Most profitable apartment idea

If i some day owned an apartment building say with 20 or 40 apartments, what would be the most profitable heating and cooling/domestic hot water system. 1: a big central wood or pellet boiler with a btu meter. 2: a basement boiler room with individual boilers that are wood or pellet marked by apartment number. firewood lockers that have a lock and key in the boiler room to. the boiler/s would do heating and cooling with an absorption chiller and hot water. I could retail the wood pellets to if i buy wholesale. Free wood if i do the cutting and splitting myself and sell it to the tenants. Wood or pellets? Pellets can avoid thermal storage.

I am not sure how most apartment complexes are done in other states though here in Texas each apartment controls their own heating and air conditioning.

Is that not something that is usually done?

Certainly check your local laws and regulations. Often heating for apartments is much more restrictive.  Also, be aware that each renter will want control over the temp in their own apt.

The shear volume of wood required to heat a complex of 40 apartments in our area would be enormous. One man would have his work cut out to cut and split firewood for a 40 unit complex. In a mild climate figure one cord per 1000 sq ft. Here my friends use 3-6 cords per season. Pellet stove users in our area use at least 1.5- 3 tons so several pallets. Will storage be an issue? Would insurance be an issue for individual tenants and boiler operation in a complex. Cost of and maintenance of individual boilers? Those would be some of my considerations when punching numbers into the calculator.

Consider also who the demographic that you will be renting too.

Will they want to have to go and maintain an individual boiler? Will they have the knowledge to safely do it? Who is going to be doing the maintenance? How do you ensure they use the correct fuel in the correct way?

This isn't to steer you in one direction or another, but things to try and plan for if you do go that route.

I do not know for sure, but I wonder if they have scalable geothermal for large buildings like this?

Hi Wesley,
A 40 unit apartment building is pretty big. I think its possible to do with it with a single large unit, but it would be hard for all the reasons already mentioned.

Having individual heating sources would be better in terms of redundancy, but probably more expensive at first. If one went down, you only have one apartment without heat, if the big unit went down, you would have a whole building without heat.

I would probably look at ultra insulating the building first. This would seriously bring down the heat needed to keep warm. Just make sure it is a vapor permeable (aka breathable) insulation, or you will have mold issues.

Could you utilize unpressurized hot water storage tanks maybe? Obviously room is an issue with any of these options, but could you have 2-4 big units that heat water. Then each apartment would have their own 1000 gallon hot water storage tank for heat and domestic hot water. In this way, you can get some economies of scale with the bigger heat sources, still allow each apartment to have its own level of heat, and you have a buffer in the tank in case you can't heat the water for some reason. Also, an unpressurized hot water storage tank can have multiple sources of heat. So you could add in some solar hot water heaters, heat pump heaters, oil heaters, wood boiler heaters, geothermal.... as long as you can pump water through the heat exchanger, it doesn't matter where the heat is coming from... gives a lot of flexibility to use whatever fuel is the cheapest at the time. Obviously I think some of those fuel options are better than others... but with a tank... you can run whatever you have at its peak efficiency, and then shut it off for a while... which I think is a step in the right direction regardless.