and discuss your needs. After a few minutes, the experts arrive at the perfect solution for you - a pair of denim jeans that is simultaneously comfortable and attractive. And the price is more than compensated by the additional coolness and enjoyment this pair of jeans will introduce into your life. You fork over the money and walk out of the store, thrilled with your new purchase. 

At a launch event on February 6^th at the HUD regional office, WegoWise was on hand as Boston LISC unveiled their recently published guide for “Green & Healthy Property Management”.  The guide provides an incredible resource for affordable as well as market rate multifamily housing owners to explicitly define and apply green measures within their portfolios.  In this post, we’ll highlight the most important features of this publication, but encourage our readers to check it out in its entirety! 

Whether you want to be a more informed citizen or just want to kill some time before 5 on a Friday afternoon, WegoWise has got you covered. The holidays are over, spring is months away, and now is the time to start enjoying the winter instead of moping about in the doldrums.  Whether you ski, snowshoe, snowboard or blade, winter can be a fun and active time of the year.  Sure it's fun to play in the snow, but many winter sports have complicated environmental footprints.   Here are some links to help you navigate the dicey world of green snowsports. Check out these links, give us some feedback and be sure to share some of the info you just gleaned with other interested parties at the parties you're hopefully attending this weekend. Brought to you by Dan, Nate, Lily, Catherine, Casey, Joanna, Sam and Adam.

With the severity of last year’s drought, as covered in our most recent blog post, water conservation is important to think about whether or not you live in an area with limited water resources. Greywater - the water used in your home for activities such as dishwashing, laundry, and bathing – can be up to 50-80% of a typical home’s waste stream. The potential savings from recycling greywater are great from both a water and energy conservation standpoint.

Multifamily housing presents an excellent opportunity for energy efficiency measures for three primary reasons. First, much of this housing stock is old: according to the Energy Programs Consortium, 85% of multifamily housing in the United States was constructed before 1990. This means many of the structures need repairs and most have building systems that are outdated. Next, the physical characteristics of multifamily housing, such as exterior exposure per residence, make it easier to perform retrofits. And finally, the larger scale of these types of properties means that improvements result in larger total reductions in usage and larger financial savings. Due to these factors, EPC found that multifamily buildings could save anywhere from 30 – 75% of energy through efficiency measures. We’ve observed this ourselves through the work we’ve been doing in Massachusetts with the LEAN Multifamily Benchmarking Inventory. In some cases, owners have reduced their energy bill by more than 50% through retrofits.

Whether you want to be a more informed citizen or just want to kill some time before 5 on a Friday afternoon, WegoWise has got you covered. So peruse our best links, give us some feedback and be sure to share some of the info you just gleaned with other interested parties at the parties you are hopefully attending this weekend. Brought to you by Dan, Nate, Lily, Kate and Bert.

Here at WegoWise, we are very excited about the Olympics, particularly this year. 2012 marks the year of the first Olympic Games committed to sustainability and the environment. Did you know that the most sustainable Olympic Stadium ever built is now in London?

Earlier this year, the green building community was rattled when it appeared the military projects would no longer be pursuing LEED certification.  The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed by President Obama on New Year's Eve, included language which stated that no funds authorized in the act could be used for LEED Gold or Platinum certification.  It also requires the Pentagon to report how cost effective LEED certification is to Congress.  Many were worried that these measures would cause the military to stop pursuing it.  In fact, a number of articles started circulating around the end of March stating that the Army was dropping LEED.