Advanced Rooftop Controls for Your Building

Growing up, my grandmother was an influential person in my life. She believed in me when I started my business – when everyone else thought I was nuts to leave my steady job at the fire department to focus on my endeavor. In addition to being the first woman accounting major to graduate from Miami University in Ohio, she was known for her love of pelicans. Every holiday or birthday, we knew just what to get her – anything with a pelican bird on it.

It feels like a bit of providence that my favorite energy savings system of 2025 is made by Pelican Wireless. And it would make Grandma Louise happy from an accounting perspective – the energy savings are huge and lead to a great return on any investment.

Smart HVAC systems offer significant savings beyond traditional setups. But adding them to your rooftop can be expensive. Enter the retrofit offered by Pelican Wireless – a smart thermostat connected to a small control module in your rooftop heating and cooling unit, which is then connected to a gateway. Add them all together, and you get a ton of control and energy savings. And with energy savings, often come great rebates from the ComEd Energy Efficiency program – helping to offset the investment.

We have been installing these systems for over 5 years, but this year has been the moment where costs to install have decreased and incentives have increased. And the best part – these little components are made in the US, mitigating many of the concerns we have for many of our energy efficiency products.

Who Can Benefit from These Systems?

People who own or manage multiple buildings are the ones that love this system – it allows them to keep all of their building systems in one portal. And that portal is free with no subscription software – a huge benefit compared to other systems.

Restaurants, in particular, have a huge savings opportunity because their kitchens often create enough heat to require cooling in the fall, spring, and even winter at times.

Buildings with many people are also huge winners because fresh air management is controlled based on demand (also called demand control ventilation). Pelican does this best, from my experience, by having a sensor in the thermostat to measure people in the space. It measures CO2, or the amount of air people breathe out, which raises the space level over time. This allows the Pelican system to bring in outside air only when required, versus most systems that always bring in outside air to meet code. This is a huge savings on energy, humidity control, and safety.

What Are the Savings?

Utility energy savings reports have been estimating about $2,500 in electric savings per restaurant and $500 in gas savings. But we recently completed a pilot across 6 franchise restaurants (I’ll take the name of this butter burger chain to my grave) and found they are on track for savings of closer to $4,000 per restaurant in electricity alone.

They love the product because they can have control over so many different spaces, and they loved that we were able to include cooler and freezer temperature monitoring. This alone saved them from sending staff on holidays to check on the store to avoid losing product.  But we were all pretty blown away by the savings. Verde should have charged more 🙂

What Are the Costs?

I have been trying so far to get the costs to between $100 to $400 per system installed on each unit, so we have been discouraging projects with lower incentives to consider this – like smaller packaged rooftop units that are less than 5 tons. Since the incentives are based on tonnage, higher tonnage units have a lower cost to you, since rebates are higher on bigger units.

But I am going to rethink the range of cost I propose to clients. I love to see projects move forward with 2 years of payback or less, and this would open up even smaller projects since the energy savings are so high.

For some of those restaurants, they paid between $400 and $750 per store – with savings of more than $4,000 per project. That is a payback in months, or like a stock market return of 530% forever. I never understand why people look past investing in their own spaces but are aggressive at investing in companies. Although my same grandmother retired a millionaire because she worked one year at Procter & Gamble before World War II and kept her employee-issued stock, which split over and over again and came to be worth a huge sum. So maybe we should both invest in our buildings and good companies.

How Does the System Save Energy?

Free cooling leverages outdoor temperatures when they are cooler outside, often from people, equipment, or a commercial kitchen. When external conditions are favorable, the system uses outside air to cool the space, bypassing energy-intensive compressors and running fans at a fraction of the energy cost of compressors. This natural method saves substantial energy, especially in the fall and spring.

Controlling fan speed also contributes to savings. By adjusting fan speed based on demand, rather than running at full capacity all the time, the system reduces energy consumption and noise. We program our fan speeds for our clients to run at 40% of the max speed when “fan only,” 70% with one stage of cooling, and 90% with two stages of cooling. In fact, running the fan at 40% saves more than 90% of the energy due to the magic of physics. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I believed it until I saw it for myself.

Having programs that can be deployed across multiple stores can be critical – especially when you keep track of humidity levels like we do with the Pelican system. I shared some direct feedback with a restaurant who was keeping his kitchen at 70 degrees and 40% humidity. I believe he can save another 10% by jumping up to 72 degrees, with very low likelihood of anyone noticing or being uncomfortable, and a 100% chance of saving energy and more profit for his restaurant.

What Should I Do If I’m Interested?

Reach out to me or one of your favorite Verde folks.  Or fill out this form, and we’ll set up some time to chat.

You never know unless you try – and we always enjoy hearing from you.  Verde believes in being a partner for the life of your building – re-evaluating as the technology (and incentives change).  We also have built our company on referrals, and are always grateful for a new opportunity to work with someone like you.