Heat­ing, Ven­ti­la­tion and Air Con­di­tion­ing. You wouldn’t think there would be much heat­ing in Hawaii and you would be right. Only a few projects up in the moun­tains (Mauka) require heat­ing. How­ever, we often need to reheat sup­ply air to spaces. This is because we have cooled the air to remove excess humid­ity and now must heat it back up to pre­vent mak­ing spaces too cold. This seem­ingly energy waste­ful process is com­mon and nec­es­sary in Hawaii’s humid cli­mate in order to pre­vent mois­ture related prop­erty dam­age and asso­ci­ated mold issues.

Even the rel­a­tively sim­ple topic of ven­ti­la­tion design is dif­fer­ent in a hot and humid cli­mate as com­pared to other areas. One of the pri­mary pur­poses of ven­ti­la­tion is dilute and exhaust con­t­a­m­i­nants from an occu­pied space, replac­ing the air with fresh out­side air. How­ever, accord­ing to the EPA, the main con­t­a­m­i­nant in res­i­den­tial occu­pan­cies is exces­sive mois­ture. In Hawaii, there is almost always more mois­ture in the fresh air than in the air being removed, con­trary to con­di­tions elsewhere.

Both of these issues demon­strate that it is crit­i­cal to design for the unique con­di­tions in Hawaii. It is not pos­si­ble to dupli­cate designs or prac­tices from main­land projects with­out address­ing our unique cli­mate, mois­ture and humid­ity con­trol and siz­ing equip­ment prop­erly for a hot and humid climate.