FOR BUILDING OWNERS
Cut the HVAC bill. Cut the carbon. Stay ahead of LL97.
On a 50-ton building running heat pumps year-round you spend about $46,000 a year to run the HVAC, cooling and heating combined, and nobody watches the equipment between service visits. AirPulse itemizes that bill by machine and ranks every fix by payback.
The waste, scaled.
HVAC is roughly 40% of an all-electric building's electric bill (EIA CBECS), the single biggest line you can move without touching the rest of the building. A real share of it is waste from faults nobody watches between service visits: a dirty filter alone is 5-15% of a unit's energy (U.S. DOE), a low refrigerant charge 10-20% (ACEEE). Heat pump, year-round (cooling + heating), conservative $0.18/kWh marginal basis; on an all-in NYC commercial rate ($0.24-0.30/kWh) multiply by 1.33-1.67. On a demand-billed SC9 meter, add the demand charge (about $3,900/yr per 5-ton at $65.79/kW-mo) for roughly $8,500/yr per unit, about $85,000 on a 50-ton building. The waste number is the floor, not the ceiling.
| Metric | 1× 5-ton | 50-ton building (10× 5-ton) |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline HVAC OpEx (heat pump, year-round) | $4,600/yr | $46,000/yr |
| of which cooling | $1,432/yr | $14,317/yr |
| of which heating | $3,165/yr | $31,650/yr |
| 15% maintenance waste | $690/yr | $6,900/yr |
| 30% maintenance waste | $1,380/yr | $13,800/yr |
| 30% waste over 15-yr life | $20,700 | $207,000 |
The demand charge is the story.
On a commercial meter, the biggest line on your bill often isn't the energy. It's the demand charge, billed on your monthly peak kilowatts. We pulled a real NYC commercial Con Ed bill (Rate EL9, a 32-day summer period): 3,003 kWh, $2,084.64 total, of which demand charges were 70% of the bill. All-in demand rate: $65.79 per kW-month. One kilowatt of peak, present all year, costs about $789. Effective rate: $0.694/kWh versus about $0.11/kWh on energy alone.
A fouled coil, low charge, or dirty condenser makes the compressor draw more amps for the same cooling. That hits the bill twice: more kilowatt-hours, and a higher peak, every month the degraded unit sets it. This is why maintenance-equals-money is sharper for commercial than residential: homes have no demand charge; large commercial pays for the degraded peak twelve times a year.
Even the Sense tier earns its keep here without control: it shows the demand peak forming, so staff can shed a load or stagger a start and shave the kilowatt that sets the month's bill. Avoiding a single 20 kW peak event that would otherwise set the billing peak is worth roughly $700-880 that month.
Con Ed rates: last verified 2026-07-17.
$2,084.64
one month · 3,003 kWh · rate EL9
What you get.
Every fault priced in dollars per month
Repairs are approved against a payback number, not a hunch.
A portfolio dashboard
Every unit, every building, one screen, ranked by dollar impact.
LL97 documentation, continuous
Per-unit energy behavior, findings, repairs, and measured recovery, archived.
Capital planning with evidence
Replacement budgets go to the units the data flags as degrading or rising in operating cost.
Your contractor arrives with the diagnosis
A scheduled visit, not an emergency call.
The floor
Correcting the common faults AirPulse flags recovers a documented 5-20% of a unit's energy each: a dirty filter is 5-15% (U.S. DOE), a low refrigerant charge 10-20% (ACEEE). The value lenses above are separate ways to look at the return, not figures to add together.
If your equipment is past saving, electrification can pay for much of the replacement.
Commercial HVAC is moving to heat pumps, pushed by LL97 and the R-410A phase-out. Con Ed's Clean Heat program pays $8,000 for a single-family home and $4,000per apartment (non-DAC; $10,000 and $5,000 in disadvantaged communities), and the commercial building-electrification incentive is $120 per MMBtu of space heating, with a 20% bonus for projects completed by October 1, 2026. No federal residential credit applies in 2026; we don't quote those.
Gas combustion carries a fixed carbon coefficient that never improves; the grid's halves in 2030, so every year on gas your LL97 exposure rises against a tightening cap. Electrify, and AirPulse manages the new system from day one: it recovers waste on the larger electric load, catches the demand peak before it sets your bill, and documents the CO2 you avoid for your filing. Your local AirPulse Pro handles the install and the incentive paperwork.
See what your equipment would tell you.
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