It’s not surprising that multifamily management companies in Florida see HVAC issues as one of their top service requests. With the challenge of keeping more than 100 air conditioning units working efficiently in the heat and humidity of Tampa, Cortland Properties chose to take a unique approach to ensuring resident comfort at its Bowery Bayside community.

At Cortland, residents are guaranteed to have problems in their home fixed within 48 hours. If it’s not fixed by then, the resident lives rent-free until it is. So when the property management team is alerted to an issue, they need to respond quickly.

Cortland selected Emerson’s Sensi HVAC monitoring and maintenance technology to help optimize comfort for residents and support Cortland’s 48-hour service completion guarantee. The 100-system installation at the Bowery Bayside community includes Sensi™ Touch smart thermostats, Sensi Manager multi-thermostat system, and Sensi Predict smart HVAC. All of the thermostats can be managed at once and even set to the same temperature with just a few clicks.

The Sensi solution almost immediately helped identify system issues and optimize performance in more than 40 percent of the monitored units at the community.

Cortland’s community service team has found that the use of the Sensi Predict monitoring system gives them the opportunity to prolong the life of their older R22 units. The team noted that some 20-year-old systems that started at 45 percent efficiency were able to get back to 96 percent efficiency after service issues were identified by the Sensi Predict sensors.

The ability to monitor systems 24/7 has allowed the Cortland team to take the guesswork out of maintenance and to diagnose problems before they happen — saving downtime and system damage.