Location: Kahakuloa, Maui, Hawaii

Problem: The community’s water pumping system was insufficient to meet the residents’ needs

Outcome: RCAC staff realigned the pumping system to make it more efficient and also decreased costs

Kahakuloa is a village on the north side of West Maui, Hawaii. It is a small, isolated and picturesque community of about 100 residents, some of whom are direct descendants from the community’s original inhabitants and survive on an agricultural economy.

The Kahakuloa Acres Private Water Company in Maui supplies water to 80 connections. The system has two pressure boosting stations and zones. Since its inception, the system was designed such that almost all of the water was pumped to the top of the system and then allowed to gravitationally drain down to the rest of the system. During normal operations, two-thirds of the water demand was in the lower one-third of the pressure zone, making the system inefficient to meet the residents’ needs.

RCAC staff worked with the system contract operator to realign the system. Since then, the system only pumps water to where it is needed. The system now only pumps about one-third of the total water to the upper part of the system. The estimated savings to the system is about $20,000 per year in pumping costs.