The 13-story Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay hotel is located inside a 35-acre nature preserve just outside downtown Tampa, Florida. Recently, a $16 million dollar renovation was completed, ensuring the Grand Hyatt’s reputation for being one of Tampa’s premiere luxury hotels.
The Challenge:
ATS Waypoint was given a challenge by Stewart Engineering Consultants Ltd. of Sarasota, Florida, and the owner, UBS; provide the hotel occupants with complete temperature control of their rooms while still maintaining humidity control in all 400 rooms without using supplemental heat.
The Hyatt was having difficulty with providing a completely hypoallergenic sleeping environment due to elevated humidity levels.
The tropical environment on the West Coast of Florida can overtax most BMS systems. Hotels always present an added complexity by needing to satisfy the hundreds of different environmental needs for each guest room independently while still maintaining overall control of the building’s central systems and reducing overall energy expenses as much as possible.
With a yearly average of 74% relative humidity, traditionally, the only option was a reheat dehumidification system.
While effective, the energy cost is prohibitive through over-cooling and then reheating air back to the user’s setpoint rather than simply being able to control the temperature directly. There had to be a better way.
The Solution:
A two-part plan was implemented to deal with each room individually as well as centrally dehumidify at the main rooftop air handlers. In the guest rooms, the fan coil cooling coils were replaced, allowing more capacity to remove more moisture, while new HPT heat pipe systems were added to the existing air handling units. ATS provided a complete control package, including modulating chilled water valves and humidity sensing via Delta’s DNS-H24 space sensors, DAC-322 controllers installed in each room’s fan coil unit, and eBCON modular controllers within the central plant. All hardware comes back to a new ORCAview operator workstation located in the facilities, complete with a dynamic 3D graphic package.
The Benefits:
Simply being able to enter a guest room without feeling moisture in the soft furnishings was, of course the primary goal. What was delivered exceeded this goal by a wide margin.
$37,000 will be saved yearly. Even when the humidity is above 75% and temperatures are soaring, the guest rooms at the Grand Hyatt are always a comfortable 60% RH. The only way this could be achieved is through the new control strategy implemented by ATS.
One of the key selling features for Grand Hyatt hotels is their PURE – Hypoallergenic Rooms. Through PURE’s filtration processes coupled with ATS’s complete BMS control package, 99% of pollutants are removed from the guest rooms and can provide the highest air quality to their guests. Without the ability to control the humidity within the guest rooms, there is no way that the hotel would be able to achieve the high standards that PURE sets out.
The Results:
From the first three test rooms, ATS has been granted the guest rooms and all ongoing renovation phases throughout the facility and associated private suites. The next phases of the Tampa Grand Hyatt will be common areas and conference room air handlers. From there, work has also been scheduled for extensive BMS renovations at the neighboring Bayport Plaza.
By the numbers, this has been an astonishing success:
- 464,000 Kilowatt hours saved each year
- $37,000 in yearly savings
- 110-ton reduction in CO2 emissions
- 3.5-year ROI
