 Good afternoon. Howard Wigg. Hold Green. Think Tec Hawaii. Our distinguished guest this afternoon is Sean Remos, not Ramos. Remos of Sinetric. And we have a special, special dream home for us greenies. I think everybody out there is going to be drooling. Yes, I want this type of home. So welcome Sean. Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me. And a little background first on what this home is all about. A little personal connection here. Sure. I've been in the solar industry for the last five years or so. About a year ago we decided to have a baby and we needed just a little bit more room for our family to grow. We also wanted to make some room for my parents as they were aging to have a safe place to spend with us and encourage my sister and her family to join us as well. So we just needed a little bit more space to grow and me being in the energy efficiency field was looking to incorporate as many of the available technologies to save as much as I can and be as comfortable as I can. Okay, so why don't we bring up the first slide. We've got lots of slides to cover and I want to talk about each one of them. So basically it was an energy efficiency retrofit. In Hawaii there's a lot of three bedroom one baths. Some people tend to build a little studio onto the back of their house for their family, kind of an ohana so to speak. And that's what we started with. It was started out as a basically a three bedroom one bath with a studio on the back. The energy usage in the beginning was about $450. So we were spending that every month. It was coming out and you know we were just looking for ways to make the house more efficient. That's pretty typical for an air-conditioned home. It is. It is, yeah. So what our goal was to turn the studio in the back into a one bedroom one bath and then go above the garage and build another three bedroom two baths for us to live. And so we could have kind of a long-term home for everybody to join us. So we basically cut off the back of the house right above the studio, went up and built an addition that that was going to be energy efficient there. The next slide will show kind of what our goals were for the energy efficiency upgrade. We were trying to reduce our energy usage, you know, add the three bedroom two bath addition and hopefully use some of the technology to inspire others to to go green and try and see whether you can be comfortable while saving as well. And I might throw into that comfort and health. It turns out the generally the more efficient a-home is, the more comfortable it is and the healthier it is. That's true. And of course you're keeping all those dollars in your pocket. That's right. That's exactly right. You're much better able to pay the mortgage that way. That's exactly right. So the next slide basically just kind of starts the energy efficient action plan. We're looking at to reduce the hot water cost because basically that's the first big piece that you can take off of your energy pie. On the right you can see there kind of typically how energy is being used in the in the islands. Just shows that a good portion of it is for heating hot water. So we went ahead and wanted to try and attack that first and just take that off of there. A lot of people are interested in solar power using photovoltaic and they tend to kind of jump into that first before they do any energy efficiency on the home. If you were to look on HECO's website, first thing they would recommend before you go photovoltaic is to make the home more efficient. So we were just trying to kind of hit some of those line items so that instead of having a giant bill and a giant solar system we could shrink that usage down and then have a much smaller system and still accomplish the same goals. So let me jump into that. We in the energy office constantly recommend solar water heating, solar water heating, solar water heating, and it's not nearly as popular these days as is photovoltaic and the best answer I ask the experts what's going on here and they say Howard it's just not sexy. If there's no glamour to it it's not high tech you can't point to it and say hell isn't that beautiful out there and people in my humble opinion and probably yours too are wasting a heck of a lot of energy and a heck of a lot of dollars by neglecting that solar water heating first. One thing Hawaii Energy will rebate you and then you get your federal tax credit and your state tax credit. That's right typically with the solar hot water system you can take about 30 to 50 percent off your energy bill. So for people that are trying to save and without having to wait the long lines in the Department of Permitting and with HECO to get approved for your solar system in my area and in Enchanted Lakes the wait was over a year and four months. So what we can do is we can actually start saving today by putting hot water on you get about 65 percent of your money back pays itself off in about 18 months and it attacks the bill right away. So as you pointed out virtually zero permitting time. No we can pull the permit online we can put it on the very next day you can start saving that month and kind of see what your bill comes down to and with some of the other energy efficient work that you can do on the home you can see what that bill comes down to and then you can adjust your PV system accordingly. That way either you can stay with the same size PV system and have a surplus in case you're planning on adding more things like in our case we're adding a electric vehicle. So we made that additional room that we had created from energy efficiency we replaced it with the EV and it kept it about the same or slightly less. And in terms of dollars even if a solar water heating system in your case you've got a lot of people under the roof there might be seven seven and a half thousand dollars given Hawaii energies rebate plus the tax credit you're not talking much more than two thousand that's correct yeah and as you pointed out really really quick that's right yeah we actually decided to add a second solar water system for the house too so now we have 240 gallons which is good for up to 8 to 10 people we did add some bathtubs and so those tend to use a little bit more water so we just kind of oversized the system just so that we can have enough for everyone and still be able to take a bath if we'd like to and that addresses the problem that people bring up what about the 40 days and 40 nights of rain that we had a few years ago 240 gallons even for a large family that's good it'll be more than enough yeah and and the thickness of the insulation in the tank will hold it for three to five six days at a at least a higher temperature so that the electricity doesn't have to work so hard to bring it up to a comfortable level okay I just one really wanted to drive to that home and I'm sure you and I are in the same page there absolutely so I guess you can see the next slide there pretty much we're just going to be going from a lower usage there with the hot water you can see the 20 year savings in that is about 32 thousand four hundred dollars or so and it does take only about two years to pay it off what people do forget which I want to remind our viewers at home is you do have to do a little bit of maintenance with hot water every year they recommend flushing that out homeowners can do that themselves or they can have a professional do it but we do recommend maintaining your system every three to five years there's a little rod in the middle that protects the tank from rusting and it's called the anode rod it's usually made of zinc and what it does is it attracts all the rust to it once it degrades then the rust starts attacking the tank people kind of tend to forget how much they're saving with hot water until it breaks and a lot of times they'll refer back to electricity and then they see their electric bill go up you know if you can just take the time every three to five years to maintain it they can last 20 to 30 years or more so in in my personal case suddenly there was all this oaky water draining out of my hot water area and the old tank had finally given up the ghost you do need to replace the tank every 10 years or so they're actually warranted for 10 years but if you maintain it every three to five years they can last 20 or up to even 30 years so yeah so you can see the next slide here it just discusses a little bit about some of the other efficiency we're doing with the home there so the second biggest user for Hawaii is obviously cooling down the home so we were taking bids on air conditioners to see how much it would cost and they were quoting us about $20,000 for four zones upstairs and downstairs two zones and then two for our living area the operating cost is two to $400 per month so even at $200 you're looking at about $2,400 per year and there's no rebates for that so the total 20 year cost is over almost $70,000 to operate that and that's only a few hours a day if you're running at 24 hours a day it could be half again or maybe even double that so we just decided that we're gonna stay comfortable leave our windows open enjoy the breezes that are coming in and basically accelerate them using a whole house fan system so whole house fans basically they operate in the attic space and they're pulling cool air into the room and out the attic so the challenge there is just having adequate ventilation so we created a ridge vent and some ventilation around the roof to accommodate that and basically it reduces the odor it reduces the dander allergens in my case I have a baby so there's that smell from the baby bucket we can turn that on and it pulls those orders right out of the room as well as in our kitchen we didn't want to have a hood blocking the view and we wanted to keep it an open concept so we're able to use a whole house fan to evacuate all of the food odors and smoke as well and we've been able to to accomplish that using the whole house fans they are about 10,000 installed and they only cost about 240 per year versus 2400 so pretty significant savings there and there are some rebates that come with whole house fans you get about 350 dollars at 75 dollars a fan so the total cost about for for for 20 years is a 14,450 and you save over fifty three thousand dollars absolutely people do tend to forget to change their filters in those AC units so you end up catching a lot of pollen transmitting that into the home people have allergies there's a lot of other things that kind of happen within the AC world plus all the energy that it takes to operate it as well as when it breaks you know that you got the free on or the the coolant that can be an energy that can be actually an environmental hazard as well when that breaks and so we were just trying to avoid that whole thing by just staying with the whole house fan system and let me point out for those who like me thought of a whole house fan is just one great big old fan it was noisy it was just in one part of the home and it did a good job of exhausting that the air from that part of the home as long as you didn't mind the noise the new whole house fans have outlets in all the different rooms and they suck the air up into the attic very very quietly because it's a series of little fans correct and then exhaust the air out out into the the atmosphere that's right totally totally silent that's correct they actually created a motor that is brushless and so it's almost basically a magnetic levitation type of a motor that they were using in RC cars and they expanded on that and so island cooling here locally it provides the whole house fans they're whisper quiet they only take about eight dollars a month to run versus two to four hundred and it does vent out nicely and and you can set it on a timer so if you want to have an hour two three four hours or eight hours or if you want to leave it on all the time that way it can actually shut off on its own if you wanted to nicely and on that cheery note we need to take a break already this is think tec kawaii back in a moment think tec kawaii honored guest today shan rimos of sanitric and we are describing his personal home where he expanded the heck out of it to accommodate a new baby his parents and his sister's family and the energy use was 450 in the smaller home that's a month now it's 150 how in the world did he achieve this magic while providing a healthier more comfortable home so welcome back again thank you very much appreciate it and let's launch into our next topic here terrific so um yeah you can see on this in the next slide here that we're talking a little bit about radiant heat if you can stop the heat from coming into the home you can reduce the cost of cooling the home so there's actually some technology they can use for the decking that actually has a radiant barrier on the inside of it kind of like a space blanket material and the new shingles that we have today actually have a light reflective property to them that can reduce the heat in the attic space significantly if you can keep that energy from getting into the house you don't have to expel it you don't have to try a comedy for its heat so it can get up easily to 140 degrees in an attic and i've seen attics 160 degrees correct without this technology that's right and that's how hot most attics are ours is about a hundred degrees more slightly less on a cooler day obviously but i can walk comfortably on the roof material without shoes on it doesn't burn me and that heat just keeps from coming into the house so you can see there on the next slide there it kind of discusses a little bit about transportation we were planning on adding an electric vehicle to our to our fleet i currently drive a Prius i really love it and 42 miles a gallon i can't complain you know you don't have to worry about the range so i use that for my sales vehicles but for our personal vehicles having a leaf was really attractive to us and charging it from the sun was something that we wanted to do so you can see the savings there it's about 10 years it's about 12 000 or so and and that's that's not bad if you're going to be looking at trying to trying to charge using the sun on the next slide you can see kind of a little bit toxic about after we've done all that efficiency work basically it then goes to being able to save using our lighting so if you just move forward one slide there yeah the a lot of people are familiar with lighting that's kind of the first thing people think of when they're trying to save on their energy bill unfortunately it's only about five to ten percent of your total usage so while you're spending most of your time it's actually kind of the least beneficial so in a commercial building it's a real big chunk of the pie but not not for a residential yeah so so what we did is we actually accomplished some day lighting by using what are called sun tunnels or light tubes and they just basically have a little lens that sits on the roof there and it drags light in using a reflective tunnel into the home so we had a wall in our house that had no windows on it and so we were able to drag those three sun tunnels there we're able to drag in day lighting and you can see also there in the bathroom there it's a slightly larger version of the sun tunnel and we never have to turn on the lights until about 6 30 or 7 o'clock at night yeah and and in a bathroom for the ladies the ladies like a lot of light in the bathroom so they get all their makeup absolutely and we have a we have a walk-in closet that I didn't show here unfortunately but it also has one in the walk-in closet that kind of just helps you to plan for the day when you can tell by how much light is coming in as if it's a real bright day or it'll be a little dimmer if it's cloudy so you can kind of help to prepare for the weather as it approaches and and that was something that we wanted to incorporate walk-in closet you know exactly what your clothes look like exactly as most closets are exactly and in the next slide is kind of what most people start with by basically cutting our energy usage by over 50 percent we now can have a much smaller system to cover the rest of the energy so instead of spending over 45 thousand dollars we're able to reduce the system cost down to 17 instead of covering a $450 bill we're only having to cover a $200 bill and I was able to cut 20 panels off of my system so what that did is it reduced the footprint on the roof there it made able to fit in a much smaller area and we were able to go ahead and achieve the goal of the maximum offset lowering the bill down to about $18 and 36 cents from Hawaiian Electric when we first turned it on when we added a few of the other improvements it did go up a little bit but it's still hovering between $15 and $100 and this is worth going over again because I can't tell you how many people I and other people in the energy office talk to and all they want to do is PV PV is sexy it's the in thing it's high tech I guess you can brag about it sure but as you pointed out a big PV system on a typical home can be what is the did you say $45,000 well now people are having to have batteries so it's even more important to do energy efficiency now because the cost of a solar system has increased with the necessity of having to use a battery on the home so he goes asked us to store some of our energy rather than providing it back to them at the grid because they had a surplus and they were just having a hard time managing that surplus and using it in an effective way and so now that the net energy metering program has been fully subscribed and the customer generated system program has been fully subscribed they did basically require people for the most part in the higher saturated areas to store their additional energy so they can use it for themselves at night now what that's done unfortunately is it has raised the price significantly and so it's even more important to try and do some energy efficiency on the home so that we can keep that cost affordable help us going forward to that 100 renewable energy goal that we have as a state and being able to make it affordable and comfortable for everybody and just a side note on the battery we're not talking a standard car battery sitting somewhere these are high tech zinc no i listen to me and they're safe they're stored outside the home generally and as you're indicating in the middle of the day we have so much pv out there on our roofs that they're the power plants can't ramp down far enough to accommodate all of that pv so you've got a lot of wasted energy at the hottest time of the day so if you have a battery in your home you during the excess time you put that all that energy into the battery and then in Hawaii we have what's called the evening peak where we use more electricity than any other time now your battery comes in and it does what's called shave that peak and it has really good implications for Hawaii being totally totally energy efficient absolutely and and just to kind of complete the whole circle here the last slide that you can see there just talks about the total energy efficiency technology we have there so with the hot water 20 year savings about $43,000 without using the whole house fan system instead of air conditioning operating cost savings about 73,500 lighting savings for the sun tunnels is about 8650 and then scrolling back over to the pv side you can kind of see that there's some significant savings they're adding up to about 192,540 the savings from 20 years on the pv side was about 67,200 so we did add some permanent value to the home and that savings in 20 years actually paid for almost two-thirds of the improvement itself we spent about 365,000 about 192,540 of that is going to be coming back to this in the form of efficiency and the house went from about 800 to almost 1.3 million in value so it's increased in value the equity is improved the savings is more comfortable for us and we're living in a healthier and a brighter safe environment and you've got a little baby to raise in there she loves it she absolutely loves it yeah so payback shade over four years implications for that if a bank were to hang a bank banner over its front door and say 25 interest exclamation mark i think people would be marching through those bank doors pretty darn quickly that's true and that that's what you are realizing here that's right a 25 percent yearly return on your investment that's that's a really good investment i don't know a lot of investments that can get 25 return no no so yeah now we're we're able to drive around comfortably we charge using the sun uh we're nice and cool um you know the sun tunnels actually have a little bit of a side effect of being a little too bright at times so you've got to close that bathroom door if you want to make it nice and dark in your room but the dimmable leds are really sweet we've added a few extra bells and whistles we have an apple tv that we can throw our computer screens up on we have some lights from hue lighting which is a philips lights that's a led a multiple colors so we can control the lighting and the color of the home using our apps so just kind of trying to get as few as many of the different technologies available so i can kind of create a showroom and people can come over to my home see how we're living and take a look at the technology see if it's for them and really get a feel for how it actually works and then you mentioned hawaii's goal of it's a hundred percent clean energy by the year 2045 which is what 28 years from now correct yeah correct and we all have to do our part to to make that happen um you know the technology that we have available to us to reduce the energy in our homes and businesses is available today it's incentivized there's absolutely no reason not to avoid it other than not knowing how it works and maybe it's it is important to take a look at your home or your business and take a look at the energy and see where it's going and if you're happy with the way it is maybe stick stick it out but if you find that the savings is something that's appealing to you and the cost is not prohibitive i mean maybe explore some of these technologies make yourself a little bit greener while you're doing it and then looking at the larger picture there's a lot of talk about climate change and climate change doesn't exist but i think most of us especially in hawaii will agree that climate change does exist we're having issues now with the rising sea level and encroaching that's right on our our properties and every time you shift away from hawaii electrics normal generation that means that they are burning less oil that's right oil is a what would you call it a climate changer it is you're having all of this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere the carbon dioxide is the prime cause of global warming and actually not having enough finances is a primary cause of dysfunction in the home as well so if we're able to keep some of those resources in hawaii and in the workers in the people's pockets and in the economy you know it creates a more thriving environment for growth and allows us to do to do more with what we have and and still be comfortable a few years ago hawaii's gross state product was about 70 billion dollars and on that year we spent seven billion dollars on oil 10 percent of all of our wealth went overseas to pay for oil and thanks to people like you we are decreasing decreasing decreasing this absolutely we've been able to put a few of the main power generators on standby we estimate that it's over 700 000 barrels of oil are not making the trip to the islands anymore due to solar power and we are hovering between eight and a 12 percent penetration on solar power which is it's a very small amount but it's double pretty much anybody else in the nation so we do have the highest penetration of solar and renewable energy in this in the nation and we need to wrap up is there a final slide given your particulars here yep there you is oh no no yep that's the one oh yeah there you are there you are so pretty much that shows a picture of the final home there and it's it's only about a hundred dollars now a month for a seven bedroom four bath we're able to maintain a comfortable energy efficient safe and green environment to live and that's just so that the the keiki can enjoy those resources and have nice clean water and clean air moving forwards if you're interested in getting some information on how you can get an energy audit done on your home it does not cost anything and we can come out there and take a look at what you're using and how you're using it and give you some suggestions on some ways you can cut cut though some of that usage down you know we do have a I have a vendors list of of people that can help you with that as well and I've created quite a little energy portfolio and if you want to come over and see the house too I'd love to show you how it works beautiful and on that cherry note we have to call it an afternoon thank you son Sean Rimos and that's it today for St. Tech Hawaii Code Green Howard Wig see you next time