 Okay, we're talking about energy. We're sitting in for Howard Wigg. Hi, Howard. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. This is Code Green. So you can, you know, you ought to get the hint on that. Code Green has a lot to do with building code. It has to do with buildings. It has to do with keeping things cool and efficient and not too expensive and green. Green, you know. So Tom Cashman, sales engineer with Hawaii Energy Systems, Oahu, right? Okay, and when, when? Yes, we win. An engineer, you're a, what kind of engineer? So I'm a good engineer. I'm a good engineer. Yes, electrical engineer. Yes. Okay, also with Hawaii Energy Systems. Hawaii Energy Systems. I'm a mechanical engineer. Okay, so you guys, what is your primary market that you do energy systems for, Tom? Primarily the hotel industry is a big one. And then military installations as well as the offices downtown. So commercial is what we're looking at more than residential. Why do they need you? To save them money. It's mostly about money. Well, you know, it's always down to the bottom line is money. But yeah, exactly. And performance for hotels, you know, guests, satisfaction is, is huge. So you want to make sure the guests are happy. They're able to get their comfort. We're talking about room comfort. And to me, comfort is extremely important. And we go to, so we're having climate change now. It's getting hotter. It's going to get hotter. Yet you can quote me. Okay, that'll be a final exam. So we have to make sure that people are comfortable because they can't function if they're not comfortable. And we've all got to get used to that. Right. So how do you help me stay comfortable? By the temperatures around you. The cooling is what we do with HVAC cooling and air conditioning. Conditioning your space that you're in. So you're not going to provide me the HVAC. You're going to provide me the systems that make the HVAC more efficient. All right. What we do is why energy systems is we're controlling the HVAC system. So we're controlling how much air is going into a space, the temperature of that air. We're controlling the fans through VFDs, the speed of the fans, controlling the energy that these systems are using and limiting them to what they need rather than having them ramp up too fast for too long, spending energy they don't need, which comes back to the bottom line where you're spending money that you don't need to. So you have to have a qualifying air conditioning system. It can't be one that was built in 1937. Am I right? That's correct. Yeah. So 1937 air conditioning is probably some louvers and a sling for swappers. So yeah, what we're talking about is controlling money. Yeah. So what kind of, you know, really, what kind of air conditioning system do I need to have a benefit from your control systems? We're using commercial type air conditioning. So it's not going to be your residential split systems. It's going to be, you know, you have big chiller plants, you'll have air handlers, a branch off to VAVs or fan coil units. So it'll be a commercial. Okay. And your system is going to send in a signal and say I want more, I want less. Yeah. Our system will control the entire system from the chiller plants. In fact, we do chiller plant optimizations, which you can speak to that a little if you'd like. Yeah. So yeah, we control everything in the building. So the chiller plant, the pumps that move water from the chiller plant to the condo units or, you know, hotel guest rooms and the fans as well. So that's, we have a couple of slides on that where we also do that as well. We control the fan amount of fan energy and how much water that gets into that fan coil unit. So yeah, we do all that. So you're controlling that from this kind of technology we're going to talk about. Okay. And you mentioned, you mentioned slides. I heard you, I heard you say that anyway. So, Tom, why don't you start with the slides because we got to get this off our chest right away. Okay. So basically what we have here is our smart thermostat. Can you hold it up, get a picture of it? Previous to the stat, you'd have a standalone stat is what they would call it. It would just turn your fan up or down, cool your room. Once you've turned it to a degrees, it would stay at that degree until you physically turned it back down or up with our smart, smart thermostat is able to talk to different devices around the room and control the fan so it could go back down or up through technology. How much of what he said you agree with, we went. I agree with all of it. I thought you'd say that. Some people say 110%, but hey, that's right. Yeah, 110%. Okay, go through the slides. Yeah. So that first slide was showing some of the things that it's capable of doing when you say the stat of the future. Not only can it just control the fans in the room, the conditions of the room, it also, we have Alexa can speak to Alexa. You can have many bars where it's able to tell if a customer has taken a bottle of Coke or a bourbon and then register that down to the front end. I thought you were joking. It will, you know, put it on the bill on the front desk and as the guest leaves, they will be charged. It's kind of a surveillance thing. You also have lighting and drape control, which is a really nice thing. So, you know, just to push the button, you can control the drapes or they have daylight harvesting that's even capable. So it's kind of complicated because it's not only the brain, you're talking to peripherals. Right. And then you're talking to the chiller and the fans and they might forget the other. Yeah. It was the third part of that system. Yeah. So there's there's fans, there's fans. Okay. So you're talking in and out. You got a lot of connections. So the big question is how do you make those connections? Is it it's a lot of wires that sound like to me? Yeah, it's through cat, cat five cabling. So it's controllers. You have to see it. Yeah. But there's it's, it's powered by it's hard wired thermostat is part, but communication is all wireless. And so back to that slide, you saw how it communicates to all these different things. That's all wireless. And so there is minimal networking required other than just powering up this thermostat, which is standard on every every room. So I plant that on a wall somewhere, probably at eye level so I can see it. And I have to have to put a water ethernet cable in through the wall what what cable is feeding that will just attach right to the can of fan coil unit that's cooling the room and then that fan coil unit will have a controller on it, which has been relayed back to the chiller plant and through the system to do the work. And it's also now the wireless, what's it connecting with wirelessly? The wireless is speaking is speaking to the front door, the lanai doors as occupancy to see if people are in the room. Those are the sensors then those are the sensors. So the sensors are out there and they're connecting wirelessly. As well as has a Zigbee deep national network, where you this the different thermostats will talk to each other and send the information to a router in the telecom room, which will then draw the data will be sent down to a server down to the DOE. Excuse me, if I'm if I have a big building, I have a bunch of those things. They're pretty much everywhere. They're pretty much in every space any every defined space of the building. Do they talk to each other? In other words, I have room A room B is room A the what do you call this? It's a smart thermostat. Yeah. Okay. A smart thermostat. Smart thermostat device. Does smart thermostat device in room A talk to the one in room B? I mean, you say mesh, I love mesh mesh is really important. So are they all talking to each other? And what are they saying? Sure, yeah. So they do talk to each other. So each one of these devices that you see here, it's a receiver and a transmitter. So it not only transmits its own data back to a server, it also receives data from other thermostats, and it gets that all back to the server. And so that server then makes decisions on commanding things on and off telling your chiller plant to turn up more or turn down more. And so they're even the chiller plant data on how many people are in the room, let's say it's 50% occupied at a certain point. It can have that events notice before they make decisions on whether to turn up pump stronger or lower. And so, yeah, all that data goes back to essential plant, essential place. This is really all about using sensors to determine who's in the room, then making decisions on who's in the room, send instructions back to the air conditioning system. Correct. One of your basic, if you go to the second slide, one of your basic, we can run through these slides now. Yeah, go ahead. So basically, when a guest checks into the room, the rooms are set at what they call a deep set, deep set back, which is saving energy for the hotels, hotels, for example. So once the guest checks into the room, we go into into just your setback, which will be cooling the room down. So as a guest is riding up the elevator to his room, he doesn't want to walk into a deep setback room, which would be like 78 degrees, it'll be more towards 72 degrees. And what's the first thing guests do when they do enter the room, if you go to the next slide, they immediately usually drive down that thermostat in Hawaii, get it down to 68 or whatever it may be. And they love that looking for comfort. Yeah, suppose the guy, instead of driving down the thermostat, he walks right over the window, you know, that big sliding glass window, and he opens that sucker wide up. Right, you know, he loves the sound and the smell of Hawaii. Okay, what is that? So yeah, we have door switches on that that are speaking wireless to the smart thermostat. And it'll shut it down because we don't want to cool Waikiki Beach off. It will. It'll shut it down. And there'll be no cooling. So if you go to that next slide, you just stop it. Yeah, exactly. Why, why, why argue with mother nature? Exactly. If you want to do that, absolutely. Okay, next one. Yeah, so that's just showing that the next slide, I think we'll be showing that he's gone to the balcony, your little stick man in there is over the balcony opening the windows. So you'll see that the room temperature is red now shut down. It's pretty smart thermostat. And then, you know, you shut it, you shut the balcony door, and it'll turn back on. It'll go back to the setting that the gust has desired. So if they, if they choose 68, it's going to make its way back down to 68 degrees. What's the lag? I'm just wondering. I'm just thinking. So that's a good question. You don't want the fan cool turn off and on off and on every time someone opens and closes the door or the window. So I think believe it was a 10 minute lag in there. And again, you can program that. Yeah. So I mean, when the guest opens the sliding door, it cuts off the air conditioning immediately within five seconds. And so when they shut, they close it, it'll turn back on pretty quickly. But the set point takes time to rebuild us. So sure. And so there is a lag when someone either leaves it, leaves the room, it will do a 15 minute scan before it turns off again. And so it's about 15 minutes for what I'm really interested in to is this, this, these combination, this combination of devices can tell, can tell the machine how many people are in the room. And therefore, how much cooling it has to deliver to that room then. Yeah. There's that capability of actually counting people. That'd be another device you would have that would actually count bodies into a room. They also have devices, CO2 sensors that would, by parts per million, you could tell the CO2 that's being breathed into the room, whether a fan needs to be turned on or fresh air needs to be dumped. So you're always monitoring the room. Exactly. And so if my wife decides she wants to cook something and she has all the burners on, that's going to affect the temperature in the room. You know it, you found out and you adjust the cooling supply accordingly. Exactly. Okay, got more slides? I got another slide that just shows I believe when the guest leaves the room, you know, a lot of times they're not going to turn that thermostat back up, they're going to leave it down to their desired temperature. And you have an occupying sensor that will, the front door has a switch, so the contact's been broken and knows that someone's left the front door. It's going to have occupying sensors, it's going to look for someone if there's no movement, then it'll go back into its setback mode. And that's how you save energy for the hotel. Does this have anything to do with security? Do you ever connect this sort of thing with all these doors opening and whatnot? It can. Because my security force would like to know if it's being opened at the wrong time. Right. Yeah, so this has the capability of talking to the front door. And so it has a Bluetooth beacon on here and all the hotels these days, they're what they have is a network front door system. And so when you check into the hotel, they usually give you a key, like a key card. Today they don't have just a set key card for every single room, they just program it as you come in. And so if let's say you drop your key card, someone comes up that doesn't belong to they start scanning different rooms, the system will know that that key card has been scanned to know multiple rooms that are belong to them. And then that will then shut off that key card automatically. So there are security features built into this that can be enabled. You talk about a server somewhere, all the data. Right. So is there somebody looking at the server in other words, if I'm detailed to look at the server, and I can look essentially at the whole building, I can look at every unit actually see how it's performing. Yeah, we build graphics that show the rooms of all the hotel and you can drill down into a particular room, you can do some maintenance check, you can check the set points, you can adjust the set points, you can see if it's functioning properly all through the server. So you have a server down at the director of engineering's office, or it might be by the front desk and then the front desk server and the director of engineering's server can gather data from that server. Does the person who monitors the server have to be there watching it all the time, or is it work on an alarm basis? Absolutely, and you also can get it onto your mobile app. Oh, so the fellow who was responsible for the server, he can take a walk, have a coke. Yes. And it'll tell him there's a problem on his phone. It has an alarm right onto his phone. That's pretty good. We would expect nothing less here. It's the future, right? Okay, more slides? Is that it? Okay. This is the last slide. That's just... Yeah, that's showing someone leaving the room, and the scan for occupancy, nobody's in there, so it went to a, you see that red room temperature is red now, so. The brown cooling off. Yeah, so now it's not cooling anymore. He's off at the beach going to a restaurant, whatever it is, and doesn't return for another four or five hours. Air conditioning's off the entire time, saving energy. So when you guys install a system like this, say a fresh install in a hotel or an office building, or I guess a school as well, you're going to come in and you're going to... First, you're going to have to have an air conditioning system in all those parts that are compatible. But then you're going to have to put in sensors. You're going to have to... Did you install the sensors, and then you install these magic boxes? Yeah. May I call them magic boxes? Yes. They are magical. Smart thermosets. Yeah. So you have a job to do because you have to wire these up, at least with the one wire, and then you have to connect them up by wireless through all these sensors, and that's in every single compartment. It's like each compartment is on its own. That's correct. It's like a submarine, you know, watertight doors. Exactly. So every fan coil would have one of these, and then the doors that that space is cooling would you'd want to have your switches, door contacts on all those and windows as well. Yeah. We're turnkey contractors, and so we're licensed electrical contractors. We have our own people come and do the installation. We have programmers on staff that program these thermostats in order to work how you want it to work. And then we have engineers on staff that can, you know, do the drawings and do the as-builds, and then we do the design as well. Before you come in, you're going to say where each piece goes, each sensor goes, and each item that you're censoring goes. Okay, so we're finished with that discussion. We're going to take a short break, Tim, and we, now when we come back, we're going to talk about why. That's good. The almighty why. The almighty why. We'll be right back. Hey, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii studio. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of The Pretty Matters Hawaii. We air here every Tuesday at 10 a.m. Hawaii time trying to bring you issues about security that you may not know, issues that can protect your family, protect yourself, protect our community, protect our companies, the folks we work with. Please join us and I hope you can maybe get a little different perspective on how to live a little safer. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. My program airs every other Monday at 1 o'clock on Think Tech Hawaii. Most of my programs deal with my own life and law experience. Recently, I interviewed Alex Gempel, who I have known for over 30 years about his voyage across the sea as a lawyer from Tokyo to Hawaii. Those are the type of stories that I like to bring and like to talk about. Human stories about law and life. Aloha. Okay, we're back real live and I let we show me the thing to want to see how heavy it was. It's not very heavy, but it's not terribly light either. It's, so I would say what, a quarter of a pound, half a pound like that. Something like that. And it's got these clicky buttons. These are buttons that give you a pushback. I like that. And it's a button for Fahrenheit and centigrade, a button for the fan. I guess that's incremental speeds, up and down. And then you got these arrows, which are up and down too. What are the arrows signifying? Temperature, so if you wanted to Oh, temperature. Temperature, sure. Decrease your standpoint. Decrease. And mode is, what was the mode again? If you wanted to change, you know, cooling only mode or heating mode or auto. That's what's the modes for. Yeah. Heating doesn't help much here. We don't care about that. It's really a nice piece of gear. And you say that if it goes out for any reason, I guess they last a long time anyway, probably a couple of years at least. Yeah. You just get another one and put it right on. Yeah, exactly. So this back plate stays on the wall. So if that for every reason failed, all the parameters are saved on this little chip. I know it's kind of hard to see on the camera, but it's saved on this little chip. So the maintenance team, they just pop the new one in, put it in, and all the settings are already saved. And so you don't have to find any of the new. Every time you put one of those in, originally you'd have to bind the signals to the front door, to the night door, to the windows. Yeah. You give it a number. It knows what room it is. Like an IP address. Yeah, exactly. So all that is held in the smart chip. So when those fail and so having to redo all that, you can just... Configurations saved. That's great. Exactly. You know, I was pushing this button, you know, the down one, which presumably, you know, lets you reduce the temperature in the room. And I sense that our studio was a... It's wireless. Joke, joke. It automatically seeks out... It's like there's placebo effect. So this is really the heart of the... This is the special sauce in here. That's correct. And you're going to configure it in a way that works best for the larger system. Right. It's all about a system. In fact, this part of your name, isn't it? All these systems together, same energy. Yeah. So you like to deal with the whole building system? Absolutely. So, okay. So I'm a building owner. I am so cheap. I am so cheap. You like you. We got what you need. I want to save money so badly because, you know, my owners and investors are on me all the time. You know, how can you save us money? And you guys are going to have an answer to that, right? Hopefully, yes. What is the answer? It's a facetive answer. And you would do an energy audit, I think, be the first thing to do. Yeah. So what we're showcasing here is just one of our solutions. This is managing the guest room, right? So we call it the airside. There's a whole slew of solutions that we have that manages the chill plant, the wet side of the building, that manages hot water, that manages lighting. And so all this can be all integrated into one system that we need. You want to hold this? Sure. I feel like you need to have it for some sort of gratification purpose or something like that. Hold on to it. Thank you, Tom. Yeah. So this is the brains of a lot of that. But yeah. So that would be my pitch to a lot of, you know, building owners and is to allow us to do an analysis on the building and figure out where we can save them energy. Could be the solution and, you know, which helps a lot of people and could be something else. So you usually find this in others. I mean, if I put in, you know, millions, hundreds of millions, who knows what, into a given project, I usually have something there. If I went to the trouble of, you know, having a chiller and a fan and what was the other one, the third piece, chiller fan and pumps and pump. Yes. If I put all that stuff in, then I probably have an energy system, something like what you're talking about. So you look at the thing and say, oh, this is, what do you find in terms of the legacy equipment that you find in there at the moment you're talking to this owner? That's a good question. We look at a lot of the sometimes if it's an existing building with existing parts, the VFDs might be outdated. Some of the technology that's using to be outdated programming might need to be brought back up to today's codes or we can provide. Howard Rigg raises his head. So it's about code. If you're going to do a new system, you have to look at the code and make sure you comply with the code. Yeah. Absolutely. And this would comply with the code. This is very modern, very up to date. Yes, definitely. And this is actually beyond code. I don't think code requires this technology here. But yeah, we go into buildings all the time with legacy equipment where we either replace the entire thing or we can reuse some of it and add some of our smarts on top of it to save energy. So it depends on how old, how legacy that is. I would guess a lot of these buildings, a lot of buildings in Hawaii were made, were built a long time ago. And I would guess that you have to do a lot of installation of sensors. Because the earlier systems probably didn't have a lot of sensors. It's all about sensors. Do you have to do that? Do you have to think of a new sensor system and put sensors on all of the critical pathways? Yeah. So that happens quite a bit where 20, 30 years ago, people weren't tracking for CO2, for example, that Tom brought up earlier. So this room, for example, here, is probably older systems, but just sense for room space temperature, how hot it is in here. But the new way of doing it is putting a CO2 sensor in here. And that tells you how many humans are in this room, how much heat is being generated and how much fresh air needs to be brought into the room. So that's just one example where we put in a sensor and we do demand control ventilation where we add oxygen as needed rather than outside air as needed. So you have a sensor and it's going to look at CO2 in the room and it's going to tell you how many, well, how much CO2 is being generated, I guess, by humans or whatever else. Correct. And I guess if you had a car in the room that would be generated. Then you have the sensors in the garage, the CO, the CO sensors. You have a carbon monoxide sensor. So we do that as well. So garage exhaust fans, for example, maybe the garage that's in here. And usually there's a fan that just runs all the time 24-7. So what we do is we put a carbon monoxide sensor and turn on the fan as needed only to save energy. Same idea, yeah. And then sensors, sometimes they drift. So you'll need to replace them too. So you need to go and test those to make sure existing sensors are still working as they should. The sensors are changing all the time, aren't they? The technology is always improving. It's a big area of research and development. Yeah, some of the sensors are pretty basic. I think they've been around for a long time. And then there's the newer ones that they've created sensors that work better than their previous predecessors. Absolutely. Precision improves over time. So back to my room or your room or our room with the people in it, well-generating carbon dioxide. And humidity. And humidity and all that. So you want to flush that out. So you have to have an algorithm in there somewhere that says, well, the room is this big and the room now has seven people in it. And we are going to make a change here. So there's a mathematical formula there, right? Seven people, this big, this much carbon dioxide and so forth. And we want to get down to that 72 degrees or whatever the target was. So this is all in that little box or is it in the server down below with the server person? Yep. So what you just mentioned is exactly correct. It's all in this box. So this senses for humidity, temperature, and then it can sense for CO2. That's something that has been enabled. But in this room humans produce all three things, right? They produce BTUs, right? So we produce heat. We produce carbon dioxide as we breathe. And we also humidify the space as well. So we sense for all three of those things. And there's an algorithm in here that determines how much air conditioning is needed to remove those things or how much fresh air is needed to remove those things. So how much money can I save? Is this big time savings? Absolutely. I mean, we don't ever really want to quote money out of the air, but there's up to 30% savings. 30% savings? That's a lot of bread. Yeah. I mean, if I have one of those legacy systems, I'm probably paying way too much. Absolutely. And I know, I mean, for example, what is it, the university or it's electric, just to put it in perspective, electric bill is something like a million dollars a month. Yes. Easily. Yep. Absolutely. So a big office building, that'll be big as university, of course, but a big office building is going to be spending a lot of money per month on energy. So you can cut the energy cost down. That's why there's such a big market for the DVC, the direct visual control market. Controlling not only just the space, but also controlling the pumps that run the chiller plant, the fans that run the air handlers. You just want to have all that in town and being controlled through programming and direct digital controls does all that. Yeah. Okay. And now my last question, and then we got to go is, so we have climate change. It's getting warmer. Everybody knows that a building that's too warm or room that's too warm is no fun. It's no fun. And it undermines productivity. Absolutely. It undermines learning. It undermines human activity in that building and that room. And it's going to get worse. Maybe that's why you guys are in this business, because you know that the trend line here in climate change. So is this going to withstand, deal with the climate change changes? Because we need a system that is sustainable, even when it really gets tough. What do you think? I would say yes, this does help fix that problem and contribute to that. So like for example, this building, air conditioning might be on in every single room because you don't have sensors determining if it needs to be on or not. So if it gets warmer and warmer, the capacity of your air conditioning system in this building might exceed that. So if you had this smart system that tells you how much occupancy is in the building, you can shift some of the air conditioning to where it's needed and then maybe you don't have to increase your capacity for this building as far as air conditioning. So as temperatures rise, technology like this becomes more and more important. I totally agree with you on that. Tim Cashman, we win from... Tom Cashman. Tom Cashman, we win from the Hawaii Energy Systems Oahu. Tom, why don't you tell us what your website is and how people can reach you? Our website at www.whiannergysystems.com or you can reach us through our website. It would be probably the best way. Our website is our best. Our office is in Halawa Valley and then we have offices on Maui, Big Island and Guam. So if you're watching from Big Island, we can help you there as well. You're on all the major islands. We have a team of 50 that can spring into action and do an installation. That's correct. How much of what you said you agree with? Nine and not nine. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jay. Thank you very much. Thank you.