If you're building a hotel in a warm area, you need to think about cooling. Ideally, you may want to integrate some elements that will help to cool your hotel naturally, such as wide rooms where two windows can be opened to create a cross breeze, awnings to provide shade and greenery around the hotel to interrupt the heat island effect.

On top of that, however, you also need to implement additional cooling. Here are some questions to consider.

Do You Want Individual Air Conditioning Units or a Chilled Water System?

You can put an individual air conditioning unit in each room, but that takes a lot of electricity. As a result, you will either need to roll those costs into your rates or let your profit margin suffer.

To save on costs, you may want to opt for a chilled water system. A chilled water system runs cold water through the building. When guests want to cool their rooms, they turn on a blower which draws air from around pre-insulated pipes and that brings cold air into the guests' room.

How Are You Going to Get Your Water?

If you decide upon a chilled water system, you need to figure out where you are going to get your water. Some people simply get water piped in from the municipal water supply. Others "create" their own water using a condenser. This basically pulls water from the air. It means you have to buy more equipment, but you don't have to pay for water.

Where Are You Going to Store the Water?

Regardless of where you get the water from, you need to store it. This usually involves a large insulated tank. You can put this behind your building if you have space there. If you are trying to minimise the footprint of your building for any reason, you may want to put this tank on the roof.

However, that requires you to strengthen your roof so that it can hold the water tanks. If you also plan to put other utilities up there, you need to make sure there is room for everything.

How Will You Support the Chiller?

Finally, you may want to think about how you will support the role of the chiller in your hotel. Chillers are designed to work well in spaces where you need to keep different rooms at different temps. However, you may also want to put lots of insulation between the rooms. That way, if one person is using the chilled air, it won't make the room next to them unnecessarily cold and vice versa.