marketing. A whiff of new air – cool, filtered and even!

When the stately Oberoi Hotel reopened in Delhi after a multimillion-dollar renovation, one of the things it pitched as its USP was filtered, purified cool air. The HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) system, according to a spokesperson, “was nothing like the industry had seen ever before”.

Meet Vipin Agrawal, Director, System Air-Conditioning business, Samsung India, and he points to how the air is changing inside homes, hospitals and especially in hotels. “Earlier air-conditioning in a hotel was only about cooling. Now we are talking treated, pre-cooled, pre-filtered fresh air. In terms of expectations from air-conditioning, everyone wants personalised comfort.”

Imagine a scenario where you check into a hotel room, and find that the air-conditioning is at the exact temperature of your choice. No more fiddling with remotes or controls! “Typically most hotels have controls which work when you are in the room. But now some hotels that are learning customer preferences – especially of frequent guests – also have controls from outside and adjust it to the guest’s liking even before they enter the room.”

Agarwal says Samsung’s HVAC units can integrate with any intelligent building management system that the hotel uses. “If they want, we also have a platform where we can keep collecting data on guest preferences,” he says.

Energy equation

Even as hoteliers focus on offering personalised comfort, saving energy and cutting operating costs are big concerns. Over 70-80 per cent of the hotels are now going for VRF (variant refrigerant flow) air-conditioning solutions, says Agarwal. Unlike traditional HVAC systems that have a single unit indoors and single outdoors, in VRF there are multiple units indoors connected to a single outdoor unit and the refrigerant flow can be controlled in rooms that are empty. These products have compressors that work at variable frequency and deliver different capacities. Thus energy savings can range from 30 to 60 per cent.

While VRF has now become ubiquitous (it’s nearly $200 million of the estimated total $2 billion HVAC market), Samsung this year unveiled a wind-free solution to raise the energy-saving quotient further as well as increase comfort. How the system works: Suppose you want the room to be cooled to 23 degrees. The AC unit will fast-cool it to that temperature and then when the desired temperature is achieved, it switches to wind-free mode. The main flaps close and the air comes from 21,000 micro holes in the unit. “This will ensure the air is diffused evenly and is not hitting people in the face with one direct blast. Air velocity is drastically low,” says Agarwal, describing how it is a common complaint in offices and homes that some people feel cold and others warm. “That’s because the blast is hitting on one side.” The Wind-Free System diffuses air better and can also connect on to Samsung’s Smart Home App.

Splitting with splits

Hoteliers particularly conscious of aesthetics are now moving away from split ACs, says Agarwal. “In split ACs half the wall ends up being dedicated to air-conditioning. There is refrigerant piping inside the wall travelling all over,” he points out. The industry has come up with cassette ACs which are on the ceiling. Here the refrigerant pipe does not cross the wall but is laid into the ceiling between the false ceiling and roof. “The condensate water goes with gravity so there are no chances of leaks as happens with split ACs,” says Agrawal.

Though priced at a premium, the cassette ACs – especially the circular ones – lead to much better interiors and cooling. If fitted with the Wind-Free technology the diffusion is even as well.

Unique demands

Are there any unique demands Samsung gets from hoteliers? Agarwal says preserving upholstery and furnishings is a big consideration for the hospitality industry. To maintain these, the rooms have to be kept at a certain temperature. Typically, when a guest leaves the room, and takes out the key, the AC stops working. But nowadays there are controls available with the hotelier to keep the AC working in these rooms at 29 degrees.

Hoteliers also want to subtly check the behaviour of guests who have a tendency to switch the AC to 16 degrees, which guzzles power. So there are requests to lock the ACs at a particular temperature. “As a society we have to become conscious of global warming,” says Agarwal.

But an interesting demand, says Agarwal, came from Leh, where a hotelier wanted some rooms heated and some cooled. In Ladakh, the sun-facing rooms tend to get warm while the others tend to get cold. “Samsung came up with a central cooling system that would provide heating to some rooms while cooling another set. We also have a product that gives heating in minus 25 degree Celsius, suitable for places like Leh,” says Agrawal.

When you check into a hotel next, spare a minute to think of how much science goes into air-conditioning!

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