 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to Code Green, one of the longest running shows on this network here. And our veteran showmaster, Howard Wigg, is out and about to basically spread the word of green. And so we're broadcasting live from Honolulu, Hawaii here and we're driven by the military, nevermind, but by tourism as well, that much. And we're gonna have to talk about the 70,000 and more guestrooms we have on the island and how we can innovate them in the sense of the show. And for that, we got the perfect experts here today from Hawaii Energy Systems. We got Arsena Kairi Hiva. And we got Hui Nguyen here. Thank you guys for being here, much appreciated. Thank you, Martin, thanks for having us. And if we can get the third slide, because Arsena, you're gonna tell us a little bit about your company, right? Right, yes, so Hawaii Energy Systems actually has been around since 2006. We serve Hawaii, Guam, and Pacific Islands. We just celebrated our 12-year anniversary. We have offices here on Oahu, on the Big Island, Maui, and Guam. We doubled in size in the last two years. We're up to 49 employees. We are a turnkey electrical and mechanical and low-voltage systems contractor in Hawaii and Guam. But more importantly, we don't only install, we have a 24-7 service and technical support, which is huge in Hawaii, because a lot of people like to install and then they have a certain service on the mainland. So we are local. We do have a 24-7. And also, everybody gets us mixed up with Hawaii Energy, but we also are a clean energy ally with Hawaii Energy. So what that means is that we can do energy calculation, savings, and rebates for our clients. And that actually gets added to their project. So the ROI means better ROIs for our clients. Very good, very good. And also, one last thing is we just recently this year, we became INCOM's automated system integrator. Like you mentioned, there's 70,000 of those thermostats. And 70%, around 70% is INCOM. So that's a huge thing for us. And so they just came out with a new E7, which we is going to talk about. Yeah. New E7 thermostat. Yeah. And when we go to the next slide, please, this is, I think, for me, because in my other life, when I'm not the deputy of Howard here, I'm an architect and also a coach and architecture up at UAH. So that's stuff I can understand, an exonometric diagram here. But also, at this point, I want to confess because most people know me from another show, which is my own show, which is tomorrow, every Tuesday. And that's called Human Humane Architecture. And behind that is that my belief is coming from Germany and having gone through the Midwest and Arizona, that this is the place I believe to be because the thermal comfort of the natural environment is so close to the one where we try to artificially control everywhere else. And if not here, so I have this little story for when I came here some six years ago, they put me up in the Alamona Hotel. And I got into the pretty generic hotel room and I saw that thermostat thing we're talking about. And it said 75 or something like that. And I felt like, oh, this is like how it must have felt outside. So I opened that sliding door and I said, count me in and ever since I'm on that mission and have my own self-experiment and I live like that. So, and initially I thought there would be a conflict of interest between that, but there actually isn't. So explain a little bit why, but along the lines also what that diagrams and walk us through the hotel room, please. Yeah, so thank you for having us on the show. So Mark, when you were in that room, when you slid that the nine door open, that room was air conditioned to 75 degrees, like you said, might've been 82 degrees or 84 degrees outside or whatever it was that day. So all that air conditioning just rushed out of that room and it might've been for two minutes, might've been five minutes or you could've left the room, for six hours. No, it was the whole night in my case. Yeah, so you might've slept with it open. Yeah, it marked. Yes. And so our system here, it's a smart guest room thermostat. What it does is automatically detects when someone opens the nine door and it turns off the air conditioning system so you're not blowing cold air outside, just air conditioning outside air. So this diagram that you see here, it's a typical guest room, maybe a little bit bigger than most of us used to, but just to show all the components, we put in a pretty large guest room here as an example. So the central piece of this guest room is the thermostat. So it's on this screen here, it's on the left side of the screen. So what we're showing here is a guest room with a separate bedroom and a separate bathroom with a lanai door. And there's several devices that are connected wirelessly to the thermostat here. And so when you opened up that lanai door, there's a magnetic door switch contact that opens when you slide the door open and that thermostat detects that and it shuts off the air conditioning that way you're not wasting energy while the door is open. There's several other things on the screen. On the bottom left corner of the screen, there's also a front door switch. And so what that's detecting for is when a guest either enters or leaves the guest room. And so it goes through an algorithm when a guest leaves the room. And so as a door switch opens there, it's also a magnetic door sensor. The hospitality thermostat that's shown there is scanning for occupancy. On this thermostat, it has a PIR sensor which is proximity and infrared. When someone leaves, there's a sensor that thermostat's looking for and if it doesn't detect movement, it knows the guest has left. And there's no reason to keep the air conditioning cold at 68 degrees or whatever it is. So we'll do a temperature setback. Set it back to 78 degrees, which is all configurable. And then we'll save a bunch of energy by doing that. You imagine half the hotel guests are out and about going to restaurants, enjoying beaches. No reason to air condition to 72 degrees. And that's part of the strategy. And then when someone enters the room, the motion sensor will automatically pick that up and it will air condition the space. Several other things that are on the screen. There's some remote occupancy sensor in case you have multiple rooms like you do heavier. Some small guest rooms, you just rely on the one that's on the thermostat. We can also control plug loads, TVs, light switches, and little mini bars and refrigerators can all be connected to this as well, so. And then on top of that, you can actually network all these thermostats together and have them come back to a central server. There's some additional energy savings with that. So when the room is occupied and booked, we can go into different set points and when it's not occupied, we can go into a deeper setback and we could talk about a little bit later. I'll have a different slide for that. But what we've seen with these systems, it saves a bunch of energy, Hawaii energy, the rebate people, not Hawaii energy systems. Hawaii energy, they rebate this project $75 per guest room. So you can imagine a pretty medium-sized hotel has 400 guest rooms. It's a pretty big rebate that Hawaii energy subsidizes project because they know it saves energy and it's a big part of the energy consumption for the state of Hawaii are these 70,000 guest rooms that we have. Having the intelligence, it's not only saves energy, but it improves the guest experience that you've seen some of the hotel rooms where they have the smart card where they remove a card to engage the air-conditioned system. Not very fun for the guests to do something like that. This is automatic. You don't have to have human interaction, right? Exactly. So it's very smart. It has artificial intelligence, there's analytics involved in it that continuously saves energy and makes sure it saves energy that was initially designed for it. It has alerts and alarms and it's a very robust system that can save millions and millions of dollars for the state of Hawaii and all the hotel rooms that are here. No, sounds like a clever idea. Way back to my temperate upbringing and temperate climate, we designed a school around the millennium that was for disabled children and basically we did the similar thing with heating as we connected the windows to a sensor that would sense when a kid or a teacher would open the window and the window time with a good intention to bring the fresh air in, but at the same time they were wasting the energy out of the window, right? And it also shut the furnace off in that case. So it's pretty much the same kind of technology just in a different climate here. Yeah, exactly. Instead of heating, it's air conditioning. And I mean, in Germany you will eventually would probably freeze to death in your room, right? But here, not so much. So here it's way more problematic, I guess, that we don't even realize when we are wasting energy, right? Yeah, so you're right, in Germany you'll know when something like that is coming out because there's bigger consequences than energy, but to me energy is a very big problem to have and this type of technology that we apply to guest rooms really addresses that. And something a lot of people ignore, a lot of hotel rooms and a lot of facilities ignores is the amount of energy that these guest rooms are consuming. And the architect in me cannot get around pointing out another point here, which is basically aesthetics and beauty for that. Maybe, Arsena, you wanna talk about we can bring up the next slide, but I think even better if the camera could go to studio because you guys kindly brought a sample and that's not just a dead sample, this is not like a printed on there, it's actually plugged in. So we're knowing what a comfortable temperature we have in the room right now, right? And you wanna explain a little bit. That's an interactive problem. What we see behind the pretty surface, which I'm pointing out because an architect always also judges by the look and I have to say there must have been some designer who was not trying to overemphasize this device but keeping it pretty lean and clean and sort of the display is flush and everything looks like in cool cars of these days. So, but what's probably more, we wouldn't talk more about the core values. And so what do we see, which buttons do we see and what maybe more importantly, what don't we see and what's all in there in that device? So you wanna address that? Oh, sorry. And you can also grab this one. Yeah, I was just sure if I was gonna... You even brought another one, so we got plenty of them. All right, so obviously there's different guests from different countries coming to visit, so Fahrenheit or Celsius, right? I can operate it too, I suppose. Right, see? So that's always important, but with it being smart, hopefully they'll know that ahead of time, right? If a guest actually requests, then that's something that they can have that already set up on the different fan speeds. But again, what we don't want is them touching this, right? So, and then obviously the temperature's up and down, but most of this would be preset. So we want it to look pretty, but other than it going down or up, we really don't want them to start touching set modes. But that's pretty much it. It's very simple, we wanna keep it simple. It's very user-friendly, right? All the built-in, the modes and everything would be on, so there's no reason to turn it off or anything other than that, but that's pretty much it, it's very simple. There's screens that turn on, but again, they're just turning on the temperature or any mode that they're actually getting into, which the, like I said, the client, I mean the client, but the guests shouldn't even be seeing those, right? They shouldn't even be bothered with that. So yeah, that's pretty much it. I mean, most guests already do just the lower and higher-ing of the temperature, right? Or the fan, the fan. Yeah, so there's, yeah, so like Arsene said, the simplicity of it, really architecturally clean-looking thermostat, the horsepower and technology behind it is pretty advanced. So there's a built-in temperature sensor, obviously, it's sensing for temperature. There's a built-in humidity sensor in here, comes with standard with every thermostat, so when the guest checks out, you don't need to air-condition to temperature anymore, but you still need to keep low humidity levels, and so there's a built-in humidity sensor in here that can do that. There's a PIR sensor that's kind of right here, it's really hard to see in the camera, but that's proximity infrared sensor. And then the neat thing about this new thermostat, so this is the, I don't know if you see this on the camera, so this is the back plate here, this is the thermostat here, so when this thermostat, for whatever reason, fails, it gets damaged by a guest, or someone moving luggage and it damages it. You take this faceplate off, all the configuration values are still left on this back plate, and so the maintenance, all they have to do is take this thermostat off the wall, pop a new one back on, and all the features are saved, and the configuration is saved here, and now you have a brand new working thermostat with all the old settings still, knows which room it's in, knows which sensors it's tied to, and you don't have to go through and reprogram this thermostat again, so. Awesome. But now it's actually down, when the thermostat's down, that whole room is down. So that's, it's having to change them out and just income coming in is down, so it's really quick now, 15 minutes versus, I don't know how many hours to rewire. Yeah, I mean. All right, we're gonna halt this thought just for a minute, that we do a little infotainment break here, and then we're gonna be back with Arsena and Huey to talk about these amazing savings, super smart for our 70,000 guest rooms. Foundation for a better life. Hey, we're back with Arsena and Huey from Hawaii Energy Systems to talk about their super smart device, and before the break, when you were talking about that smartness, that the information is basically in the frame, that reminds me of my car radio that I have in my convertible, so no one steals the thing, you can clip off the front one, put it in the glove box, and all the information, and even the CD is behind, right? So I think it's sort of pulling. Even the display reminds me of the new dashboards and cars where everything is flush and clean. But the thing can do much more, and so it can network. You already made an indication about that, so for that, can we get the next slide, please? And you tell us more about what it can all network. Sure. So the guest room thermostat has a built-in ZigBee radio, so it can communicate to each thermostat, to the adjacent room, and that builds a network that goes back to a central router. So that central router can come back down to a server. That's kind of what you're seeing in this slide here, is a server. So that server brings in all kinds of information. The sensors that are communicating to the thermostats, a lot of them are battery powered, so they'll tell you which systems have a battery that's out or running low. So that's the worst thing with some of these smart thermostats, and when you have a battery that goes out and no one's really watching it, you end up not having a very smart thermostat if your sensors aren't working. So that's one of the things the analysts can do for you. So kind of the main screen that's up on front, you see like a high-rise building, a hotel. There's some green rooms, some red rooms, orange rooms, some yellow rooms. So all those have different color codes. So a red room might be a room that's having trouble keeping up with air conditioning. It could be a broken air conditioning system. It could be a filter that needs to be changed. So all that information can be trended and brought to a attention to a facility owner or a building manager. So they need to start repairing things and maintaining the system. And then there's all kinds of different analytics this can do. It's a little bit advanced. So this is sensing whether the guest is, how often the guest is leaving, how often the guest is in the room and for how many hours, are they waking up in the middle of the night, every night? All that information is available now using big data, right? We're talking about big data and analytics behind it. So this can tell you that a certain room, the guest is waking up every day at 2 a.m. And for whatever reason, every day at Thursday on a 2 a.m., that person wakes up. And you go back and find out why that's happening. It might be a laundry machine that kicks up at 2 a.m. every day and is waking up the guest. And so that type of analytics really increases the value of just a smart guest from thermostat everywhere. It just saves energy. Now you're doing analytics and finding out some problem spots and really improving your guest's comfort. You explained this to me in a very sort of simple and easy to understand way that you said maintenance was usually, whenever we, you know, human beings think we're smart, we invent technology, it's gonna break at some point, right? So mostly we recognize that when it's already broken. So we call this reactive maintenance. We say, oh, something with our car, or it breaks down and we got to go to the shop. For a little smarter, we do basically proactive maintenance, which is I do my service intervals, right? But they might not, you know, be timely enough as well because who knows when the timing chain is gonna break. You know, that might be between the intervals. So your system is once again with cars where you can sort of plug in and have the electronics at the sensors basically figure out, you know, which parts at what point and whatnot. Right, so yeah, I would call that like a third level of maintenance, right? So you have your reactive maintenance, which is my brakes are broken. I need to fix my brakes. So you're not driving for two weeks while you're having that scheduled. Preventing maintenance, like you said, you check your oil every 3,000 miles and that might be good enough, it might be too much, but you're preventing it from breaking. The third level of maintenance that you're referring to, I like to call predictive maintenance, right? So now you're not changing your, you know, air filter every 10,000 miles, like they would suggest. You're doing it when you need it, right? It might be 7,000 miles, might be 12,000 miles. So the type of analytics this device is collecting gives you that it tells you your filter needs to be replaced or your air condition system needs to be maintained or something's wrong with the room door switch or whatever it is. It takes you to another level of maintenance that now you're predicting failures before they happen and not over doing maintenance, I guess. Not over or under, right? And that is also being very resourceful, right? Because you're not wasting intervals and throwing out parts that could easily, you know. Exactly. Be in there and stay for a little longer. So that's pretty clever. Yeah, yeah, so that's... It's smarter and smarter. Yeah, I mean, it's with all this data, because this is collecting all that data, I mean, should do something with that data, right? It's a little master of mind. Yeah. It's smarter than the people in the space of time. Yeah, so it's like we were talking about earlier, there's really not many functions that guests can have. You know, it's detecting all this for you. There's a lot of future built into this. It's future proof. We talked about it a little bit earlier before the show. It has a Bluetooth beacon inside of it, so you can interact with your thermostat with your phone. There's things coming out with Alexa, so now you can speak to your thermostat, you can order, you know, pizza or have guests reservations or, you know. Yeah, you need to bring... We have her sitting here, so we might... Yeah, so you have Alexa there. And so there's Alexa integration. They currently have door lock integration, so you get those apps that open hotel guest rooms that they can integrate with this as well. So a lot of that's already been used today. Some of that is built into this already for the future, is that Bluetooth function. Amazing, amazing. And since we were mouth watering the audience with that spectacular, catchy title of these super savings, right? Probably the audience wants to know what are we talking about quantitatively, right? Sure. And so do we want to maybe bring up the concluding and final slide for that? There it is. But go in more depth of what all these dollars mean and where they come from. Sure, so the strategy we talked about where we have occupant sensors and front door sensors and lanai doors sensors, all those things amounts to reducing energy costs by turning off air conditioning systems. So what does that amount to? Typically 15 to 25% per room. And so that's just the amount of energy consumed in that room. So that's the lighting, that's the air conditioning system. And then property wide, there's a chiller usually a central air conditioning system. And that's 10% property wide. So you can imagine a lot of the properties we've worked with, they have energy bills upwards of four or five, $6 million a year. Saving 10%, that's not a small amount of money. So we're talking about a product with 70,000 guest rooms in Hawaii that can save millions and millions of dollars a year for the state of Hawaii. And that's a lot of that's from HECO, that's foreign oil and all kinds of things that come along with that. So a lot of environmental impact as well. So we're looking at about two to three year payback for a product like this. And in all fairness and also sort of in favor of your product, you said about more than half of the hotel rooms are already equipped with the technology but an older version, right? But you also said there is a problem with these ones, right? You wanna address that? Yeah, so this is the E7 that we're looking at here. And there's a couple other varieties that are out there. About half the hotel rooms already have something like this. It's a smart guest room thermostat. What we've seen is a lot of these thermostats are not properly maintained. So we have batteries for sensors that don't work anymore. And so they have a lot of these, the older ones that you saw on the previous slide, there's an ox sensor that's in there that's been pushed in. People think it's a camera or something, they damage it. And so if that doesn't work anymore, you're not detecting for occupancy. And so it assumes that it's occupied if it's damaged. And so without knowing all that data we talked about earlier, a lot of these smart thermostats are not smart anymore. They're just running like a regular old thermostat running all the time. So that's a big energy consumers thermostats aren't working correctly. Definitely. And I'm sure this little appetizer wasn't enough for many people who wanna know more and who wanna see more. There's a current very attractive chance where people can meet you guys again over the next couple of days. Where and when is that? I've seen that. Yes, it's at the, please. That's all right. Wednesday with March 7th and 8th will be there all day. I think it's nine, I didn't get it. Yeah, so it's at the Hawaii Building Facilities and Property Management Expo. It's on this week. It's on the 7th and 8th. So that's Wednesday and Thursday. Yeah, it is on Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday and Thursday. We will be there, we'll have a booth. We'll be displaying this along with some of the other technologies that we have. We're system integrators. And so our primary role is applying a technology in ways to save energy. And this is one of the technologies we have. And we have, we'll have several others on display. So our C&I will both be at the booth this week. So come join us, come see us. Yes, check us out. Definitely. So thank you for getting to the end of the show. Thank you so much for having been here. I mean, this is refreshing until Martin gets his vision done that everyone lives easy breezy. And you guys maybe like BP is leading in PV because by the point there is no oil anymore, they want to just flip over and the switch and want to be leading. So maybe you guys go into other biochlametic devices in the future and use screens and stuff like that. And until then, you contribute in the notion of Howard's show here and now. Let's do it and equip all the rooms with that. And then Martin can have his easy breezy and it shuts off. It's just smart. Because of what is it, 2045, we promise to be off the grid. Right. That's great. This is a great step towards that. For sure. That's great. Right. Okay, thank you guys so much. Thank you. It was a pleasure to have you. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thanks for being with us on that mission of Code Green. And so I'll see you guys when Howard is back next week. Tune in again on Monday at 3 p.m. Here for Code Green. And until then, stay as green as Howard and Arsena and Huit. Bye.