Ace Glass Tinting - 1132 Bishop St Honolulu, HI 96813

The building

1132 Bishop Street is Bishop Place, a commercial tower on the street that carries most of downtown Honolulu's banking, legal and government tenancies. This page is about the working floors; our Bishop Place project page covers the arrival level.

The complaint every downtown tenant makes

It is always the same one, and it is worth stating precisely because the usual response makes it worse. The desks along the windows are too hot from mid-morning; the desks in the middle of the floor are too cold; and because the only control anybody has is a thermostat, the whole floor gets driven down to fix one row. The building then pays to overcool a core that was never warm in order to make a perimeter habitable.

The reason is that a curtain-walled floor plate has two completely different thermal conditions in it. The interior is a stable box heated only by people and equipment. The perimeter is a strip a few meters deep whose load swings with the sun and can several times exceed everything else on the floor, arriving through glazing that typically makes up most of the wall.

Glare is the other half. Screens sit facing or backing onto glass because that is how offices get laid out, and once the sun is on that elevation the blinds go down. In practice they go down and stay down, and the building spends the rest of the lease lighting artificially a floor that was designed around daylight, with the view the rent was set on hidden behind a slat.

What window film does about it

Film reduces the solar heat gain through the glazing, which is the load driving the perimeter. Take that away and the terminal units at the window stop calling for cooling continuously, the floor can be balanced sensibly, and the core stops being refrigerated to compensate. It also cuts transmitted glare enough that blinds go back up, which is a change occupants notice on the first afternoon.

The reason it gets specified in occupied towers rather than any of the alternatives is disruption. Reglazing means scaffold, permits and empty floors. Adding shading changes an elevation that a landlord may not be free to change. Film is applied to the inside of the existing glass, floor by floor, out of hours, with no access to ceilings, no ductwork and nothing left behind but the glass looking slightly cleaner.

The honest caveat is that the size of the gain depends entirely on what is there now. On older clear single glazing the difference is large. On modern high-performance units that already carry a low-emissivity coating it is much smaller, and we would rather measure the existing glass and tell you that than sell you a film that changes very little.

The other thing to check on an older tower is whether the glazing has been filmed before. Downtown Honolulu has plenty of buildings still carrying dyed film from twenty years ago that has gone purple, hazed or begun to lift at the edges, and it is doing very little now beyond making the elevation look tired. That has to come off before anything new goes on, and the removal is frequently the larger part of the job.

We survey commercial glazing across Honolulu at no charge. See our commercial work or request a quote.