"The more that I know, the faster I can get in front of things, the easier my life is, and the less damage happens when things break."
Luis Vecchio
Community Association Manager
5400 South Dorchester Avenue
Challenge
Old Buildings Are Full of Hidden Problems. Without Visibility, You're Always One Step Behind.
Forth Group specializes in managing condos in Chicago's historic converted manufacturing buildings — century-old structures with aging infrastructure that tends to fail all at once, in all the same ways. For Luis Vecchio, a community association manager at Forth Group, the biggest challenge wasn't fixing problems. It was finding out about them in time.
"I had a building where the bottom of the boiler fell out in the middle of the night," he said. "No one was taking a shower, no one noticed it wasn't warm anymore. By the morning, the boiler had been leaking for five hours."
Without real-time monitoring, Luis was stuck in reactive mode — waiting for a frantic call from a tenant before he could act. And when complaints did come in, diagnosing the root cause was just as hard. When residents in one unit said it was too cold, there was no easy way to know whether the building's heating system was actually failing them — or whether the problem was something else entirely.
Solution
A System That Tells You What's Wrong Before Anyone Else Does
In May 2025, Luis installed Runwise in a 16-unit steam building in the Chicagoland area. What he found wasn't just a smarter way to run the boiler — it was a window into everything the building had been hiding.
Where older boilers solved heating problems with brute force — "run faster, run harder, run longer" — Runwise cycled heat intelligently based on real temperature data from across the building. That shift in approach immediately surfaced issues that had been masked for years: uninsulated pipes, radiators that had never been serviced, and heat distribution patterns that didn't make sense. One unit on the main floor was running at 74°F while units above it ran cold — a clue that something in the system was off that no one would have thought to investigate otherwise.
Runwise also gave Luis the ability to loop in his HVAC contractor directly. When a return line leak was detected, the alert went to Luis, the board president, and their HVAC vendor simultaneously. "They were on top of it before I even got out of the meetings I was in."
Results
Lower Bills, Fewer Surprises, and a Building That's Running Better Than Ever
Since installing Runwise, the building's heating costs come down — and that's before the full impact of the system improvements Runwise helped identify. After discovering that radiators throughout the building had never been properly adjusted or serviced, Luis brought in a specialist to overhaul the entire system. Three units also enrolled in a City of Chicago window efficiency program after Runwise data pointed to heat loss as a likely culprit.
For Luis, the value goes beyond the savings. "The more that I know, the faster I can get in front of things. The faster I can get in front of things, the easier my life is — and the less damage happens when things break."
He's already in conversations with Runwise about what else can be connected to the platform. "The foundation technology is expandable. I'd rather start now and be ready for the future."
