November 15, 2022

Condo living means being part of a vertical community. In addition to allowing many opportunities for friendships, everyone in your condo can come together to create a green community. One way to do this is by being mindful of energy conservation. By doing so, you not only help the planet, and your pocket, but you also join Concord’s larger green initiatives.

Your Home’s Energy-Saving Features

You may not have realized it, but Concord has removed the guesswork from beginning your energy-saving efforts. Your home is outfitted with Miele appliances. Not only are these appliances ultra-modern and aesthetically pleasing but they’re also energy-savers. Over the past 20 years, the company’s achieved reductions averaging around 50 percent in the energy and water consumption of its appliances. The thermostat you use to keep your home comfortable saves energy too. Ecobee prides itself on saving customers in North America up to 26 percent on their heating and cooling costs, based on an internal analysis conducted in April 2021.

Tips and Tricks to go Green

It’s pretty easy to further incorporate energy saving into condo life — from ceiling to floor. Start by assessing your light fixtures, including overhead, on the floor (floor lamps), and on your surfaces (desk lamps). Are you using LED light bulbs throughout your home? The benefits of these energy-savers include a long lifespan, improved environmental performance, no heat or UV emissions, and low voltage operations. Some LEDs are up to 90 percent more efficient than incandescent bulbs, and they last at least 15 times longer.

Make your home trendy while helping to insulate during the winter with curtains. Curtains in cleaner, earthier colours such as cream, white, or slate gray are very much in style right now. Also popular are olive, forest green, or deep blue curtains. Beyond their visual appeal, curtains help with heat retention by limiting airflow. Naturally, heavier curtains are better at preventing heat exchange between the cold air around the window and the warm air in the rest of the room. How’s that for dramatic flair?

From the time we were in elementary school, we were taught to recycle. The importance of recycling can’t be understated: it conserves energy, reduces air and water pollution, reduces greenhouse gases, and conserves natural resources. Recycling properly is just as vital. Ensure you understand what can be recycled and the necessary processes before you put an item into the bin (think rinsing out jars). Go a step further by taking advantage of your building’s compost system, or creating your own in a corner of your kitchen, to reduce food waste.

Good things come in small packages, right? The same can be said of small appliances. Use small appliances like a microwave when you’re reheating small quantities of food. You’ll use up to 50 percent less energy compared to a conventional oven. The same goes for choosing the right burner on your stove. A small burner will take longer to heat a large pan than a small pan, making your stove work harder and using more energy. Select the appropriate burner based on pot and pan size. Remember, less energy usage means lower emission of greenhouse gas.

Concord Paints the Town Green

While you do your part, we’re doing ours. More than 10 years ago, Concord created Concord Green Energy to power our future communities and the cities in which they’re built. This initiative has projects of scale in wind, solar, and hydro at various stages of planning, development, and operation across Canada. Concord’s current green energy projects can power more than twice the needs of all our communities.

Transportation and temperature control are the largest energy draws in our communities. So, Concord designs green communities of scale and infrastructure that reduce energy usage while simultaneously supporting the green energy grid. For example, because our high-rise buildings contain hundreds of homes with shared walls, heating and cooling are managed far more efficiently than in single-family homes. Additionally, our high-density master-planned communities are connected to cities and mass transit, greatly reducing our carbon footprint.

To round out our efforts, we’re committed to automated smart building systems, which make our developments more energy efficient, and we’re also leading North America with progressive EV parking infrastructure.

Whether it’s large-scale projects, such as Concord Green Energy, or simply hanging stylish curtains, together all of our efforts will make a difference in our lives, our neighbours’ lives, and in the global community.