 This is ThinkTek Hawai'i, Community Matters here. Good afternoon, Howard Wigg. ThinkTek Hawai'i Code Green. Takes heat to make cold? What's all that about? I have with me today Dr. Manfred Zepka, Principal of Sustainable Design and Consulting. And what he is doing is developing a new technology that's actually not so new, extracting moisture from the air to make air conditioning much more efficient. And he's on contract to University of Hawai'i at Manoa. And you know what? Why don't we bring the first slide up, please? That'll like us. Now here's the cost of doing business. This can be University of Hawai'i Manoa or any downtown firm, even a hotel in Waikiki. Your main cost of doing business is the personnel. And then you have incidental 10%. And cost of energy, 1%. Who the heck cares about cost of energy, 1%. Well, what more and more people are doing and what Manfred is leading the way in is saying what if we cannot deliver not only efficient energy to the building, but energy in such a way that it promotes health and wellness in the building. Now you're getting more productivity out of your, not out of you, you're delivering more productivity to your employees or you're making your hotel guests happier and so forth. So now that 1%, if you do it right, suddenly expands vastly into that 90%. So let me introduce Manfred. Welcome to the show, Manfred. And thank you so much for coming. You were on the show about two years ago and talking about the University of Hawai'i Manoa general plan for increasing efficiency. And since then, you have gone off on your own but stayed with the university and formed your own company and it's going to be a new and exciting type of energy efficiency. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? But you have a very, very interesting background, Manfred. Well, thanks. First of all, thanks for having me. You know, it's been really a pleasure to be in your show. I think it's such a great show for Hawai'i, very important. And you've been a leader also for the Code. You're really putting the energy stuff in the front and I really appreciate being here. So what we've been doing is mostly our have been in sustainable for a long time, only concentrating energy, trying to sell, you know, why we have to save energy. But lately our focus has shifted. First of all, the work at the university where we actually were concentrating on thermal comfort that actually there's a wellness for buildings and that getting more and more important. So if you want to sell something to the owner, they really respond very, very positively towards like increase in wellness. For instance, like, you know, if you can save on absentees, if you don't have to bring in new people, if you can retain talent, this is really getting to be a very important part. And just related to that is I deal with people who create LEED certified buildings and so forth and LEED leadership and energy efficient design goes hand in hand also with a healthy building and study after study is proving that a LEED certified building, number one commands higher rents, number two has greater stability within the leasing force. They like it there in the building and they're gonna stay in the building. Absolutely. And you know, I've been right now certified as a WELL AP, I think the first in the state. WELL AP, yes. Now what is a WELL AP? WELL AP is actually a new standard. It's called WELL, you know, building standards. It actually comes out from the LEED family. Interesting, I did not know that. So what they have done is like usually LEED is for the environment, they have triple bottom line, means the finances, the people, you know, the environment. This one is very much on the occupant. So it puts the occupants of a building of a, or employees in the center. And that's the new threshold. I mean, that's the new frontier of green buildings. Wow. And it all ties in with energy efficiency and the management especially of the HVAC, the heating ventilating air conditioning system within the building. Yes, absolutely. And we've heard about building sickness, remember legionnaires, disease, and many, many years ago. And a statistic that I keep coming across is the fact that we Americans, fortunately not we in Hawaii, but mainland Americans spend 90% of their time indoors and indoor air quality is significantly worse than outdoor air quality. So this business of making the indoor air and the buildings more healthy is really, really significant for us as Americans and for productivity. See, there's actually might be a conflict between energy use and wellness. There was a recent article and it came out as Harvard review. And they said like, if you increase ventilation by 30 or 40% overcoat, you can actually, the employer can save something in the neighborhood of $7,000 per employee per year. And the cost of the increased ventilation in terms of energy use is $40. So you know, you can, it's almost a no brainer, where do you go? But on the other side, if we increase more and more also with lighting, then actually wellness becomes a burden on energy use. We cannot save so much. So here actually you and maybe also myself, their leaders, we can help just to bring these things together. We can make very healthy buildings but we can also save energy. Yeah. And just to clarify, when you bring the advantage to bringing more and more outside air into a building is that it doesn't recirculate, recirculate, recirculate. And Lord knows what it is you're recirculating. You've got a sick person coughing away in office A and way over here in office B, those germs might get recirculated to the person in office B. Yeah, absolutely. Also building materials, right? Yeah. VOCs, volatile organic compounds, you know, farm alderhoed or so, this kind of stuff, which we have more and more. And again, like you said, 90% indoors, 6% of the time actually the typical Americans in the car only knew 4% in, but you said like in Hawaii, we have a little bit different, which is probably why we have the longest living rate in the nation. Yeah. Well, we have other problems. And this will probably you will address that actually we do have a lot of problems or potential problems with a humidity, which can even be like mold. So, and this one actually we have to watch because as we save more energy in buildings, these problems could get worse if we are not wisely and smartly about it. Yeah, ironically, what we're shooting for, I'm an energy codes guy, is tighter and tighter and tighter buildings where we want to make them like thermos bottles. And the mainland in winter, if you want it warm on the inside, you have a thermos bottle of warm like a coffee mug. And in our climate, if you have cold, you want to keep that cold in there, which minimizes the exchange between outdoors and indoors. And the older buildings and homes were much leakier. They just leaked in accidentally all this outside air. So ironically, the buildings were healthier that way. So now we have to get real scientific and say we've got a building that's tight as a drum. We need outside air. Exactly how much do we need it and of what quality do we need that outside air? Definitely. I was involved in a project and I looked at a building. It's actually a naturally ventilated building where they had put a cool roof on top. And the reason, I mean, the result was that they all of a sudden had mold in the building. So it used to be cooked basically out before. Right now, we have much better thermal comfort, but at the expense of having like a different health issue. And everybody knows, you don't want to have mold in now. No. Yeah, and some people are hugely allergic to mold also. That's true. Yeah, a friend of mine who's a mechanical engineer specializes in the American Southeast. And he loves to go into especially lower-priced motels with vinyl wallpaper. And they're having a health problem. And he has a camera on him and he'll pull back the vinyl wallpaper and there's all these black splotches all over the place. This is true. The more actually we spend indoors, the more susceptible we are. Because we somehow, as humans, we somehow develop of being indoor humans. We actually use that. And our rhythm or internal rhythm is actually not what it used to be outside. It actually has to be sustained by the indoor environment. And the expectations and demand for indoors becoming more and more. So therefore, wellness is so important. Which is one reason we, even in the energy code, stress daylighting so people can have access to the outdoors so they know when the sun is rising, when it's noon, when it's setting and so forth. Very, very, very important. This is a, we've known about this for a long time but now scientists are beginning to really, really pinpoint how we can adjust the indoors to suit the outdoors that we evolved in for over 200,000 years as homo-savians. As a matter of fact, today was in the news that three Americans got the Nobel Prize of Doing Groundbreaking Work in this rhythm, yeah? Circadian rhythm, yeah, yeah. So you know what I didn't do was introduce you properly. You've been in Hawaii for 25 years. You have your PhD from University of Hawaii. You are a water man. You like water sports? Yes, I do. And you have, I guess, two grown daughters in California. Yes, wonderful girls. And I'm happily married. And so what can you ask more, right? Yeah, and living in Hawaii. Yes, that's very true. And doing what you love to do. This is true, yes. So why don't we go to the next slide? Yeah, we have time and look at, now walk me through this and walk the audience through this. How an air conditioner works is really, really counterintuitive here. So this is definitely a very simplified and a lot of experts in HVAC say, hey, you know, there's much more to it. But this one actually shows the very fundamental of what we have right now as air conditioning. You see on the left side, there's something coming in, which is outside air, has to go through a fan. We need a lot of fan power in the building. And as it comes into the room, which is on the right side with the person indicated, it goes through a cooling coil, which is like this gray thing with some droplets. And once we cool air, let's say we have something like outside air for 70% relative humidity, and we bring it in in cool, it would actually start to rain inside because the humidity is getting so high. Now we can understand this being blessed by living on this island where moisture laden air, when we have trade winds, comes in from the Northeast and hits our mountains, which are about 3,000 feet high, much, much, much cooler. Where does it rain up in the mountains? Same principle, yeah. Exactly, yes. Moisture laden air hits cold and condenses into droplets. So in order to have a healthy indoor environment for humans, we should have a relative humidity between about 35% and maybe 50%. So right now we are stretching it with conventional, you know, that we go up to 60%. You know, once we're getting too high in indoor humidity and we do not have ventilation over surfaces, we get mold, and all kinds of other stuff. It's getting mold when it's very humid and when it's very dry, we got the cough or all kinds of allergies. So we want to keep it. The problem here is like you see a little bit to the right of this cooling coil, we have to chill down the air so much that actually up to about 40 degrees, 42 degrees Fahrenheit. So if we don't reheat it or somehow make sure it doesn't hit you inside, you get what's called an overcooled building, right? So and that's actually, therefore, sometimes, you know, we have to reheat it in order to, and it goes down. And inside the person which is indicated loses like his or her internal heat, either through convection, this is actually air blowing over you. We're perspiring, which is like the droplets or we're actually radiating heat against all the surface inside of the room. You see the upper thing, Howard, that actually is something which is called the recycling air, the recycling air. So we actually recycle about 80% of the air which actually gets into, you know, by, and then it goes again over the cooling coil. You nicely said, you know, if one has a cough there, then, you know, it just, everybody gets a cough. So that's actually the drawback. Yeah, and so that arrow up there is containing moist air again, even though we have de-moisturized it, that yellow bar is a reheat coil to, oh yeah, yeah, because we're too cold, so it's reheating it to a comfortable temperature. Now it strikes us human beings and we human beings give off this moisture. Right, yeah. And so we have to recirculate it, recool it, and then reheat it again. And this has been around, you know, that for carrier development, you know, invented it like over 100 years ago and has not really been changed in the last 100 years. The big problem, Howard, is that, you know, this conventional, it combines three essential functions, this ventilation, we have to have new outside air, otherwise, you know, we feel asleep or CO2 comes out, you know, like out-gassing stuff inside. It has to cool and it has to dry air. So these are three fundamental functions, or air drying also means dehumidification, which have to be done, and it is not easy to, basically, you cannot separately control everything. Yeah, it's contradictory forces at work here. And on that cheery note, we need to take a brief break. Howard Wake, Code Green here with Manfred Zupka, back in a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Marc, and every Monday at one o'clock, I present Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manoa, where we bring together researchers from across the campus to describe a whole series of scientifically interesting topics of interest, both to Hawaii and around the world. So hopefully you can join me one o'clock Monday afternoon for Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manoa. Living in this crazy world, so far up in the confusion, nothing is making sense. Good afternoon again, Howard Wake, Code Green with the honorable Manfred Zupka, principal of Sustainable Design and Consulting, doing some very, very important work with the University of Hawaii at Manoa in reforming the way we air-condition our buildings. This is old technology, but it has a whole new, much more sophisticated twist. So welcome back again, Manfred. Thanks again for having me. And let's bring up, we got to the description of the conventional air conditioning. Now let's get to this new, old system. And again, this is not new stuff. You've just put some new twists on it. Yes, this is true actually. We are using what is called a liquid desiccant. And you probably, all of you have seen, like when you get new electronic stuff, you have a little packs in there. These are desiccants, but they are solid desiccants. And the function of a desiccant is to? Suck up humidity. But it sucks up humidity without the need of cooling it way down. So what we actually have in the very important and differentiator is that we can differentiate between dehumidification, which is ventilation and air drying, and sensible cooling. Sensible cooling, not because it's like, sensible means that you can feel it. You can sense it. You can sense it exactly. The other one is called latent. What does latent mean? And it's like hidden or whatever. So that's actually the energy you need to dehumidify. And again, like whenever you bring outside air here in Hawaii into a space, you have to dry it. Otherwise you get humidity problems. And you have to dry it because the comfort range for humans, and to keep the microbes away is between what, 35 and 60%? You should have 35 to 50. 60 is already a little bit high. It's right on the margin. And our typical relative humidity in Hawaii is... Outside 70, seven nights, 85. And then when we have Kona weather like we're having today or have had, then it goes up from there. It's very, very, you know. Yeah, especially yesterday. I think we could really feel it. The temperature wasn't so high, but I don't know about other people, but I was really uncomfortable. And that was because of the high humidity, which is why we need to use a desiccant to remove that moisture so we feel sensibly a lot more comfortable. Which relates, you know, people joke about Las Vegas being hot. Everybody will say yes, but it's a dry heat. And that actually has some merit. Oh, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And again, like, you know, whenever we have a dry indoor climate, the advantage is we don't have to cool down the indoor air. Because specifically here, which we call adaptive cooling or adaptive comfort is, we outside, we know actually in Hawaii, we don't have to have it so cold. So typically you see in air-conditioned room that actually the temperature is too cold. A lot of people have to bring the sweaters and they're just freezing. So that's the drawback. In our system, we can actually separate. We can cool, we can control the air temperature and also the humidity independently. Can we go back to the slide now, please? We're working our way through this. It's quite fascinating. So you see on the left side, which is called like the desiccant drying and the desiccant regeneration. So in the desiccant drying, air is actually going through something like a lattice. It's almost like an air cooler in the car, something which was going through. So there it gives actually off the humidity. The desiccant virtually sucks it in and then afterwards we of course have to regenerate it because we cannot always use new desiccant. So and the nice thing actually is we can use solar heat in order to drive out the humidity. So the nice thing here actually, we don't have to over cool the internal, the building. And so that's actually, that's the part of the humidity and we can control it very, very nicely. On the other side, what Howard was indicating, we have the cooling. And if we have like very low humidity, we don't have to cool it down so much. There comes actually your ceiling fans. Ceiling fans do not work very well in conventional air conditioning because it might be too cold and it's a draft. So actually how do we bring them the cooling? And we have different possibilities. On the right side, this blue box there with a big, electricity symbol is a conventional chiller. We can use it. The advantage is you might need about 30 or 35% of the electricity you need now because we don't have to chill it down and if a chiller doesn't have to make like 40 Fahrenheit cold water, it doesn't have to work so hard. So we save energy also there by removing the same kind of amount to heat. On the left side where you see the solar here is that actually something which is called absorption chillers which work, what you indicated, you use heat in order to create cold. And so we could really use solar to a big extent. The thing in the middle Howard, I added because this one is seawater cooling which is very interesting for here. I worked on like 15 years ago, we worked on some initial concept but here usually seawater cooling needs this long pipe which go very deep. If we use, for instance, desiccant rehumidification is we can make the pipe much shorter. The amount of cold water comes down so you probably can save about 70% of your cost for the seawater cooling system and you could still use the natural cooling effect of the seawater. So the important thing here, we can separate dehumidification from cooling and this actually is getting a very good wellness factor because air quality is very good and thermal comfort is cool. So the value proposition will not be that we can actually save a lot of energy that we can create. We basically can custom make our internal thermal comfort and environmental air quality. And in terms of health and humidity, as I understand it, mold or any organism that likes to hang around indoors starts to grow right around 60% relative humidity and then the more moist it is up from there, the more readily it grows. And one of the, we've discussed the fact that indoor air quality is very poor, often very poor compared to outdoor air quality and one big reason for that could be the growth of organisms in there. Especially also how if you have high indoor air quality, a lot of harmful materials, they air out much easier more more readily than in dry climate. So dry climate also, everybody has here like a computer and in high humidity air like at home, you look at the back and it's all rusty. Oh my goodness, it just will fail. And in dry climates, actually the rust is way, way less. Which makes a common sense. So you said that when we are in a high humidity environment, we need to get the water temperature down to around 40, 40 F when we're in a very dry environment. So you go down to 35% humidity, what kind of temperature can we deliver? Well, this is the old tile, right? The old tile, the conventional air, what we discussed. In the conventional air conditioning, we have to chill down up to 40 or 42 degrees Fahrenheit. It's very, very cold. Then the air goes over these coils, goes through that. So the air, the humidity is condensing, like condensation, right? And then afterwards, it's so cold, when we bring it in, we have to reheat it. And in our system, you bring in the air and you don't have to chill it down. By the way, it actually gets a little bit hot. So you have to remove some air or some heat. So you actually can bring the air into your building with our system, which is neutral. Let's say you wanted to have 80 degrees Fahrenheit because if you have lower humidity, you can actually be very comfortable at about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you add your ceiling fan, it's even better. Yep. Oh my goodness, we have one minute left and we just barely, barely gotten. So in a real quick nutshell, what are you and UH Manoa doing about this? They're funding this program? Yes, actually I didn't credit, actually I do work with HNEI, Jim Mascri, and I'm also working with, and our team is Steve Meeder and Dailin Pippar. We're actually a very good team, very, very good results for relatively small resources we have. And we're actually working on the next front, I think. It's very exciting. And again, the value proposition of what we're doing is first of all, we can save a lot of energy on the other side, we can create wellness. Wellness, yes. And we go back to that first pie chart. 90% cost personnel, let's keep that personnel nice and healthy and well and productive. And on that cheery note, we need to bid fond farewell to Manfred Zepka and we will see you next time. Thank you very much for viewing.