Owners were shocked by the $29M - $34M estimate given by the Board for replacing the Hokulani and Konea tower AC systems. As late as 2023 the projected replacement cost was under $5M according to HKCA reserve studies. How did this cost then increase 7X in just 2 years to an amount which exceeds HKCA's fully funded reserve budget of $26M and is this cost even necessary? Before you fork over a $50,000 special assessment check, you owe it to yourself to understand the facts rather than simply taking the Board's word for it.
How does our AC system work?
If you have central AC in your home then this is basically a big version of it. Outside of your home is a condensor unit which releases heat from the refrigerant into the surrounding air through coils and a big fan. There are two pipes which recirculate refrigerant between the outdoor condenser and the indoor fan coil unit (FCU) in your unit: one for cooled compressed liquid and the other for heated gaseous refrigerant.
The FCU has a valve which releases the liquid refrigerant into the coils which cools the unit's air which the fan blows through it. The absorption of heat changes the refrigerant to its gas form which is returned to the condenser. One rooftop condenser unit can service about 8 FCUs so there are about 90 on the roof the towers. Units have 1 FCU per bedroom.
So how could something so seemingly simple cost $30M to fix? Answer is that the Board is not proposing to fix it, they are entirely replacing it with a new system which does the same thing but in an incompatible way. The current system is Samsung and the Board is following a recommendation to switch to Mitsubishi even though it is far more expensive and worse yet requires extensive re-piping work which means demotion work in your unit.
However, if we stay with Samsung, then the existing piping can be retained which the project would be far less costly and most importantly, your unit will be out of service for days rather than weeks.
Furthermore, owners have not been told the truth about the current state of the AC system. While the Board has warned owners that it is on its last legs, this is not the case and it is fully operational and capable of being maintained for many more years. While there have been reports of leaks, this has not been out of the ordinary for a system of its age.
The issue is that Samsung no longer makes the same replacement parts so we are not able to obtain them commercially. However, we are able to upgrade our system to Samsung's current generation while using the same piping. Although this requires replacing the rooftop condenser and FCUs in the unit, it allows the piping to be reused and that is where most of the cost and downtime lies.
So why would the Board choose the most expensive and impractical option? That's a good question and it has to do with two things: (1) how the Board makes decisions and (2) how business is done on Hawaii.