 Coming to one and all, this is Howard Wigg, Cold Green, Think Tech, Hawaii, all of us, Oahu residents are continually hearing from Board of Water Supply, Ernie Law, we're having a hot summer conserve water, and by George, I'm proud to join my Hawaii for Honolulu residents in the success in conserving water. I believe our use has gone down about 10% purely on a voluntary basis, and when you look around downtown Honolulu at some of the government grassy areas, they are brown. They're heeding Ernie Law's message, conserved water. But isn't there a better way of reducing water use then, letting our poor grasses go brown? Yes, there is, especially when you listen to one of the nation's leading water efficiency experts, and by the way, when you save water, you save the heat or you reduce the amount of heat needed to make hot water. Putting that all together is none other than good friend Gary Klein met Gary years ago at Energy Code Conferences, and the U.S. Department of Energy used to have an in-person meeting of energy efficiency subject matter experts, and they always pick that year the innovator or inventor of the year, and it was none other than Gary Klein just a couple of years ago, and it was for his very, very innovative design of water piping, but there's a whole lot more than that. So if we want a painless high tech, not so high tech, painless real common sense way of reducing our water use in our buildings, we just listened to Gary Klein, please introduce yourself, Gary Klein, and let's get rolling. You've got a lot of ground to cover. Thanks, Howard. I'm pleased to be here sharing with you all. So the simple introduction is that I'm in hot water. I have focused on the hot water as a system question for over 30 years now. My degree is in energy efficiency and renewable energy from Cornell back in 1975. This has been my career. About 30 years ago, somebody called me up and asked me how long did it take to get hot water, the fixture furthest from the water heater in my house. And I lived in a home built in 1978, single story slab on grade construction to the first title 24 energy code in California. And you know what? It wasn't a big house. It was a U.S. median home the year it was built. The guy calls me back every month for a year, have you done the test yet? Nope. I haven't done it yet. Only to make him go away, I stood there one Saturday morning with a bucket to stop watch and I waited for four gallons and four minutes till hot water arrived. I had a one gallon per minute shower head that was very satisfactory. I felt like I was in a shower. I was very pleased. The problem? There was less than two gallons of cold water in the pipe from the water heater to the shower. And I couldn't explain why it took twice as much water before hot water arrived. So I called all my friends and I asked them to give me an answer how long to take in their house but don't wait a year, get back to me next week. What I found out was that it was getting worse, not better as houses got newer. In large part because we were spreading them out and because the plumbing code was being implemented and the modern plumbing code wanted you to put in bigger diameter pipe. Next slide, please. Some years ago we started looking at how much we're doing on water efficiency, right? And we have this nice paper that looks at the slide we're looking at from 1980 to 2017. And if you look carefully, all of the things we have had installed back in 1980 use somewhere between 50 and 96% less water now than they did then. So when my house was built in 1978 it was the high end of these numbers and modern flow rates are much less. Now I'm not sure what Hawaii has adopted for its fixture flow rates, but California has adopted 1.2 for private lavatories and 1.8 for kitchen faucets and 1.8 for showers. And those are less than the legal numbers that went into the U.S. in 1996, part of EPAC. So for the most part those who are trying to conserve water are using less water for their fixtures and appliances. Howard, you're very familiar with Energy Star washing machines and dishwashers. Well, they're also water star, they're water efficient, if you will, right? US EPA water sensors, the program for those. And if you got one that does both, you have energy and water efficient appliances. And a lot of us are buying those just because they work better than the old ones did. So we use less water, but the pipes kept getting bigger. That's a conundrum that's been bothering me for some time. I'm interested in getting rid of the unintended wastes. I want you to take a satisfying shower of eight minutes long on average in the U.S. I want you to enjoy it. I want it to be the right amount of water. And part of the problem is we're designing systems that have wastes, that have nothing to do with the use, okay? I want to get rid of those unintended wastes. Next slide, please. So the question I have for you is how long should we wait for hot water to do a rut or how long do we wait? Well, I've put a red box around the one gallon per minute line down to the green. And the American Society of Plumbing Engineers developed a guidance document back in 2003 that gave if hot water arrives within 10 seconds, that's acceptable. Up to 30 seconds is marginally acceptable and beyond that's unacceptable. So green, orange, and red. Gary? Yes, sir. Interrupt and say I live in a 1954 home and my shower is at the furthest point from the water heater. I turn on the hot water, I go make my bed, come back after I've made the bed, and the water is just now getting warm. And I'm afraid that I'm pretty typical along those lines. I believe it. So I think it's, Howard, do you know any architects? I do. A few? No, it's, no, I don't know the architect. No, not the architect of your home, but we know architects because of our work. And what I would observe is I think that there's a special clause in their license that prevents them from putting water heaters close to fixtures. If they do, they'll lose their license. But so it turns out that we have this time to tap question. And it pervades us and it has to do with the volume between the source and the use. And so pretty much everybody, including the ASPE guidance document of 2003 says, if you calculate the diameter and the length, you'll get volume. Well, that's true, you will. But what we've measured under research projects at the Energy Commission and other places more than once is it takes roughly one and a half to two and a half times the volume that's in that pipe before hot water reaches the other end of the pipe. So if you have a gallon in the pipe, you should expect somewhere between one and a half and two and a half gallons to come out before hot water gets there. And of course, we've lowered fixture flow rates. So every time you buy a new shower head, it's got a lower flow rate than the last one did, which makes time longer even though the volume remains the same. So when I do design, I'm aiming for what's in the green box, in the red box in the green. At one gallon per minute is where all fixtures are headed toward in flow rates except for really low public lavatory faucets. And if you know you've got really low flow rates below a gallon a minute, use numbers that are to the left here on this chart. But I designed for one gallon a minute for hot water arrival times. And if I can get hot water in the green to you within 10 seconds, you'll have hot water. It means there's 10 ounces of water in the pipe between the source and the use. We take the volumetric number and divide by two to get the actual volume we need in the pipe. That turns out to be a really simple rule that's really straightforward to implement and it gives good hot water performance. Next slide, please. So about 10 years ago, eight years ago, I sit on a committee called the Water Efficiency and Sanitation Standards Committee. And that's sponsored by IATMO. Gary, this is a California commission? No, this is actually a national body supported by IATMO, the same people that support the model plumbing code used in Hawaii. And so IATMO formed this group called the Water Efficiency and Sanitation Standard Committee. And I'm a founding member of that group because of my interest in hot water and things that they asked me to be on it. And about eight years ago or so, we started looking at the right sizing of plumbing. Fixture flow rates are going down, as we pointed out earlier. Distances in houses are actually getting bigger because the average square footage of a home has grown, not gone down. So we've made it longer to get hot water at fixtures because water heaters are still eight miles away from the last fixture in the house. That's the architects issue. And so we formed this committee to talk about right sizing. And so what you see on the screen in front of you is the uniform plumbing code line that converts water supply fixture units into gallons per minute. And if you look carefully near the x-axis, you will see a bunch of black dots. Those are something like 20 different apartment buildings. And there might only be 16 apartment buildings. But it doesn't matter. It's the same point. And you notice that they're really close to the x-axis. And so the code is overpredicting the measured peak flow rates by rather a lot. Next slide, please. Now you can see we're looking just at the left-hand corner of the first graph. And you can see that even though now you can read the letters for each of the buildings that are there, what you can also see is that the red line is still really far from the black dots. And so what we've learned is that the code is overpredicting the measured peak flow rates in apartment buildings, which is what we're showing here, something on the order of magnitude of 1, 10 times, ranging from 5 to 25. That's a big difference in what the code is making us design to based on predictions that were written down a while ago. So the methodology we used for sizing plumbing was published in 1940 by a fellow named Roy Hunter, who back then worked for the National Bureau of Standards, which we now call the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST. And it was great work for the time. But nothing flushes or flows at those rates anymore. I just showed you from 1980 to 2017. 1940 to 2017 is an even bigger change. So nothing flushes or flows. The other part of the puzzle is that the pressure drop through the pipe fittings was published in 1941 for steel pipe and threaded and flange fittings. And that research was actually done in 1892. So a few years ago, let's just say, Howard, all right. Next slide, please. And what we developed as part of the right sizing is important because we've been able to come up with a new method that allows us to size piping much more in line with what we're actually experienced in today with modern fixtures and appliances, which makes sense. And we still have a good safety factor. And when we next get together and talk about this in some detail, which we'll probably do sometime in early December, it looks like, we'll do a webinar and invite lots of people for that one. We'll go into the details of it. But what you see on the slide here is that as one does a whole bunch of work to right size the plumbing, one has to pay a lot more attention to what the pressure loss through pipe fittings is and modern pipe are, right? All those things has to be figured out. And so I've set up two labs to measure it myself because I couldn't wait for NIST to get around to doing it. They didn't have funding. They've just recently gotten funding to start down this path of developing a correct method of test for the pipe fittings. In the meantime, I contacted all the manufacturers I knew who made various types of modern pipe, so the Copper Development Association for Copper and the different PEX manufacturers and the people who make CPVC. And we got them together and said, how would you do it if it was up to you? And so we set up a lab first in Downey, California, which is in Southern California. And if you look carefully at that cart, you can see on that cart right now there's over 1,000 feet of pipe. There's 50 feet of one type of pipe with and without fittings, with and without elbows. And we go around and around and around. We do that for each different pipe type that we're interested in, each different fitting type we're interested in. And we've got half and three quarters and three eighths. And we even went down to quarter inch tubing for one experiment on this cart. And so the idea is to figure out what the actual pressure loss is through modern pipe, which is fairly calculable using the theory, but the fittings, everything is different. Copper fittings are external fittings. Pex fittings are external fittings. Most, sorry, CPVC fittings are external fittings. Most pex fittings, the crosslink polyethylene fittings, are insert fittings. They go inside the waterway. And going inside the waterway, they make the inside diameter smaller and they disturb the flow of water as it goes through the pipe. And so all of that contributes to increasing pressure loss per fitting rather dramatically compared to copper. But I want to point out that none of the modern materials have published numbers on the pressure loss per fitting using modern flow rates and modern materials just not been done. So we started an effort a decade ago to figure that out. The first lab was in Downey. The second lab was up in Arcata, California because I have some friends there that made it available for me to use, worked with some students from Humboldt State. It was great. And we created a method of test that has proven to be extremely reliable at giving us good data points on the pressure loss through the pipe and the fittings. Very predictable numbers, very stable methodology. And so I'm not certain they're perfect, but they're certainly consistent and reliably consistent, which is very helpful here. How do I know I like the numbers? Not just because we did them, but because we've taken the data from this research and applied it to build buildings in upstate New York. So we, and we then measured the, what happened in the buildings we designed and we got what we predicted. I'd say that's pretty good sets of numbers to work from. All right, next slide, please. So I've covered the topics I wanted to cover today. We can talk about lots of things going forward, but I think that the, look, my goal, as I said earlier, is to get rid of the unintended wastes that are in our plumbing systems. We, I like you, Howard, wait for hot water to arrive. We wanted to take a shower, but we develop a routine because it's not easy. Hot water doesn't show up quickly at our shower, right? You could put in a research loop that costs extra money. You have extra energy to run the research loop. There's lots of ways potentially to fix things, but not everybody has the ability to add a research loop. There are retrofit solutions and there are new construction solutions. My goal in new construction is to have all fixtures within two cups of one water heater. So Howard, how tall are you? I'm five foot 10. I'm same. Same here. We're both about the height of one cup of water and a half inch plumbing. If you know someone who's five foot four, they're one cup and a half inch copper. If you know someone who's six, six, six, seven, they're one cup and a half inch CPVC or PEX. But that means that many, many American adults are roughly about the height of one cup of water and a half inch plumbing. And what I'm saying is that if we could have all of what I call twigs from the source of hot water to the fixture be less than two cups, everybody would be much, much happier than they are today. You'd get hot water within 15 seconds and I'd say that's pretty darn good for practicality purposes. Gary, some years ago at an energy conference, you laid out on an auditorium floor and imaginary the diameter or edges of an imaginary house and then you stood in the middle and you were the water heater. You're not in some obscure corner somewhere. You were in the middle of the house. Yes. And of course, now it's the, I think you call it twigs, all your piping is going out, it's, you were talking about 1,000 feet of piping. If you put the water heater in the middle of the house, how much, how many feet of piping might you need? So it actually depends how far the fixtures are, the bathrooms are from the water heater. We did some analysis for the energy commission in California a few years back. It's now, the final report's been published where we look at taking what I call architectural compactness and taking it from a typical 80% of the floor area of a single home, single story home down to 15%. And the effect of doing that saved $1,000 to $2,000 in first cost, perhaps. And all we changed was the horizontal feet of pipe. Yeah. Okay. So it's a big difference. You can put the water heater anywhere you want to if the fixtures are far away, you still have to connect the pipes, right? And we all want, we want to place our bathrooms where there's windows. You don't wanna put bathrooms in the middle of a home and in a windowless space unless you're building a safe room, but... So that's a really interesting question, Howard. I live in suburbia here in California and our master bathroom, it's a master suite. So it's got the bedroom and it's got the walk-in closet and it's got a very generous five-part bathroom. So two sinks, a tub, a shower and a toilet. That's a pretty typical thing in new construction here for master suites. And we have two windows over our master tub. One of them faces north and the other one faces east. The one that faces north faces the window in my neighbor's house. So we put curtains over that one. And in the summer, the sun comes around and gets up early in the morning and comes in and creates too much light and too much heat. So we put extra shades on the outside to prevent the sun from getting in. And the other window faces do east, which for the same reasons overheats in the middle in the summer throughout the morning. Okay, so, and we have curtains on it because it provides too much light. So we've never actually looked out of our windows. And so I'm not certain that having windows over master bathtubs is particularly helpful. As you know, in much of the US we're doing a lot to tighten up the air sealing of our buildings. And if we're doing that, it may not be so necessary to have openable windows in a bathroom. Good fans may do a better job. I'm thinking Hawaiian style and traditionally our bathrooms always had openable windows because that was our source of ventilation. We don't have little fans up in our bathroom ceilings. I get it. And so we're talking in much of the country about using ERVs and HRVs. And we're tightening up the envelope rather dramatically. And Hawaii is a very different climate from where I typically live. But even there, you're telling me it's in the 80s. When it, in the 80s, is it also humid? So not overbearing. Right, so I think that we have to adjust some of these ideas based on climates and based on ultimate desires. But mostly the builders tell me they put the really big window over the master tub so you can look out over the great view. Well, in suburbia, my view is of my neighbor's window and the view may or may not be any good. And so I think that we're spending a lot of money on things that people tried to fix because they didn't work quite right. Right, the idea and the architecture sold the idea but they spent four grand on the tub and another $1,000 on the windows. And we spent another five or 600 preventing from all the light from getting in because it was the wrong place in the wrong time, right? So it's like, what was the point of that exercise, right? Well, Gary, on a slightly cheerier note, you got permission to build an apartment building. I believe it was a Northern New York state for your specs and by George it worked. Did anybody in any other states or any municipalities pay any attention to your proposed design and have they done anything about it? There are a bunch of projects underway all over the country. We have taken the data that I shared here earlier with you about the right sizing and the comparison to code and it started sharing it, not just in California but all over the US. Hawaii has adopted the use of the appendix M as in Mary which is part of the uniform plumbing code which is this method of right sizing. And so I would be happy to share that with folks in Hawaii who want to learn how to use it. We found that it saved us, it saves roughly between $500 and $1,000 per apartment and first costs by right sizing. So it costs less to build a healthier and safer building. The water spends less time inside the building so it turns over more quickly which is inherently safer than having it sit there forever. We can do a lot better job of the architecture and the layout so that we minimize the distance between things, we share common risers so that we cut the volume of the water and the risers down. There's lots we can do. Oh, by the way, we're still using the water demand calculator overestimating the measured peak by a factor of two to four. We still have a good safety margin just not 10 times or only two to four times. It works. Now, in the year we've only got about a minute left, what are the typical consequences, single family residents, in terms of water savings according to your design and in terms of energy savings because to heat water requires energy? Well, actually to pump water requires energy too, process the waste. So everything we can do to get rid of the unintended wastes is a good thing. You know that people actually only take six minute showers? They spend the first two minutes waiting for hot water to arrive? Good point, good point. Yep, I'm a case in point. I probably take three minutes, yeah. Right, so in which case you're waiting half as long as you spend in the shower. So there you go, right? Almost as long as you spend in the shower. So what I would say is this, that the water and energy savings are in the apartment buildings. If you cut the volume of the water between the source of the use and half, I don't know how much it is, but if you reduce it by half you'll waste half as much water waiting for hot water to arrive. You will also waste half as much energy when the pipes cool down at the end of the day or every hour, whatever it is. So it's a number, it's probably on the order of 10, 15% somewhere in that ballpark. If you do what one of my friends in Stockton has done, he's actually got the entire hot water system down to less than 1% of the floor area of the home. Back-to-back bathrooms, kitchen on one end of the wall and a washing machine on the other end of the wall. He has one plumbing wall. It's pretty darn good. That's tight. That meets all the rules. That's tight, yeah. So on a final note, you mentioned the fact that the energy storage dishwashers and clothes washers reduce energy use and water use. I might point out that our beloved Hawaii Energy, the rebate people offer rebates for energy star dishwashers and clothes washers. So we have come to the end of our time, Gary. I wanna thank you very, very much. Oh, Gary, Gary, say again, IMPO seminar coming up. Oh, yes, IATMO, IAPMO, the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials is going to sponsor a webinar that looks at these questions, particularly of the right sizing of the water supply piping. We're looking right now to schedule something in early December. As soon as we know, we'll let the word out. And for those of you interested in that seminar, either contact me or you saw Gary's contact information right up front there. And if you missed it, this program will be archived. You can get it again on that very cheery note. I bid fond of you, Howard Wigg, Code Green. Thank you so much for all you do, Gary Klein. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.