 Good afternoon, Howard Wigg, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. This is not an April Fool program because the person sitting by me is L. Whitworth, a partner in Island Cooling, and he is an installer for a technology called Whole House Fan. Whole House fans can keep your house cool, especially given Hawaii's very benign climate, for a fraction of the amount of energy that an air conditioner requires. So, thank you so much for being with me. Thank you, Howard, for having me on the show. And as I was explaining, air conditioning is a real, real energy consumer. And here we are in Hawaii, the first state to say we will have 100% mean energy by the year 2045. Incidentally, California followed us. Usually, California leads everybody, but they followed us and hot off the press, New Mexico set the same goal as last day or two. We can be proud of ourselves for being a leader, and the way we're going to accomplish this is with advanced technology, such as yours, L. So why don't we bring up the first slide, and L, if you could explain to us, introduce your company a little bit. So we are Island Cooling, we're a family-run business. My brother and I started this business about 10 plus years ago, and we focused just on one thing, and that is the energy efficient cooling of our local homes. So we don't do any of the other products, solar air conditioning, but this has allowed us to work with the solar companies, the electrical companies, the builders on solutions for having a efficient ventilated and cooler home. And what were those funny big things that each one of you was holding? Sure, so those are the quiet cool whole house fans without the duct, and what whole house fans have been around for a long time. That's actually three different motor technologies there. On the left, the one I'm holding is a brushless EC motor, which is a very, very energy efficient motor. It's got a couple cool features to it. One, that instead of starting off with a jump, it slowly spins up to reach maximum speed, so that's... The electric utility loves that. Yes, and then the second thing that we really love about it is that they're sealed, and because that motor is sealed, less of a chance of salt or dust or anything getting inside, so they last a lot longer. And when you combine that energy efficiency plus more durability, it's a great technology for our local homes. You know, a couple of years ago, I toured a home and it was built, or the owner built it, as a really energy-efficient home and so forth, so forth. And we got to his whole house fan, and it was a big puka in the attic, and it was just a permanent puka. And up there was the fan, and it was roaring away, and I complimented him, of course. Heck, with this, I would never live in such an environment. So, one of my eternal themes is technology keeps improving, improving, improving, improving, so what you just described is major, major improvement. Yes, so about 15 years ago, the team that we work with, Dana, he was thinking there's got to be a better way to make an energy-efficient whole house fan, so he took that giant fan, moved it to the end of an air conditioning duct, an insulated acoustic duct, and by moving it away from the opening, it also allowed it to be easier to install. It's hung strapped, so there's no framing needed, and it is, of course, much more efficient, quieter because of the distance and more. It's just a lot better overall. There's been huge progress. Now we have Wi-Fi controls, we have RF controls, so you don't have to run a wire down your wall anymore. It's made it a lot easier. And while we're on that subject, can we go back to the first slide again? Because what we're seeing there is the blades in the fan, and something that I learned not long ago was the fact that there are different pitches on different fan blades, and I was in a title eight apartment some years ago, and there was a fan spinning around, and because this is state-funded, everything purchased is based on Lois' first cause, and that fan was going around, and it was a hot summer evening, and I swear it wasn't doing a gosh darn thing, and I looked at the blades, and the blades were just flat. So it was like a ceiling fan. Yeah. So shouldn't the blades be pitched in such a way, in your case, you want to suck the air out of the house and get it up into the air. That's a great point right there. A lot of folks will ask me, how is this quiet cool system going to impact my ceiling fans, and the answer is it makes them work better. The reason why is a ceiling fan is great at mixing the air around, and if you're sitting directly underneath it, it's blowing air on you, which is great. That's how we feel temperature difference, right? But it's not bringing any fresh air in, so here's an experiment you can try at home. You know how when you pull up to your house in your first park, sometimes you've got a phone call, you've parked, so you've taken a phone call, you turn off your engine, and within about 10 seconds you feel hot and stuffy, and the temperature in that car hasn't gone up so much, but what's happened is all of that humidity from your body, there's nowhere for it to go, so you kind of end up cracking the door to get some of the heat out. That's what the quiet cool system does, so it's bringing in fresh air into the home, and then simultaneously pushing the hot air out of the attic, which works great with the ceiling fan, because then it's moving around cooler, cooler air. And somehow that brings up one of the laws of physics, heat rises. Heat rises. You're bringing air from down close to the ground, I guess, or wherever the windows are actually, and the air is accumulating up towards the ceiling or in the attic, but you're causing that to move around and get to heck with it. Exactly, so a lot of folks, they come into their home at the end of the day and they say, I wish I could just have a way I could suck this hot air out of my house, and if you've ever thought that, that's exactly what a whole house fan and the quiet cool system is designed to do. It sucks all that heat out, because it's up on the ceiling, throwing the hottest air out of the house, simultaneously bringing fresh air from the windows to replace it so it can create a cross breeze in your home, giving it a little bit of a windshield factor, and then finally blowing the hot air out of the attic so lowering that temperature. So overall, the attic temperature can drop by 40 degrees, the indoor temperature, typically 10 degrees or more, and then it reduces it down to the ambient air temperature. Yeah, which in Hawaii is a pretty gosh darn good temperature. Why don't we go to the next slide? Yeah, so this is, we are distributors for quiet cool brand. They're the leaders in whole house fans, and we've been working now for over 10 years, so that's about 4,500 of these systems distributed statewide. We work with builders. What makes us really unique is that we've always searching for solutions for our local homes. What works best in a certain area, we have to maybe tweak it a little bit. A lot of our homes, as you know, have no insulation in them, so that means maybe requiring using smaller systems to move airflow through the house instead of one giant system, which was how they used to have to do it in the past. Now we have smaller units that can be installed in like a bedroom or a home office area. Yeah, beautiful. Let's look at the next slide. So, oh no, that's a nice slide. Yes, and that's one of the most popular things. So energy efficiency, of course, is very important, and we're very proud of the fact that quiet cool fans are very energy efficient, but what makes it truly unique is that it fits our lifestyle. So this is something that folks can use with open windows. When you turn on an air conditioner, the first thing you've gotta do is close all your windows, and then a lot of us are relaxing so we don't wanna get up and open our windows up again so that AC stays on all the time. Whereas there's a lot of days today, for example, you just open the windows, get some fresh air in, suck the hot air out, and really, most folks find that this can take the place of an AC for some folks all completely. Yeah, yeah, especially if they're on a budget. Absolutely, these are very, very energy efficient to use, less than 10% of the energy of many ACs. And that brings up a little side fact. The second most common reason why people, homeowners go into bankruptcy is a high utility bill. Yes, yes, and we've had folks tell us that these quiet cool systems work great for them because everything from right sizing their solar panels, not needing as more than they could, their roof can support, for example, and also having fresh air, which just leads to a healthier overall home, more comfort, having the ability to have that indoor outdoor lifestyle go in and outside of the house without having to have the home closed up all the time. And we in Hawaii are blessed, not only with some of the world's best water, but some of the world's best air. Absolutely, absolutely. As we have the trade winds coming through and we don't have a heavy industry or anything like that. Yes, yes. And most homes just having that good fresh air coming through is a much healthier lifestyle. Absolutely. And we have homeowners who tell us that in Ewa Beach and other places where it's hot all the time, they say they use this, and they're really surprised how much more comfortable it makes the home. Now there are a few days in the air, we want people to know this doesn't refrigerate the air, that's what air conditioning does. And so there are a few days in the air when it's a really hot cone of day where you may not feel the perfect relief with this and that's where you'd maybe switch on an AC if you have one. Other people tell us, hey, I just waited out and I'm great again. Yeah, because you got, at least you're down to ambient temperature and your perceived coolness is below ambient because you have that air movement. Absolutely. And keep in mind that our bodies are 98.6. You just let that radiant heat come out and sit there. That's not so nice. Yeah. Let's go to the next slide. So as I mentioned, Whole House fans have been around for a long time and everyone from the US Department of Energy to Hawaii Energy, another one of our partners, they have all been helping us raise awareness of the Whole House fan this past month with the utility little bill inserts that went out. Folks were introduced again to the idea of putting in a whole house fan to cool their homes. Oh, and I should mention, I'm the energy codes guy for the state that Hawaii has a unique amendment that says new home shall be equipped with either ceiling fans or whole house fans. Perfect. I mentioned that. Unfortunately, a couple of the neighbor islands have crossed out shell and put in May but Honolulu was going to stick with the shell. And the next code iteration, I'm going to lobby right back again. Now that you used to this code, cross out that May and put shell. Shell have either ceiling fans or whole house fans. Let's go to the next slide on that cherry note. This is the model. Here's how it works. Yeah, this is the modern quiet cool fan. So you can see there that that motor has been moved away from the opening by strapping and hanging it like that. Of course that dampens all the vibrations and really limits the amount of sound. A really key important point is right there above the ceiling, what's called a damper box. And that's important. That's that little black. Exactly, and those are two little doors that suck open when the quiet cool system is on and then they shut when the system is off and that prevents any hot air from coming back down from the attic or any little creatures or anything like that. If you run AC this is important because it's not gonna suck out your cold air. Sometimes we see people run a direct vent into their home from the roof and they'll just vent straight into their house and then later they'll say, oh no, I can't turn it off, I can't control it. All of our systems are controllable. And the motor is that black thing at the end. Yes. There, yeah. And you can see it's suspended so that there's no vibration. And it's bending out through the attic vents and that is of course, there's two limiting factors, one that makes our job fun is we have to make sure that each home has enough attic space to install it and enough attic ventilation and the only way to really tell that is to physically get up there in the attic and my brother and I, we spent a lot of time looking at folks' attics, making sure they have enough space to install equipment. Yeah, and as you pointed out, homes are different and different, different older homes not insulated and then you mentioned Eva Beach, the hottest part of the island. I live in the back of Manoa. So you treat us very differently. Well, the benefit to having done this for a number of years now is that we kind of get to know the neighborhoods. And so we can tell you maybe what some of your neighbors have done. And for example, there's a neighborhood in Eva Beach that when they built it, they included a lot of ventilation in this neighborhood. And they did such a great job with the ventilation that the systems there don't need any additional ventilation and it makes it so easy. And a lot of our customers, Eva Beach is one of those areas that you can make a drastic difference that neighborhood is sun-terra, by the way. Yes, yes, yes. And I'm not sure we know. We will take a break. We're at Wig, Old Green, and Sink Tech Hawaii back in a moment. Aloha, I'm Wendy Lowe and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock live from Sink Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're gonna be talking about. Whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. I'm J. Fideal of Sink Tech. Our flagship energy show among the six energy shows we have is Hawaii, the state of clean energy. It plays every Wednesday at 4 p.m. Come around and see us. Learn about energy. Keep current on energy on thinktechhawaii.com. Good afternoon again, Howard Wig, Old Green, Sink Tech Hawaii, L. Whitworth, partner in Island Cooling. How could I forget Island Cooling? And let's bring up the next slide here. Yeah, now we get into the physics and I think you're gonna talk about latent heat. Yes, so of course, because we're surrounded by such a great ocean, it keeps our air temperature relatively cool. We get almost 100% of our heat from the sun and there's some infrared photos there showing what may be a typical home. That sun hits the roof, fills that attic up with very, very hot air in the walls as the case may be and then it just radiates into the house and it's like having a heater on your head. This is what the Quiet Cool found. By drawing fresh air in, it helps to remove all that stored heat, that mass that's been warmed. Kind of like if you go out to your car and it's been parked in the sun and you touch your car, it's really hot to the touch. You start driving and you'll notice it's cooled down because all that air has pulled the heat out of the mass. We all remember heat rises but sometimes folks forget that heat expands as well. So many times folks will say, why is the cool air not coming into my home? It's 10 degrees cooler outside here. I take two steps in and it's hot. That's because all that heat is acting like a small high pressure zone, literally forcing its way out of the house because there aren't enough vents to go up. Good point. And by reversing that, helping that air go up and out where it wants to go naturally, we can very efficiently cool down the mass of the home as well as the inside space. In that slide, we just saw if you did a video before you get all that nice deep red, the redder it is, the hotter it is, burn on a whole house fan and you could watch red fade, fade, fade, fade and go down into... Yellow, green and blue, exactly. And again, the temperature, well, give us a hypothetical, a best case hypothetical, as you walk into a really hot home. Typically, we have a beach, we see an attic temperature of about 125 degrees and that can be 45 degrees warmer than the outside ambient air. The worst offender is if you've got an air conditioner in that attic as well, it's trying to work extra hard to keep the home cool, but it's working in a super hot environment. So by brewing an air that's say 80 degrees, I mean, even a hot day in have a beach 90 degrees, it's still relatively, sometimes what folks will tell us is that they think they've got to cool their air down to 70 or 65 to make themselves cool, but folks find that if they can get the air temperature down from 90 back to 85, it just creates a lot of relief in the home and so that's the goal there, bring it down, cool that home, cool the inside of the home, push that hot, hot air out and so you're cooling down the attic by 40 something degrees, you're cooling the inside of the home by 25 degrees or more and overall saving energy as you do it. And don't forget the air movement. Yes, yes. And then another physics law is called latent heat where the heat like can strike something and then embed itself, say pieces of furniture by a plate glass window. That couch right there is gonna be hotter than the blazes. And so this air movement is gonna pull that heat out of the couch or whatever it is. Absolutely. I know one of your passions is cool walls and I have found that of course, we get a lot of heat in the wintertime on our walls because the sun is lower on the horizon so it may be below the protection of our roof for longer ironically than it would be in the summertime when the sun is directly overhead. So by having the windows open, keeping the air flow going through the home, it can lead to a cooler wall than having it closed up with the windows closed. And let's look at the next slide please. Yeah, so this is exactly what we're talking about with the latent heat. By ventilating the home 15 to 20 times or more air exchanges per hour using free cooler air, we can just draw that heat out of the mass of the home. Now it is important to have enough air exchanges in the home that you can actually lower the air temperature. That's for example why a bathroom fan doesn't cool down a bathroom, it just ventilates it because it's not moving enough volume of air to actually lower the air temperature. I guess the function of a bathroom fan is get the moisture out. Moisture and smells, yeah. And whereas these are designed for cooling so they move a much higher volume of air. And that's important. You have to have enough air flow through the home. Our quiet cool systems have multiple speeds and we do have folks tell us it's always better to have more air flow going through a home than less air flow. But of course with the speed you're gonna be using more and more electricity. I think you said that the lowest speed might be 120 volts and then 240 and... Yes and 400. So there is a trade-off and that's part of our job is we'll work with the homeowner to explain to them the different options in terms of energy efficiency and also lifestyle. For example, if it's a small home and just mom and dad are at home nowadays, maybe one in the hallway, a large, what we call a central system might do the trick. There's a lot of folks, a growing family having a unit in each room configured that way so each person could have an option to control their own space. Oh, they've got their own little switch. Exactly, it's a great option for homes because one of the things, because the system creates air flow from the window to the intake, which is usually placed by the door, you can actually close the door in your bedroom and continue to get air flow through in a way that's super efficient and you don't have to have the door open all the time so people have privacy. You have your own environment plus privacy. And for a bedroom you're looking at about 60 to 70 watts of energy per hour so a light bulb, an old light bulb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Worth of energy. Wow, so let's look at the next slide here. Yeah, so folks will use the quiet cool systems, they're a whole house fans, in the evening especially to cool the mass of the home. If you get back after dark, that's the perfect time to run the quiet cool system because that sun is no longer there, the air temperature is cooling, bringing that fresh air in helps homes even with air conditioning to not have to cycle that AC on and off all night. With that air flow, that heat removed from the home, the AC can go on later or it doesn't have to go on at all. And do you have some fans where you can choose your speed? Correct, yes. So why not set, when you leave the home in the morning, why not set at the lowest setting? Absolutely. And just have that air circulating all day long. In the same way that we crack our windows to keep the air flow from getting real hot inside our homes, the quiet cool system, especially for folks who have pets or children at home, it's a great idea to leave something on the low setting during the day to keep that air flow going through. Some of our biggest savings are from folks who are running air conditioning to keep their pets cool during the day while they're at work. Switch to a whole house fan system and not only do you have cool pets, but also it takes out a lot of that dog odor or pet odor too that tends to accumulate when you've got all your windows closed. Yeah, especially if a dog hasn't had a bath in a house. There's actually a couple of boarding kennels and animal hospitals that have chosen this system not because of the energy savings, but well, that's part of it, but also because it helps the whole facility to stay a lot fresher as well. You can imagine what it's like having a lot of pets and keeping all the windows closed. I hasn't thought of that, yeah. Wow. And because Quiet Cool works, these whole house fans work with open windows, homes in older homes, homeowners with older homes, historic homes, found that it's oftentimes a better match than trying to change all the windows and bring everything up to where it can be refrigerated. There's a little bit of a cost factor there too. Yeah, it's just a lot. Because the original homes, a lot of them were designed in the era before air conditioning, so you can use that sort of older style of natural ventilation. It just fits really well. Yeah, I live in an older home myself and there's all kinds of window space and there's big overhangs to keep the walls treated. And a lot of glass there. Hey, I think we've got one more slide maybe. Oh yes, so the great folks at Hawaii Energy. We've been partners now, we've been clean energy allies with them now for a number of years and they included this $75 energy rebate in their per system and it's a great way to help raise awareness of the energy saving aspects of the whole house. Now how does that rebate work? You install the system. So the system is installed. And then we actually give them the rebate application. Mostly filled in. They fill in their account information and mail it or complete it online. And about four to six weeks later they get a check back for the rebate. And it doesn't take a whole heck of a lot of paperwork. And it's great because even if you don't have any tax liability for seniors and folks like that, they can get that back. It's nice to get some money back from your utility. And we have one last slide before we say a do. Yeah, this is actually a study that I think you released but folks in naturally ventilated buildings can be comfortable at higher indoor temperatures. Again, referring to that thermal boredom that we were talking about earlier. If you are in AC all day in the office, a lot of folks say the last thing they wanna do is go back home to an air conditioned space. They wanna relax with natural air. And that's what the quiet cool whole house fan system allows them to do. And there's something called IAQ, Indoor Air Quality. Absolutely. And conditioned buildings, conditioned homes tend to accumulate very poor air quality not not all the time, some some of the time. Whereas here you're just bringing in some of the tourists there on the entire planet. Give thanks for that. We're just about to wrap up any hurting words of wisdom now. Well, no, thank you for having me on again. I think it's been a couple of years since I was last here and I really appreciate it. Helping to raise awareness of energy efficiency here in our state. And what we're trending toward is zero net energy home. Yes. Where you reduce the amount of energy you're using and then have PV put a voltaics on the roof and you're producing up there as much as you're consuming down there. Yes, yes. And whole house fans would really make a big contribution towards your achieving zero net energy. Absolutely. So thank you very much. That wraps up another cold green think tech Hawaii. Thank you so much Al. Thank you Al. Thank you for the enlightening. And back, see you back next time.