 Good afternoon, Howard Wing, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. Thank you for joining us. Today, the theme will be not just efficiency, but super-efficiency. There is hope for the world. And to demonstrate that is a young man, Brett Foistat, of TRC Sales. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Howard. Appreciate it. And just as a bit of background, we're going to be talking about air conditioning or HVAC technology, but to give a more comprehensible context, look at the fact that we in Hawaii have many, many, many more cars on the road than we did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And yet, if you look at gasoline sales, they're down. How could that be? All these new cars sales down. Reason is because each individual car or light truck is more energy efficient. It gets a higher miles per gallon rating. And that rating is continuing to go up and up and up. And the same holds true for HVAC systems. Brett represents the claim of HVAC efficiency, and the technology is moving ahead so rapidly. It's not moving ahead as quickly as computers, but by George, every time I turn around and look at HVAC efficiency, there's something new, something different. Not just in the efficiency rating itself, but in the controls. We can now control these devices precisely so that you just put as much cold air where you want it, when you want it. None of this. Just turn it on and let it blast everybody, including empty room. So on that cheery note, Brett, welcome to the program. Thank you. Why don't we bring up the first slide, and you can introduce yourself here. I'm Brett Fleistad with TRC Sales. We're a manufacturer's representative. We represent about 14 manufacturers, our large ones being Fujitsu and Solar Palau fans. Very energy efficient equipment that's leading the way here in Hawaii. Yeah, I follow energy efficiency very, very quickly, and this is a reason why you have been one of these select few, speaking of which, disclaimer. Even though Brett and I will be talking about one particular manufacturer today, neither I know the state of Hawaii, nor ThinkTech Hawaii in any way, shape, or form endorses this particular product. There are many, many, many other good competitive products out there. So Brett, I've been following HVAC efficiency for many, many, many years. We measure the efficiency in sear, seasonal energy efficiency ratio, and maybe we'll get into that. But when I first got into the field, a decent sear, believe it or not, was eight or nine, meaning you could deliver, say, eight or nine, I'm going to use this layman's terms, and then you can get us straight. You could deliver eight or nine units of cold air for every watt that went into the system. And you know what? I'm going to let you blow everybody's socks off later as you present the Fujitsu system. But Think baseline eight or nine. So what do you have to begin with here, Brett? We can do the next slide here. So here we have the history of Fujitsu air conditioning. Started out in 1960 with those window AC units we still see being sold today. They moved into the mini-split market, which are the more efficient, better performing equipment. You can see some of the pictures they have there, like the multi-path heat exchanger, some of the revolutionary inventions that they came forth to the market. Now these are the examples of the type of improvement that have allowed that sear to go up and up and up over the years. All of the manufacturers have been kind of battling in terms of inventing new technology to really increase the sear rating or efficiency of this equipment. And so you see there with the multi-path heat exchanger, that really allowed the refrigerant to be distributed in a more efficient manner and created a little bit better flow so they could get that refrigerant outdoors and then back indoors to collect more heat. And another cool invention that they came out with is the Lambda style heat exchanger down there at the bottom, which is the Lambda shape. And that really gave a lot of surface area for that heat to be collected over that heat exchanger in those aluminum fins. And so they came out with these two inventions. Other manufacturers have followed. We followed their inventions, too, so it really pushed the envelope in terms of efficiency. We know that's really important here. This is competition at its best, by the way. And especially from the mainland, where I'm from, it's all ducted systems. So when I first came here, it was the first time I saw a split system, and it really showed the value of the technology. Let's talk for a minute about split systems, because most of the audience out there is not going to know what it is. We are familiar with the old, what are now called the window shakers, those rectangular boxes hanging out the window. And number one, they're noisy. Number two, they're inefficient. And number three, they had rather short lives, if I remember correctly. So what is the difference between those old-fashioned window systems and a new split system? So the old-fashioned window system is kind of like an all-in-one unit. It has the compressor, the outdoor heat exchanger, indoor heat exchanger in the fan, all in there. With the split system, it just does that. It splits the components up, so it splits kind of the noisy compressor, puts it outside, where you don't necessarily going to hear it. And then the indoor unit that produces the cold air or collects the heat and brings it to the outdoor unit is on the inside. And all that's inside there is mechanically is a fan motor, which is designed to be really quiet. So it really split the noisy from the cooling part to give us that comfortability, that performance, which also gave us great efficiencies as well. And incidentally, as technology improves, you use the word comfort and performance and quiet. Everything is improving. We look, the old window shakers are kind of the bad old world, and this is a good old world delivering higher quality cool air as much as we want, when we want, in a much more quiet fashion. Right. You can kind of compare those old window shakers to maybe an older car, to where whenever you're driving behind an older car, you can smell the fumes, and that's because it's not burning all of the fuel. Precisely. So now behind a newer car, even some of the cars, they say nearly zero emissions. That means it's not burning all of the fuel inside that combustion chamber. So just like the cars, Fujitsu and other manufacturers with the split type units have increased the performance, got us more horsepower, now we've got the horsepower of a Corvette, but we've got the gas mileage of a Prius. There you go. There's a good analogy, yeah. Yeah. Why don't we take a look at the next slide then? So here we have some, what really adds to the, whereas the heart of the air conditioning system is the compressor, and the compressor is what compresses the refrigerant and allows it to have a high heat capacity when it goes into the inside to absorb the heat. So before the compressors were AC and they were scroll type compressors. Here we have a DC power compressor, so we take the AC power, convert it to DC power through some complicated electronics, and then we provide some precise amount of pulses to that compressor to give us here on the right hand picture a thousand steps. So instead of a high, medium, low, now we have a thousand steps in between there to give us just the amount of frequency that we need to remove heat. So just the amount of energy we need to remove the heat to where we're not wasting any energy on those high, medium, low settings. So that would imply that there's a whole heck of a lot of sensors out there. Correct. So that would mean the interior of the space to be cooled, and then some sensors right in the internal workings there. So Fujitsu is actually a very big software company, and they're very big in programming and algorithms. So they take all those information from those sensors, air thermistor sensors, pipe thermistors, and they take all the information in the outdoor temperature, indoor temperature, and they really make the system efficient, only use the amount of electricity it needs to remove the amount of heat on the inside. And how about humidity sensors? Is that one of them? No. No. That's a whole separate issue, I guess. Especially here in Hawaii. Because a lot of the function of an AC in our climate is to dehumidify to, I think it's like 65 relative humidity, something like that. It is definitely one of the added benefits to air conditioning. We get the cool air, and then it drops below the dew point to where we get that condensation. But we've seen here in Hawaii to where even that can't keep up with the type of dehumidification that we need, and we're actually in some cases heating up the air to dry it out before it enters the space. So getting very creative here in this humid environment. Well, you know, it certainly doesn't apply just to us, because Fujitsu, of course, distributes worldwide, including to South Asia. And those of you who, like me, have been to South Asia, you will know that a typical day there is like a really hot, humid day here. We say, lucky you live in Hawaii, and we really mean it. Our temperatures are higher, and our relative humidity is lower. Therefore, the AC has less work to do. But on that, sure you know, we need to take a break back in a moment, cold, green, sink, tech, Hawaii, Brent Floyd Statts. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me, where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music in Hawaii, Anna, all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Good afternoon again, Howard Wing, Code Green with Brent Floyd Statts. I should be able to pronounce that name really well, because it's Norwegian, and I'm half Norwegian. But in any case, welcome from the cold climate, Brent, to the warmer climate. And let's move on to the next slide. We've got lots to cover here. So controls, controls, controls, they don't sound very sexy at all, but see what's going on in your automobile engine now, and all those things going on in your dashboard. You could not do any of that without Julian controls in the engine and in the dash and so forth. And so it is with the new HVAC systems. What are the economy mode? What is the economy mode here, Brent? So economy mode says the thermostat setting automatically changes. So this one's going to be more of the fan speeds going to automatically change to save energy. Maybe somebody left the fan on high, and it's becoming below the set point, so that it's going to automatically kick the fan speed back to save electricity on that indoor unit, the wall units that you see. And still keep the room nation cool. Correct. And then the next setting, energy saver, that's the one that's actually going to drop the set point. And so that one's going to vary the set point. So it's going to heat up the room, say our set points at 72, it's going to heat up the room to 74. Still like you said, make it comfortable, but again, saving energy. And then the last one, my favorite, the ESP energy saving program, our highest efficiency, highest tech wall unit actually has a little motion sensor, has a little eye, so it can sense if there's motion in the room, if there isn't motion for 20 minutes, it's actually going to kick the set point up four degrees in our case for cooling to save energy as well. And then when somebody returns, the set point's going to return back to 72, or the desired set point. And this is a big feature that's very desired. Because the higher the set point, there's almost a logarithmic scale of the energy savings according to the lower or higher set points. And it's not as if anybody's going to walk into a hot, humid room, it's just up a little bit, may feel a little bit warm, but as soon as that motion is there, zoom. The unit kicks on again and starts delivering cold air again. Correct. Yeah. That's just beautiful. That's what I mean about delivering cold air when you want it as much as you want. And just, I like to think of it as just delivering the amount of energy you need for that cooling, you know. Pre-precisely. Let's move to the next slide here. So this is another really cool controls aspect, as you can see. Yeah. That means when you're on, oh, so it mentions vacation rental units. How would something like that work? So especially in Maui, we see a lot of vacation rentals, and people want to see how much their renters are using the air conditioning, if they left it on, if nobody's there. It's in-between periods, so even though you probably have to be pretty wealthy to have a vacation rental in Maui, these people are still very energy conscious. That's why I put the picture of a light bulb with money, because it seems like even with people who have money, everybody's being very conscious of their energy bill and their energy usage. Well, there's a reason they got to be wealthy. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what would happen, let's say they happen, the owner happens to know that the tenants are out for the day at the beach, and the AC is still going full-blast, can they control it remotely? Correct. They can control the unit from anywhere in the world. They can be in Ohio and be monitoring their system. They can set the set point, turn it on, off, and even change the temperature there. So it's a really cool feature that we're really excited about. All the homeowners love it, because they can do just that. They can be at work and see if they left it on and see if they're using that energy that they don't want to use. Yeah. And then if they say pretty sure that they're going to get home at 5.30 that evening, can they then remotely set, okay, let's get this system going up. They're getting to temperature at 5.15, just a little before they're right back in the house. Correct. They can set timers from there as well, and then on their way home, just turn it on so everything's nice and pretty cool. And another really cool feature we have is the Alexa voice control. And what I could see with this one is, again, people forgetting to turn things off. And now when they're leaving their house before they go out the door, they say, Alex, turn off my Fujitsu. And then it's off. It's saving energy. They know it's off. They didn't have to go over to the thermostat, press a button, and that seems the kind of the world and the technology we're moving towards is this voice control in smart homes. Yeah, we're certainly finding this or the responsiveness. In our iPhones now. Correct. Yeah. That's beautiful. And so, oh, what else? Oh, schools. Yeah, so you know, we had this huge push. Governor Ige was to cool a thousand classrooms quickly. This was during that horrible, horrible heat wave that we had about two and a half years ago. So Fujitsu was one of the participants in the cool schools program. Is that it? Correct. It was the heat abatement project. We called it where we started out with the hottest areas on the island. And we, like Eva, and we really try to get those classrooms cool so the kids can function and think correctly because it's actually scientifically proven that if your brain is above a certain temperature, it can't perform correctly. Yeah, and we've all experienced that on a personal level too. Correct. And if the kids' sweat is dripping down on the paper, which has literally happened, or they're trying to write and their hands are all full of sweat in the papers, yeah, that's not a pleasant experience at all. And of course, the teachers are not very happy either. Yeah, so you could see some of those jobs we did out in Eva Beach and Farrington High School, the outdoor units and the indoor unit on the left. It's kind of funny, you can see the old fan actually behind there. So they put the Fujitsu right in front of the old fan that they had in there. And it's really, systems are performing correctly and it's all off of PV as well. So they have battery backups, PV, to where all the energy that's supplied to the Fujitsu is all created from the sun. And you know what happens when schools are not functioning? What happens to all that generated energy? Of course, some of it would go into the storage, you know. Yeah, once the battery backup is full and then the panels become more dormant. So when the system is fully charged. Do they feed into the grid after they're full? No, I know they're connected to the grid to charge the batteries at night, but they didn't say anything about backfeeding, because I know there's a kind of a... Yeah, the fire department is a little sensitive about that. If there's an emergency and they think all the power is off, but also they go into a building, a school, and they're beginning to fool around with live wires and they think they're off. But the solar system is still treating and that has rather unfortunate consequences. So we work very, very closely with the fire department. Okay, and another great project that we're trying to get Fujitsu on is the Nimitz transitional village. So families, homeless families with jobs, they give them these units. It's kind of a humanitarian project and we were approached by Photonworks because they created the micro grid you see there with the Tesla batteries and the PV on every single unit. Every single unit? Every single unit has PV and solar hot water. Yeah, there's 30 units up and running right now. In the first phase. And so they chose, they approached us and are considering our Fujitsu 33 seer, as you see there. So we were talking earlier. Yeah, we talked about seer. Yeah. Now we're above triple that. So we got a 33 seer unit, the RLS3Y, the Y there's for Wi-Fi. And they wanted the Wi-Fi so they could kind of control the temperatures themselves. And so the occupants just kind of have an on-off switch. And then the building manager, site manager would have the Wi-Fi, have all the units on there and be able to... And I guess there's a central control office and then the building manager controls from there? No, they'd be able to do it just from their phone. Remotely. Okay, okay. From their smart phone. Yeah, because you certainly don't want every occupant turning the thing on full blast 24-7 or whatever. Yeah, this is a huge success story. I know that that particular project is making nationwide news. Really? Because so many cities are faced with this homeless problem. And if you cannot just provide just minimal housing, but at least some AC also, that is absolutely terrific there. It's really a unique project that we're proud to be a part of. That's just wonderful. And so the next slide is... So we also talked about fans. So we had the air conditioning. Now we have ventilation fans. And fans are a big deal now, especially with fresh air requirements. We're bringing in hot humid air into the space now to where AC systems have to be increased in capacity. So we found a couple unique ways of treating that fresh air or exchanging it to where we can get our fresh air, but not having to increase the capacity. And down there in the lower left-hand corner is our refresh kit. And that also has EC or DC motors. So it uses DC technology to get that infinite amount of speeds. And this is a really cool kit because it has a filter in there to filter the dirty air, the fan, and a speed controller that you can set in terms of limits of temperature or humidity. So if it's too high humidity, it'll shut off and only cycle on every 10 minutes to satisfy the fresh air code, but not continuously bring in that extreme air that you want. And again, maintain comfort while absolutely reducing the life there. Because we have these new codes that say everybody needs fresh air. And that's really affected the design. That's become a big issue because we used to build our homes, especially so loosely, that you'd get enough fresh air just coming in through the cracks. But now we build homes very, very tightly. So this business of bringing in dedicated fresh air is a real big deal these days. Because even in a home, you want enough circulation to keep the CO2 levels up. Well, oxygen up, CO2 down. We always heard the term, go get some fresh air. Well, now you don't have to. It's coming in right to you. I've got to get out of your chair. So a cool device that we have is the... We have one. This is our last slide here. It's the Energy Recovery Ventilator. Just like it says, recycles the conditioned air. So you're bringing in hot humid air from the outside, and you'll be exchanging it through that cross-type heat exchanger in the middle to where the hot humid air isn't as hot or humid. And then you exhaust the kind of stagnant air to the outdoors. And that'll be a little bit colder, but not all of your conditioned space out the door, which is really cool technology. And then you make the AC, the work of the AC much less. Correct. It just doesn't have that much work to do. I see this being implemented more and more by engineers out in the field. Yes. As a closing remark, I once asked a wholesaler of AC units, what percentage of your residential units are split systems like this, and what percentage are the old-fashioned window shakers, even though the window shakers are a lot cheaper? And he said it's at least 90% split systems, because they cost more initially, but the savings, the quality, the everything, including the life. I mean, I can just tell that these have long, long projected lives. Yeah, we offer 12-year warranty, so that just shows you how far, how much they back up. Yeah, with a 12-year warranty, you can be pretty darn sure this thing is going to last for minimum 15 years and even beyond that. We even have a get-go warranty if they crawl up in there and fry the board. Oh, my goodness. I don't know quite how they... They love it in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I were a get-go, I'd love it in there, too. Yeah. So on that cheery note, we need to close for the day. Thank you, Brett Floresstad, for being a wonderful guest and giving us optimism about the future. All technology is improving, and AC technology, as exemplified by your product, is improving by leaps and bounds. We're able to achieve greater comfort, greater safety at much less energy costs, and the maintenance of these units is going to be just much better also. So see you next time, Code Green. Think, Tech, Hope, Wai'i.