About Apartments' Heating Efficiency

There's been an argument made regarding how apartments are more efficient to heat then homes. Years ago (in the 70's) the wife & I helped manage and did maintenance involving four apartment complexes. One was in Salisbury Township, another in Catasauqua and two more in Bethlehem. These totaled about 400 units. All of them were either electric forced air or electric baseboard heating.

I'm here to tell you that in many ways (per square foot) these apartments were less efficient then many of the newer single homes of that day. The reason is they were designed knowing renters would be paying for their own electric. When the builders constructed the apartments they did so in the least expensive way.

The insulation, doors and windows used were far from the most efficient available at the time. In three of those complexes' buildings they didn't use insulation between the walls of adjacent units. This meant there was additional costs to someone living next to a empty or someone living next to an occupant who ran their heat (or air conditioning) at a lower setting then their own. Yes there were fire walls, but they were only installed on every other unit. In one case the firewalls didn't even extend beyond the units up to the commons attic roof. This created a draft (summer & winter) from one end of the building to the other end across the top of their ceilings.

It may be true that some apartment complexes may be more efficient then single homes, but that's not always the case per square foot. Some friends we had at the time owned homes several times larger who's heating bills ran lower then some of our single bedroom apartments. Not only because of the way the buildings were constructed, but also because the homes didn't rely on electric heat (which is the most expensive form of heat).

In my particular case the owners built these apartment complexes as cheap as possible then sold then right after to another group of investors. Then leased them from the new owners for the next 5 years (gaming the tax advantages). They were never built to last over the long haul for the new investors nor with tenants utility costs in mind. The point is, don't buy into what some promoters of urban growth tell you regarding apartments always being of greater efficiency.

What one should also keep in mind is the thermodynamics. It always cost more to cool upper level units more then lower ones. Heat rises. The higher the number of stories a apartment is located, the more it will cost to cool it. Which means sometimes it will cost more to cool a 4th floor apartment then it would to cool an average two story single home.

This is an example of another kind of myth that urban proponents constantly perpetuate against single home ownership which tends to aggravate me.