Ace Glass Tinting - Valley of the Temples Memorial - 47-200 Kahekili Hwy Kaneohe, HI 96744

The setting

Valley of the Temples Memorial Park lies along Kahekili Highway in Kaneohe, on the windward side of Oahu, set into the base of the Koolau range.

Windward glass, which is a different problem

Kaneohe is twenty minutes over the pali from Honolulu and a genuinely different climate. The trades come in off the bay and hit the Koolau wall, so this is the wet side: frequent rain, high humidity, and cloud that sits on the ridge for days. People therefore assume glass is not an issue here. It is, for two reasons.

The first is that the sun comes up out of the ocean to the east with nothing whatever between it and the buildings. A low, direct morning sun goes straight into east-facing glass at exactly the hours when services are held and families are visiting.

The second is humidity. At eighty per cent relative humidity a room at seventy-eight degrees is uncomfortable in a way the same temperature in dry air is not, because the body cannot lose heat by evaporation. Solar gain through glass is what pushes a windward room over that line, and it does it in the morning rather than the afternoon.

There is a third requirement that is particular to a memorial park. It is a place where people need not to be looked at. Family rooms, the offices where arrangements are made and the chapels all sit in a landscape that is designed to be walked through, and clear glass at ground level offers no separation at all.

What window film does about it

For the heat and the glare the mechanism is the usual one: the film rejects the near-infrared band that carries roughly half the sun's energy and removes effectively all of the ultraviolet, while passing enough visible light that the rooms stay daylit.

For privacy it is worth being exact, because this is where film is most often oversold. A reflective privacy film works by making the brighter side into a mirror. That is the outside during the day, so it gives daytime privacy and an unobstructed view out. After dark, when the room is lit and the grounds are not, the effect reverses and the room becomes the visible side. Where privacy is needed at all hours the answer is a frosted or opaque film, which gives up the view in exchange for working at every hour. We will tell you which of those a given room needs rather than fitting the same product everywhere.

Durability is a fair question on this side of the island, where the humidity is high and rain is frequent. Film goes on the inside face, so weather never touches it; what shortens a film's life in Hawaii is ultraviolet acting on the film's own adhesive and dyes, which is why cheap dyed product turns purple and lifts within a few years here while a quality non-dyed film does not.

We work on memorial, temple and institutional buildings on both sides of Oahu. See our commercial and institutional work or request a quote.