This article was originally published on by THE CITY
Radiators are on the way out at a Queens public-housing complex — where the first wave of a project to modernize how 10,000 apartments are warmed in the winter and cooled in the summer is taking shape.
The New York City Housing Authority this month installed electric-powered heat pumps at 12 apartments inside the Woodside Houses, where residents lost heat and hot water for months in 2021 after boilers at the 20-building complex were damaged by flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida.
The units are replacing steam-heat radiators, which could leave residents sweltering in winter or sometimes without heat when the gas boilers powering them failed. The pumps operate by pulling warm air in from the outside in to heat a space, or essentially in reverse to cool it.
They are more efficient than window air-conditioning units and boilers, which combust fossil fuel on site to produce heat — the reason that buildings emit the most harmful greenhouse gas emissions in the city.
“It’s like winter in here,” Roseline Vieira, whose second-floor apartment was one of the first equipped with the pumps, told THE CITY on a day when the temperature outside neared 90 degrees. “It’s so nice.”
But the big test will come once temperatures drop in the coming months.
According to NYCHA data, there have been 2,448 total unplanned heat outages over the last five heating seasons.
The pumps are among the improvements planned for a public housing network that says it needs $78.3 billion to renovate its aging housing stock, a task that includes replacing old boilers. Presently, the most cost-effective move is to replace a gas boiler with another, instead of a cleaner, greener option.
“If that’s our only option, then we’ll never be able to decarbonize our buildings at needed scale,” Vlada Kenniff, NYCHA’s senior vice president for sustainability, told THE CITY. “We’ll never be able to…
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