Episode 356 ControlTalk NOW features a COVID-19 Pandemic Solution from Neptronic’s Luis Melgares. Resolute Building Intelligence’s CEO, Chris Hallendy says is all about Action and Answers!

Eric Stromquist
Hi, welcome to control talk now your Smart Buildings videocast and podcast week ending March 29 2020. This is Episode 356, where we talk about all things smart building controls and HVAC controls. And I gotta tell you, man, we’re going to talk today about a way our industry can help mitigate or maybe even eliminate the corona virus but before we do that, let me introduce your co host to mine the man the myth the legend, the one the only secret agent man, Kenny smiles and Kenny man I am so pumped up are one of our guests this week is going to share some stuff with us that I think it’d be absolutely huge.

Ken Smyers
Yeah, you know, it’s been playing, hiding in plain sight looks like for many years that you don’t really smell gars is going to we’re going to see him interview him shortly. But I mean the importance of humidity in public health now, especially in this pandemic crisis. This is remarkable information. This is Very important information this is going to be is going to drive a lot of people catch a lot of tension. And it’s very actionable. It tells you exactly what to do, how to do it, of course, Netronic being experts in humidity selling humidifiers, both the industrial level commercial level, I don’t really think they have a residential product line. But you certainly can take the information that we will provide here in a very short future and use it in your own personal life and your professional life. No, absolutely. And then Kenny, our second guest, man, I tell you what, he’s got a platform and a software that I think is going to revolutionize revolutionize how we do analytics. So exciting stuff. So stay tuned for the rest of the show. You’re not gonna want to miss this. Again, for our podcast listeners, you might want to go to Control trends.com and you might want to watch the video because it can be a lot of slides and a lot of very good visual information as well.

Eric Stromquist
So Kenny before we get to all the exciting stuff we got coming up, we have some exciting stuff happening this week on campus. trance

Ken Smyers
you have a good Eric, you know this a COVID 19 pandemic has basically redirected the way we do our daily lives and all the events. We know that if you remain in place you’re doing the best thing you can for yourself and your family and your co workers is if the virus is locked and not moved, then it can’t spread. And we need to be contributing our efforts and our thoughts help people that need it. But but if you don’t need to be moving around and socializing don’t because it, it’s been very convincing. The information that we have that you know, the virus will will die in place, it’ll die in that, you know, it’ll go and run its course in that person and not be spread on so. So what happened is it’s changed our scheduling. So the first big thing that we got is that the real calm IV con 2020 has been rescheduled. It was supposed to be there. April 1 through the fourth, it’s now going to be September one through the third 2020 in Miami. It’s the same location The Miami Convention Center is gonna be a marvelous event. Hopefully we’ll be all healed and ready to go. Because the one thing that we know for sure that the stimulus package that’s coming out is people going to be excited about getting back on track and getting back on track quickly and healing economically. And there’s going to be money that’s going to be infused into our HVC building automation world that can really really make that needle move that we always talk about getting into the small spaces but middle sized buildings and of course the large buildings but that’s the big mentioned a call for contributed articles to project haystack for their spring 2020. connections, magazines, project haystack still out there. You’re working it there. They’re looking for both contributions for the spring 2020 connections magazine and also sponsors. So there’s going to be a call for sponsors for a project haystack. We also have a copy trolls is coming out with a very interesting sponsor career day where why considered the building automation industry. This is going to be a webinar that’s April 2. 2021 Pm to 2pm Eastern Standard Time. But this is really neat because they also have taken from their point of view how we can attract more people into our career fields, which is a very necessary thing. And finally, we had a product release from Lake spring. They’re very excited about their new product announcement, the Genesis edge 534 4g LTE product.

Unknown Speaker
Very, very cool. Yeah. And just so you know, I did speak with Mark Pete talk a little bit earlier today. He’s doing fine, but like the rest of us work as we know, it is shifted. It’s a little bit different now. But Kenny, I tell you what, without further ado, I really think you talked about maybe the business opportunity the decade for the people in our industry that can absolutely help this pandemic. And to your point, I don’t know why this hadn’t come out sooner. But how about introducing Luis and let’s get this started.

Ken Smyers
I’d love to. Our first guest is Luis Melgaris, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Neptronicf Welcome to the show.Luis Thanks for taking a few minutes to speak with us, brother.

Luis Melgares
Good morning, Mr. Stromquist. How are you doing? And first of all, let me ask you a question. How’s your family, your friends and your core and your co workers going right now?

Unknown Speaker
Well, you know what it’s, it’s, you know, it’s it’s a little disconcerting, you know, they’ve closed the schools down. So I am a controls guy and a homeschool teacher and families doing great I have two small kids Evian axon and an adult child Brett and no, Britt’s doing great. The two small kids are doing great my wife and I are getting along thank goodness I’m kind of reminded of a thing I saw on Instagram which is okay, you’re going to be you’re going to be quarantine so here are your choices you can be quarantine with a your wife and children he goes be a mean I’ll take we take the exam. I think I’m really fortunate that that you know love my family. I got a great family but I you know, I can only imagine how horrible it would be to be sequestered with somebody.

Ken Smyers
Right. Okay. Well, thanks for asking Alicia. How are families doing? You know, we’re hanging in there. We’re doing good, you know? Knock on wood.

Unknown Speaker
So how about you, brother? how things going with you? Oh, we’re doing good. We’re doing good. Well, we’re holding the fort right now. So yeah, we’re dealing with that this. Well, I don’t think nobody was seeing it a few months ago, right. But, yeah, you got to do the utmost with what you want. It’s showing challenging times that you actually get to see the best in humans also. So I also keep that fake.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, brother. Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on always because, you know, you you and Neff. tronics have done some research and actually, I think the HPC and smart building controls industry has the opportunity to really help had this had this coronavirus off so I understand you gotta have a presentation to be able to show us today so if you don’t mind how about showing us your screen and, and appreciate you educating us on this good.

Unknown Speaker
So as perhaps a lot of people may know, some people don’t have time. For we have actually five different divisions in our company. As a matter of fact, we can divide them in three, one of them probably is very well known, which is the on the equipment side dehumidifiers section, but most of our community most likely knows us much more for the control side. So what we actually did is that we actually started looking and we actually started this, this, this research, I would say, probably about four months ago, out of pure curiosity on a little paragraph that we saw, and little that we know that this would become such an important thing to actually be talking about today, which actually has to do what is the impact of well controlled humidity in a, in the in the building, especially related to how viruses and bacterias actually come into, into into our environment. So what we did is actually we decided to search and we started to document our stuff. And what we actually did is that a few weeks ago, we actually did this presentation for most of the people that are already industry. And it’s interesting, first of all, thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to actually get to bring this up, especially to people who actually have their hands in this, which is basically the control of the temperature and the humidity in the enclosed buildings. So what we decided to do was actually come up with this presentation. Very cool Luis. So if I may, if it’s if it’s, if it’s alright with you, let me let me show you a little bit of the what the presentation is about and how actually, having a well controlled humidity environment actually has a profound impact, especially right now in this period of pandemic crisis, right. So, so what I would like to cover with you guys is first of all, we have to understand what this thing is. Some people call it virus, bacteria, microbes, germs. So, first thing we want to do is actually understand what exactly what exactly is the difference between all of these terminologies, we also have to understand and this is where it becomes very crucial. How does our body actually defend herself against all Have these intruders, that what are basically harmless. And we’re going to talk about the covert 19. We’re going to understand how it correlates to our respiratory epithelium, then we have, we’re also going to go into a little bit of biology one to one, we’ll talk about our cilia how our internal protective systems that we have actually help us always fight back. And we’re also going to see the relationship between diet and how important it actually is to maintain a proper humidity level. We’re also going to talk to you guys about different scientific research and white papers, actually, that actually exist out there just to understand and make all of us a participant to this thing of trying to kill this beast. And we’ll also show you where to get information. And the point we really want to get across is the importance of humidity, not from a comfort perspective, but really about public health and how it actually relates and how we can actually help the people you Supposed to be serving in this environment that we have, which is called buildings. So, first thing to understand is the fundamental difference between what is a microbe, what’s a bacteria? What’s a virus? Well, basically, these things are actually church. These are external, sometime living, sometimes non living organisms that can actually harm us, in some cases are beneficial. In some other cases, they’re actually non beneficial. So what’s important to understand is that a bacteria is a living organism. First of all, has only one cell, you can always find it antibiotics, very important to remember is that infections are localized just in one part of the body. The best example of that, if you eat something that is not right, that has a bacteria in it and you actually digested it will affect your digestive system. If you cut yourself, okay, and there are some bacteria in that environment, they will actually penetrate through that opening. That’s what’s going to be affected, which is very different from a virus. Some bacterias are actually good proof of That is that for all of those, all of those culinary connoisseurs out there, we all know that cheese, for instance, in yogurt actually comes from good bacteria. And as a matter of fact, there’s actually a study out there that proves that, on average, every human being every adult has more or less about good 10 pounds of bacterias in our bodies, especially in our gut, which also means that they also have a proactive

Unknown Speaker
results, helping us obviously, do what it’s supposed to do, which is basically help us digest the food that we have. Very important to remember that is that a bacteria can also split itself as opposed to a virus virus. On the other hand, which is basically what the Covid 19 is, is nonliving. And this is where it becomes very important to remember, it actually needs a proper environment for it to actually survive. That’s key here, okay, and that’s where we’re going to draw the attention to the only Way to fight back a virus is to a vaccine. And some viruses cannot be killed with vaccines. So in that case, you actually need to have what we call anti virus as an example of that HIV is a antiviral, and the HIV actually has an antiviral in order to help people who actually I’ve been infected. In some other cases, some other types of viruses through history had been fought back with vaccines, such as the measles, the very cell and the polio, and so on and so on. The infection coming from a virus is systemic, which means that it will affect your entire body, it will penetrate through one of the cavities that we have, that we’re going to talk about, but it will affect the whole body. In this case, it’s actually a respiratory virus, which means it’s going to affect your lungs, which is going to hurt and obviously is going to impede your system from actually breathing properly. Viruses are not beneficial in any shape or form to our body. So that’s why it’s important to keep them away in order So very important to remember because it cannot reproduce by itself. It actually needs to penetrate ourselves through ourselves. So far so good, Eric.

Eric Stromquist
Yeah, absolutely, brother.

Luis Melgares
Okay, good.

Unknown Speaker
Also, something very important to remember is that a bacteria can move by itself. That’s why it has this long tail that actually propels it to be able to be moving in our body. And that’s how actually gets infected. The virus actually needs to have somewhat of a transport media in order to actually move. In this case, they’re called droplets. When you sneeze when you cough. That’s why it’s important to remember that’s the way they travel. And but we’ll talk about that much more detail. So remember, one thing very important bacterias you can fight them. Antibiotics virus, you cannot fight them with antibiotics only with vaccine if you have in our case, we don’t have any. So that’s why it’s important to understand where we’re going with this. So let’s go back to biology. Do you want to one? How does our body actually fight back? How does it How is it done? Very important to remember we actually have three layers of defense. The first one is through his thank thanks to our skin into the different nucleuses that we have in our body. The second one actually has to do with the antimicrobial proteins our body can generate, and also the inflammatory response, it has best example of that, just before you start to have a cold, what happens your throat starts to ache, right starts to influence the inflammation, that means it’s trying to fight something. And then the third line of defense is when it really gets to be bad. That’s when the antibodies kick in. That’s when the lymph acidic sites systems kick in, that’s when you start having fevers. That’s when the whole artillery comes out in order to fight this thing. But interesting enough, the second and the third level of defense that our body has, these are the ones where typically, the medical world actually can tackle and help us with But the first line of defense is skin and the mucus. That’s where we, as an industry have a positive effect, and where we can actually make a difference. Alright, let’s look at it. skin, we understand the way it works, we understand also that the skin becomes our first shield of protection for the physical layer that we have. While the mucous is what we call the internal shield that protects the internal part of our body. All right, and when you look at they’re both are obviously done pretty much the same way. They all have a sub layer that ends with the upper layer. Cases of the skin, obviously, it’s called the derma. And in the case of the human spirit story system, it’s actually called different causes that we have in our eyes or nose in our mouth. That it’s why so it is so important to like all the public health agencies have been saying, keep your hands clean. Why because if your hands do get the virus on them by touching your eyes or nose or your mouth You can actually help it penetrate into your body. Remember what we said, These do not move by themselves, they have to be introduced. And one of the ways they’re introduced is through different droplets to pick up a droplet without noticing. That’s how you can introduce this thing into your body. Alright. And the important thing here is the following. In order to have healthy mucus, you obviously need a humidity level that is proper. Because what happens we know this wintertime all the people from the northern climates or people who’ve been to northern climates, in wintertime, our eyes get dry or nose gets dry. And without a doubt, our mouth also can get very dry, right. So there’s a correlation between winter dry air and humidity, and also how it affects our ecosystem. So let’s look at this mucus system. Because we said this is one of the first fundamental layers of protection that our body has to fight back these things. When you look at our system, one of the important things to remember is that our mucous membranes and membranes Actually the only thing open to the exterior. So these are the things are actually are protecting us from whatever is trying to come into our body, just like a skin does on the external part.

Unknown Speaker
And the most fascinating thing that we have when you start looking into this is, as an example, let’s look at the respiratory system that we have. And the way actually moves and actually operates inside of our breathing system. The first layer that you notice is what we call the basement membrane. This is the last lane that we have until that you’re trying to protect. Why because once you penetrate the song, which is the internal part, that’s where all healthy cells of our body are, actually that’s where you actually find them. So that’s why it’s important to actually always keep protecting the upper layer or actually towards the right side of this image. So the first thing you will notice are these things called cilia. I don’t know how much you guys remember about cilia when we did biology, one to one in high school, but cilia are one of the most important things that we have As a protective as a way to protect ourselves why? Because they’re actually hairs, these little hairs are actually holding the mucus layer on top. And what these mucus layer are actually doing is brushing off any type of particularly any type of germ, any type of virus or bacteria that could fall directly before it actually penetrates our body, just like the skin would do. So the way actually works is that it actually will move it will be brushing all those particles away in order for us to actually have it inside of our larynx so we can swallow it. So let’s look at the the way it actually is built. So here you have a cut through of what the system looks like. You will notice the first thing facili a hair nice little long hairs on top of edges, your first layer of mucus and the one on top is actually the one that’s actually being pushed being brushed off by these hairs because that’s the dynamic effect that they actually have. They are continuously brushing all that dust away just like broomstick. And when you keep a proper amount of humidity, they actually can do their job properly. So in other words, you’re actually, if you’re giving them the right environment, the right temperature, the right humidity, they will do the job. But what happens if you start decreasing the amount of humidity in that given space? Few things will happen. In a good humidity level, there’s two layers of mucus, the first layer of mucus is extremely viscous. Okay. And the one on top is actually less viscous. So what does it mean? It means that because it’s less viscous at the bottom, it’s a lot harder for anything that wants to penetrate actually come in. The mucus that we actually have on top is actually more liquid has more viscosity. So it’s a lot easier when the little hairs are actually doing their job of rushing to actually be pushing it off. As the level of humidity actually starts to decrease. So does the mucus and by doing so they also are can become more viscous, which means that it actually becomes easier for the bacteria to actually start to penetrate into the facility.

Luis Melgares
So do you see the importance of maintaining a good level of humidity at this point?

Eric Stromquist
This is huge Luis, very, very huge. Yeah. So

Unknown Speaker
but so again, just to show you guys what just to repeat ourselves, there’s a double phenomenon happening at the same time. If you give your body the perfect level of humidity, that means that the high end of mucus actually is at its best, right? If you start to decrease the level of humidity, what happens? Your cilia hair instead of actually being all straight up, I actually literally collapse. And as they collapse, they stop brushing. As they stop brushing, you lose the density of your mucus, as the density of the mucus actually starts to operate, then it’s a lot easier for any germ, virus or bacteria to actually penetrate into the lower The lower cells that we have, just to show you a little video, I will show you the first part of the video you will see the cilia hair actually moving and how they’re actually doing their movement of brushing. And the second part, you’ll see what happens once they collapse. So here we go. They’re doing their job, they’re brushing all that mucus. Now suddenly they collapse, it’s a lot harder for them to be moving it properly. So imagine for a second that that layer of mucus that you have on top is being washed literally being brushed away. So there go all those bacterias there go, all those terms are trying to get into your body. If it actually collapsed out suddenly you lost your shield, it’s a lot easier for them to penetrate. And that’s how that’s how we get

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, it almost seems Luis it’s like, you know, taking an air filter out of a unit right? It seems like it’s filtering the crap out

Unknown Speaker
exactly what it is okay, and the only way you can keep these filters proper doing their job is by providing providing them an environment that actually suits and you make it easier for them to do their job, which is what they’ve been doing for centuries, which is basically to protect us, right? So once again, what happens, we start breathing cancers of any germs floating coming into our body automatically or metabolism, what it does, it tries to either swallow it, or it will try to cough and sneeze. So to kick it up, right? So again, we’re going to swallow it, or we’re going to kick it out. All that is possible only if we let our body do its job, which is to be brushing away all of these germs through the mucous layer. All right. That’s how our body fights back. Make sense?

Unknown Speaker
Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, so let’s look at the way this covert 19 is actually working. Very important to remember this COVID 19 virus is actually a droplet virus. It’s a droplet bias, which means that every time you sneeze every time you cough, there’s actually a particle, a little droplet of this of water, leaving our body in what do you find in that little chocolate? sugar, salt The virus itself, the big advantage we have is that this one, give me the fact that it’s a droplet, the droplet will actually fall to the ground. But here’s the problem we have, it also falls to the ground has a double impact, right? Because there are two ways of contamination. The first one is through what we just said droplet, and the other one is airborne. And it’s also important to understand the difference between these two things. And airborne germ or an airborne virus is when, for example, it is actually so small, it doesn’t actually need a droplet to be contaminating other people. chickenpox, chickenpox, sorry and tuberculosis are an example of that. As we said, in our case, this cobit 19 actually spreads to droplets. That’s why all the public safety agencies or health agencies are asking us to keep a safe distance, this social distancing, that’s why because if ever you do cough, you do sneeze or you actually are just like us trying to save the pee, while there’s actually little particles that will be flying out of our mouth that can contaminate somebody who’s actually healthy. And that’s why it’s important when they actually falls into surface. That’s where you can start contaminating objects, such as doorknobs. Which brings us to something very, very important here. Okay. A recent study showed us from India that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, that a virus depending on the type of surface can last up to 72 hours in a droplet on that surface. So imagine for a second you come in, you’re sick, you still don’t know that you actually have this virus. you sneeze, little droplets fall on the table. You don’t even know if the person who’s doing the maintenance of your building comes in wipes. It goes on his hand. suddenly something happens his eyes he scratches his eye, beautiful mucus right there. humidity level is low mucus protection or low what’s gonna happen to that person? Just infected.

Ken Smyers
Wow. Okay, scary, scary stuff. Okay,

Unknown Speaker
but like anything else, information is power, right? So what happens, we know how we can actually help to neutralize these droplets. And again, another piece of information that ASHRAE actually has provided us for the longest period of time in their eight track system and equipment in chapter 22 basically tells us that if you stay within 40 to 60% of humidity, it literally kills environment for bacterias. to, to to actually populate more or to pro prolific, how do you say that in English proliferate forever? Exactly, exactly. All right. And as you can see on this on this, on this picture here, the same thing actually will also happen with viruses, which are the two major causes and in this case, it’s a virus right the covert 19. So you see if you keep humidity between 40 to 60% Okay, you will actually not provide this virus, the type of environment that it requires in order to keep surviving. We, as an industry, who actually has full control of this need to be aware of what this actually represents. And interesting enough, Eric, this is the time of the year and ask any of the control guys around this time of year when most of the companies, most of the buildings actually have humidifiers are starting to shut them down. Yeah, yeah. Because, Oh, we don’t need humidity. And the more we can use humidity from the outside, true. There’s areas there’s geographic areas where you can actually do that. But the same could be said for temperature and yet temperature we still we still keep a very strict control level as far as humidity as far as temperature to make sure we always keep an optimal setpoint of temperature, but yet, we don’t consider humidity The same way and what these studies are showing us is that it is crucial to maintain a controlled and measure our age in buildings because this is one of the ways you can actually have a positive impact on providing viruses the wrong environment for them not to proliferate.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, now this is huge. Leeson it looks like you’ve you’re between 50 and 70, even for the viruses.

Unknown Speaker
Oh, but here’s here’s another interesting piece of information here. Is that another the same? from the same study that actually did in this chapter 22. of system and equipment handbook. It also says that at 50% of humidity, that’s where the mortality rate of the certain organism is as at its highest, and the influenza virus loses much of its virulence. And the same in the same chapter. There’s also another mention that when you keep humidity levels around 55%, it becomes lethal to a bacteria called the pneumococcus bacteria, which is the streptococcal bacteria, that one that we usually get in wintertime that hurts our, our respiratory system in our throat and we complain that it hurts and you need to take some vaccine for that. And it’s some antibacterial for that, well, that’s at 55% of humidity, it actually kills

Luis Melgares
the it’s you actually can get the kill that bacteria if it’s an enclosed, Felisa, this is

Unknown Speaker
just this is fascinating. And I just wonder why, at least in the States, I’m not hearing you know, any of the news reports talking about humidity as being a way to help control this is a hidden candidate, or why aren’t people

Unknown Speaker
talk about this? Because, again, Eric, you have to understand one thing for the longest period of time. humidity is always correlated to comfort. People do not measure the importance of humidity as being part of public health. So and again, and I’ll tell you this with you know, it’s a joy But at the same time, it reveals to you how serious this is the example that I use before saying we’re going to shut down a humidifiers and winter that actually came from one of our tech people in our office who’s actually doing tech support for humidifier saying, well, it’s not important, because anyways is going to shut them off. So think about it if our own people, if our own people who are at the, you know, at the forefront of this battle, don’t even realize the importance of humidity from a public health perspective. How do you think that most humans actually understand this? And the worst thing is all right, and this is the worst thing and this is where I want to bring everybody in, I want everybody to understand is that there’s thousands of these research done out there. As an example, there’s another one here, it says that when you use 50%, when you’re 50% humidity, you will kill 100% of the airborne flu viruses within 24 hours.

Unknown Speaker
Wow. Wow.

Unknown Speaker
Okay. And if you look at the if you look at the the charts here This is exactly what you see, as soon as you start hitting 40 to 50% humidity, the level of sorry, the level of infection, as you can see actually starts to drop look on every single them and every type of size and micro meters of the mentions of these viruses. And we. And the thing is, we just said before that another study showed that these viruses can actually live 72 hours on the surface. And this study is telling you that if you keep a well humidified space at 50% humidity, it will kill 100% of the, in this case, airborne flu viruses, but within 24 hours.

Ken Smyers
He’s this is this is phenomenal. You would think you want to make sure that humidity is good in your home, too. Right?

Unknown Speaker
That’s exactly the point. Which brings me to the next thing, right, if you want to have access to this information, and again, this is you know, Eric, I mean, there’s sometimes it’s good to have to have commercial presentations because people need to understand what we do, how we do it and why we’re so good at it. This case, it goes beyond that neutronic as a manufacturer of humidifiers. Obviously could be claiming here that Yeah, we have the best humidifier for the situation. But what we’re trying to get across here is regardless of the humidifiers that you guys have out there, keep them running, keep controlling them. It is important because this is the way we as a community, as from from the engineering world can actually have a positive impact on the health of the people we love in our homes, it obviously in our hospitals, but also in our offices where we spend most of our time doing this job. Okay. So again, like I said, if you for instance, just go to Google Scholar, and just simply just write a COVID 19 just tap humidity and viruses, you will get over 200 different types of researches that have to do exactly with that, that we’re all bringing to the same place. Okay, we actually did the same thing on our webpage, we actually put a link, just, you know, for people Understand just quick, again, scientific research for people to understand. But at the end of the day, the message we want to, we want to get across as the following is that if you keep the level of humidity at 50%, in any type of building or any type of enclosed building, it will kill 100% of the airborne viruses within 24 hours. That’s where the mortality rate of the viruses at the highest. And that’s where it becomes lethal to bacterias to keep living.

Unknown Speaker
Places phenomenal. Thank you so much for doing this brother. This is this is encouraging in a time where I think a lot of people are looking for answers and are freaked out. This is something positive they can do and, and so you know, tronics you guys do sell humidifiers, right? That’s one of your divisions.

Unknown Speaker
We do we do. It’s one of the divisions we have. And again, you know, like I said, Eric, the whole point is that we want people to understand there’s a direct correlation between keeping a proper level of human is is not an upcharge The manufacturer is saying this scientific research is out there all say the same thing. And for reasons we do not understand, it seems that this message this message is not about is not passing through. So that’s why thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to share this information. And I think it’s our respect, it’s our collective responsibility as people who actually have a positive impact in creating healthy environments for all types of human beings for all us human beings in this world, that in this environment that we call buildings, we have that responsibility, bringing this information to building owners, managers, for them to understand the the high importance of keeping buildings humidify not just for comfort, but for public health.

Unknown Speaker
Luis, this is a great service and thank you so much for doing this. Again, I want to just take a minute to and just sort of shift gears and and talk a bit about Neptronics. You know, the controls company and The Division you work for as well as make sure that people know that that you know knepp tronics comm for you humidifiers as well but you know we’ve visited our facility and love the way you guys row you guys make great products but man, this is this goes beyond this like and I really get that your intent here is just from a heartfelt place to to really just sort of share and you know, I’ve got a buddy his wife works at the CDC and I’m gonna make damn sure that they know this, I guess they do know but why they’re not recommending it again makes no sense to me at all because this seems like this. Just if they implemented this instead of you know, the social distancing. But if everybody had to keep their humidity and 50% relative humidity to 50 cent level it seems like you could just really jumpstart getting this thing under guys,

Unknown Speaker
right? That’s right. And you know, and that’s why it’s important also to remember that our body does best when it’s supposed to do which is to protect us. Yeah, body is such a beautiful machine designed for that. The only thing asks us Just like for instance, when you want to be healthy is to eat proper food. But in this case, the only thing our body wants to wants us to do is just give us provide us with the right temperature and humidity give us the proper environment in these closed spaces that you have. There’s nothing we can do about outside. But at least in these closed environments, let’s give our bodies the proper environment, and our body will do what it does best, which is to protect us,

Unknown Speaker
I can take them loose, and I don’t know how it is in Canada. But down here, most of the restaurants people won’t go in the restaurants and even though they’re taking all kinds of precautions, you know, to make sure everything’s clean and all but you start thinking about with this study, if I’m if I’m in the restaurant, business or the retail business, right, when people are not going to my store, I’m going to get hold of this and I’m going to have a big thing that you know, is showing where my relative humidity is because it’s basically saying that, you know, it’s not going to survive in there.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, at least at least we’re doing something. I mean, look, viruses and disease are part of of living, but If we can at least not provide them the proper environment for them to keep living, and at the same time, give that environment to our body types and do its job. It’s a win win combination without even having to get the medical world involved. Oh, absolutely.

Unknown Speaker
Absolutely. So, all right, buddy. Well, listen, how do people get how do people get ahold of you? And how do people get hold of Neptronics?

Unknown Speaker
Well, very easy. Just go to our website, which is Neptronic.com. As you said before an attorney calm and, and from there, you can either get ahold of me by sending me an email to Luis Melgrares at neptronic.com. And let’s not forget, we’re still a controls company to so we have a bunch of products out there. They’re totally related to what’s happening right now. So yeah, fast actuators for lap hoods. We actually have ip 65 actuators for, let’s say, for outdoor environment or critical setup environments of in the health world. We also have static pressure controllers to also help pressurize isolation rooms. So there’s a lot of the problems that we actually have currently have that are, again, directly linked to the metal to the medical, medical and the public health industry right now. And obviously pharma industry also, right, because the pharmaceuticals and humidity and well controlled temperature.

Ken Smyers
Always Thank you so much. I mean, you’ve done a lot. We’ve educated our industry and children’s community, I’m sending this information to my family across the United States, because that’s how important it is. So thank you very much. Thank you. optronic. Well played. Thank you.

Eric Stromquist
Very, very cool, Luis. Again, buddy. Thank you so much for doing this.

Unknown Speaker
Eric. I can’t thank you enough. And I think at this point, it’s our responsibility. It’s our collective individual and collective responsibility to share this information with the people who care of

Unknown Speaker
Luis Melgares from neptronic.com. Thanks, buddy.

Unknown Speaker
Thank you so much.

Unknown Speaker
Like you know, I just I really don’t know how, how this hadn’t come out before but you know, everything Luis is saying it Science, you can Google it, you can research it, I would think for, you know, companies that are looking for an edge and want to do something really positive, man, get this out to your customers get it out to, you know, and see if you can get in and start, you know, selling humidifiers and helping people out and making sure that humidity sensors working right. Seems like this is just a very simple thing that our industry is uniquely qualified to do.

Ken Smyers
Well, I argue that the big push, the last, you know, ventilation, of course, was begun. pressurization room pressure monitoring is critical. And I heard through the grapevine that dwyers out of Magna helix and different people have run under products that, that provide that that that assurance that there’s no there’s been pushed back up and exhausted not coming back into the affected area is contained in that. So there’s a lot a lot of work to be done. But these are great insights. And I think you know, all in all, it’s going to improve our quality of life.

Unknown Speaker
No, absolutely. And you know, it seems like to Kenny The other thing is once we get past us, it seems like if the proper authorities realize and owners realize the effect of, you know, humidity on not just the corona virus, but viruses in general and bacteria, it seems like this is going to be something that will be an ongoing business opportunity for people in our industry.

Ken Smyers
I agree. Pivot Point of enlightenment, yes.

Unknown Speaker
Pivot Point of enlightenment. There you go, Kenny Smyers. Well, let’s pivot point on to our next guest, who I think is very enlightened and, and is really enlightened us on analytics. And what happens with that. So how about introducing him?

Ken Smyers
Eric, I’d love to leave a very interesting guest for today’s show. We have somebody who’s kind of new to the industry, but not you know, four years, five years in hurry offense. They came from the analytic world, the software world, and they’re gonna talk about an incredible tool. So we’d like to welcome Chris Hallendy CEO of resolute intelligent buildings to the show. Welcome to the show, Chris. Welcome, Chris. Thanks, guys.

Chris Halendy
Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure, man. We’re so glad to have you here. But

Unknown Speaker
listen, for our audience who doesn’t know, like Kenny said, you know, we’ve had the privilege of saying little bit about what you guys are offering. And it’s pretty phenomenal. But for our audience who might not know, tell him about resolute and what you guys do and kind of why you formed a company. What makes you different?

Chris Halendy
Yeah, so, um, you can, like you said in the intro I four years ago, we kind of had a dream we A lot of us come from big data analytics backgrounds and software, primarily, a lot came from a company called Compuware, in which we built software products that, you know, monitored and did performance analytics or insights, as we’ll talk about, on computers on servers on mainframes on pieces of code. So we understood kind of that, you know, how do you get data out? How do you analyze it? How do you find anomalies? And then how do you build up an analytics platform on it? And so we started a bunch of little companies through a VC to kind of just solve different problems with with with a tool like that, right? And then one of the ones We saw was buildings. And so being really smart guys, we realized we know nothing about buildings whatsoever, right? We don’t know. We It was like walking in a time warp a little bit, right? It was, wait a minute you you don’t have a standard protocol, you can’t just connect into a building. And then we find so that we did the next best thing, right? We go went and found the smartest integrators, we could. And then they educated us on what’s out there, you know, how do you do it? How, what are the struggles, you have to even just get data to your front end, and run a building, let alone try to get into a cloud app to do anything special with it. And then it was quickly Alright, when we have this thing, we have this energy or this, this analytics framework. What do we what do you do with it? What do you do with the data? I can show you charts and graphs but at the end of the day, that’s that’s just charts and graphs. We’re not charts and graphs company. We’re an actions and answers company, right? So how can I take data and turn it into something that’s actionable in the building? Well, so again, we’re a bunch of integrators and software guys, we don’t know anything. So let’s go find some energy engineers and find people that have experienced build spec experience, people that ran their own service contracts, and were contractors. And so you get those guys in a room. And then it’s a fight over what we’re supposed to build what we’re not supposed to build what we should be focusing on. But it’s fun and that and what’s worked over the last couple years is that triad really bouncing ideas against each other right at kind of our core of what we do is, with the integrators, I can’t make a product that’s going to take any more time for the integrator to do any work or integration, that building I can’t ask you to do any more than you’re already doing. And then the results of it, those engineers better, you know, backup that if I gave this to you, or I gave this to to an integrator or someone who’s servicing a building or who owns a building, I can give this information and it’s useful. And it’s correct, right? Is it statistically correct? Are we making sure we’re giving you the right actions to take, right you get all the way down the path and then if you go to do something, and we’re like, it’s not really what’s wrong With the building and then, you know, this isn’t worth it. So a lot of different things, a lot of fun areas to disrupt. But it’s fun. I mean, this is a great market to be in. There’s not too many spaces that are that feel new and kind of challenging.

Ken Smyers
Right? Well, Chris, you You guys made remarkable ketchup progress. I mean, I’m looking at your website, and I see your members have project haystack. So you’ve gotten into the committee report of the people writing software, and you got in deep in that regard. And it also shows on your website, extraordinary niagra expertise. So you got quite a staff to get themselves involved. I know that your other fellow that we had the What’s his name? Your chief?

Unknown Speaker
Trying to find the other gentlemen. Chad at a point No. Yeah, Chad. I texted him at LinkedIn and my goodness, he he’s got every certification in the books. So I mean, you guys quickly did your homework to get your your source documentation in order so that you can prove that you had that Dom you know, domain expertise in our world. So, so it’s very impressive. Yeah, thanks. I mean, that’s I mean, you know, I, I can only kind of steer where we can steer, I think it’s, it’s all about surrounding yourself with the right people, right? We have great integrators who bring world of a wealth of knowledge. And we have, and they’re all different, right? We have some guys who have a vast experience in programming in Niagara. We have guys that are integrators that never use Niagara, right. And so you have to build on all those different types because that’s the real world. Right? And it’s the same with our, with our engineering staff. We got guys that are that, you know, are trained HVAC engineers that, you know, they dream to be an architect, and then they did something else. And then we have guys who just, you know, there were mechanical, electrical engineers, and they got into build spec. And then we have some people that have five years experience and they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re more willing to adapt with new technologies. And then we have people that have, you know, 2030 years experience so they bring the real, the meat of I walk into a building and I can rattle off The seven things that I see with my eyes and I can hear the pump in the bump room, right? And it’s like, let me get that brain in. You know? Yeah. But you need that to feed the engine, you just have a software platform. That’s great. But what does it do? Right? And what does it do for you?

Unknown Speaker
Well, yeah, let’s, let’s talk a bit about that. Because, you know, I think one of the things with technology that’s a little bit tricky is that if you have success almost leads to failure, meaning that, you know, you start out with something and then as the technology changes, or the perception of how technology is used, changing, you still have, you know, a legacy that you have to support. So it’s almost in certain instances, I think maybe in your case, it’s easier to start from scratch and build it from scratch. And, you know, we hear a lot and, you know, a lot of conversation about analytics and data and, and, you know, and quite candidly, you know, a lot of people, you know, they buy the latest and the greatest and they get all kinds of data, but they don’t really know how to use it, but what’s your view on analytics and data and And how do you guys use that view to support your software offer?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And you know, later on, we could kind of dive in to the product a little bit to kind of support some of this, but but at the highest level, right? I mean, when you are deciding to, to to find insights and use an analytical engine, right, you kind of have to start off by getting out a lot of data. You have to build on top of that. And then yes, you’re using your charts and your graphs to kind of do a human root cause Well, why is this higher? Why is this and you have some simple rules, and simple rules build on themselves to be more complex and just have more more inputs, more changes, looking at Parent Child, it starts just kind of growing and growing and growing. And then you can start doing things where now you can correlate them up and start giving what we kind of call those actions. Right. And that’s kind of where we are now. And that’s why we’re kind of making a big push of, you know, we’re building every day we were a cloud based analytics software that deploys every two weeks, every two weeks you log in And you’re going to see something new sometimes it’s it changes the way it looks and feel and you’re gonna you’re gonna hate it. Allah a lot of software platforms that are out there because you’re used to one view. But that also allows us to be very nimble when we add new rules, or we add new reports or we hear from our customers that, hey, I need this, I need stuff around this kind of equipment, or I need stuff around this specific type of building.

Ken Smyers
Chris, you, you go so so you’re really moving a lot of information quickly. But I think you You said something offline about edge and cloud. So when you’re when you’re talking about how things change and how you evolve, it’s not a revolution, it’s an evolution because like you said, incrementally, you keep improving. Yeah, let me let me share mymy go tomy go to soapbox slides.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. So this is kind of generic in in, in, in the AI analytics. So for the purpose of this podcast is called insights and statistics, I guess, as a Math guy. So yeah, so I mean, talk about analytics, and how do you get to the end result? What’s the end result in all this? Right? Everyone’s dream is what you can see at this top flag, you know, automated command and control, right? Being able to have something that can essentially run themselves, right. And so when you build a system like that, I don’t care if it’s for an autonomous vehicle, it’s for stock market analysis, or it’s for buildings, you kind of follow the same cake layers, as we call them. So the base cake, we call that that, you know, from a building perspective, that’s, that’s fault detection and diagnostics. Right. And then analytics, we call that anomaly detection. Essentially, I just need to know as much binary data of yeses and noes as I can, right. However, that gets boiled down to a yes or no. Right is something on is it off? Is it exceeding a threshold is it on for too long, or all of its children to wide open, I mean, it can get kind of complex in that in that bucket. But you need that data, and you need that data to be, you know, good data, you need data integrity. And then if you have that base of anomalies or false, you can start building that second layer, which is the orange layer, which is the root cause and correlation. And that’s when you can actually start solving problems, right? Now you can start saying, Well, if these scenarios happen, and this happens, then if I have enough data over a week or a month, I can say, you know what, this box or this piece of machinery or this system is underperforming, because of this, and it you know, the data is pointing to that it’s the data is somewhat always right, as long as it’s good data. And so then if you build that root cause and you exhaustively go through that, and you model all the things you can think of now you can start dreaming of what that purple layer is, which is really the machine learning gets into play, right, which essentially is just looking at the statistics of what’s happened in the past. Past what’s looking in the future and where it might start finding a pattern. And now you’re leveraging the world’s technologies out there where I can set up a Bayesian network on Amazon in an hour and a half. Now, we’re 15 years ago, I needed a team of devs to build that framework. Well, there are software tools out there that are out every day that makes solving these problems a little easier. But if you’re already at that level, you’ve already built the base two case. And that’s not easy. And that takes a lot of work and a lot of data and a lot of, of, of, you know, this works and it doesn’t but then it works all these other times, but it doesn’t these other two times. But as you build up this cake, conceptually, now you start can do predictive. And then of course, if you can do predictive, the flagstick of command and control is actually really trivial at the end. Right? If all those things work, if that cake is just running perfectly, I could the computer machine can make a decision and you can trust it as strong as that cake is right. So I always ask the question on these is this, you know is the past Smart buildings are this whole analytics and AI. Is it an evolution? Or is it a revolution? Right? Is it something that evolves over time? Or is it something where it’s like, we have this, plug it and it just works? Right? It’s both

Ken Smyers
enough. First, I was gonna go with the evolution. But now I’m saying that it made a couple of points offline, to redress them is that, you know, you mentioned how this this image right here, where the far from the car with no driver, no hands on the driver is the future, and how we, you know, the ones we were the left side of this picture with the hands on the wheel. We can’t make that jump. Sometimes we have to make a revolutionary change of behavior to be able to accept the reality that there’s a better way to do things and that technology has proven itself and it can the AI and the machine learning can outperform the humans just like in autonomous vehicles, that sort of thing.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, no, and you’re absolutely right. I mean, the reality is, it’s probably a mixed bag of both, right? I mean, this is what we said before, is Do you think that for the autonomous car, let’s use a great example everyone, everyone can relate to this? Do you not think that we have the systems in place for cars to be able to drive themselves with no wheel? I mean, you know, you can talk about the test you’ve always ever heard here about the failed test. But I mean, I almost got hit today, right? I mean, it’s uh, you know, when I think about my kids, I have four kids under the age of 10. And I’m sure they’re gonna have some some one of them is gonna gonna, it’s gonna evolve to a point where they’re gonna buy a car that doesn’t have a steering wheel. And I’m just gonna look at him like you’re crazy. He’s gonna look at me very logically and say so you think that driving down the road at 80 miles an hour four feet from a guy next to you physically rack and pinion holding your your 72 charger is safer than a computer system making millions of decisions and backed by its cake of analytics and knowing exactly what to do and it’ll be like, Well, yeah, cuz it feels like it because I’ll be the I’ll be the old man.

Ken Smyers
The crazy thing my friends have a pilot and he tells me about how they fly the plane for the first 3040 seconds. And then the computer takes over. It makes a million computations a second. And then they take over in the last, you know, 5060 seconds when they land the plane. To your point, and I think it’s a throw at Eric is that he’s playing soft on us. But he has a Tesla. And he he has taken this thing out and let

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I got I gotta tell you guys, I drive much better than my Tesla. That’s my story. That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it now. I’m teasing, but but that’s my story. I’m sticking to it. I’ve got to have some relevance in the world.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, did you so when you got in it? Do you take the hand off the wheel day one.

Unknown Speaker
No, no, no, no, it was a while before I did that

Unknown Speaker
evolution. Yeah. And you

Unknown Speaker
know, and to be candid with you. I still don’t do it often. If I want to scare somebody, I’ll put it on and then turn and start talking to them.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think it just goes back into it’s it’s it’s an interesting conversation because it’s, it’s it you can apply it to a lot of things. So let’s apply it to buildings, right? If you build a building brand new and you had all the guys, you know, all the different products that are out there that are really blazing this trail, you could probably get away with a building. That’s that, that that’s pretty autonomous technology. We can do it right guys. Does that building talk to the next building? What do you do with the building? That’s, that’s half pneumatic still. And then really it comes down to the human element. Right? Are the you know how much leeway we can already see that in controls? Right? different sequences get guys a little nervous, like I don’t like that sequence. Because, you know, I mean, so we’ve been fortunate with with early on, as we’re developed as we were developing our software, we went out and kind of got because we had engineers and we had integrators. We went and got kind of enterprise accounts that allowed us to be consultants use our software, learn from it, but then also go out there in the world. And you know, because of our chairman peak hermanos. He owns Karolina hertz We were able to go into that building. And so you talk about not touching controls. That’s my ice. Right? I mean, that’s the basketball. That’s a Garth Brooks concert like those are, you’re not touching those. Right, right. All right. So it’s, again, very much an evolution, you want to use data to make better decisions. But ultimately, you still need a human to kind of make those decisions for now.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, so So Chris, I want to hop in here. So two things right off the bat, first of all, you know, I think this is definitely where it’s going. Because it solves a major problem. This, you know, Kenny, that one of the trends we track as there are just so many people that are leaving the industry that are really great technicians and understand how to make this stuff work, ie the Tesla drivers, right. And so I think it solves the problem when the Tesla drivers go, we don’t have enough Tesla drivers to come in. You’ve got the Tesla. It sounds like you’ll be able to automate the building in such a way that you’re not going to use many people to make the building run. Here is the $50,000 Tesla elephant in the room, which is, this has got to be too expensive. I know most of our listeners are going to this sounds absolutely amazing, but I’m not gonna be able to afford it.

Unknown Speaker
Right. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s something that comes up a lot before we even give a demo. Right. I think that’s something that, you know, how do you play and I think we got to talk a little bit about the market. But I mean, one of the things we’re trying to be is we’re just trying to be as transparent as possible, and seeing what this market is except I anyone can go to our website at resolute bi Comm. We update it all the time with our new marketing messaging, we have our pricing we have, you know, as much data as we can throw it about what we do and how we do it. Um, because I kind of see, you know, I my bigger vision for analytics, insights, just just tools like this, is I kind of see this market. There’s kind of three, three segments within this. I think that there’s tools at the top that are really, really good. There’s tools that Are all encompassing you can you can use the analogy, whether it’s boiling the ocean, or the full alphabet right? There the full suit, you know, they have teams that come in, they’ll do an assessment of of your building, they’ll measure the room size, they’ll measure the horsepower of every machine, they’ll document every machine, you know, what’s the inlet diameter of the VA v box, all that stuff, you boil that down after, you know, six, eight months of a project. And you can I mean, the insights you can get from a data scientist, that that’s a that’s a dream scenario to have that data, right and install those sensors and have that and I think there’s a there’s a spot and that, that that’s pushing the envelope of what we can find in buildings. I think that there’s other products out there that are really, really good as well, that are basically open tools, right? Here’s a framework for you to go and build your own library of rules, build your own reports, make this part of your business, so that you can service those buildings or commission them or you know what Whatever you’re using it for, and they’re, they’re extremely good. Right? Those are those are great tools when you want to do edge edge analytics, I’d love to do I said it earlier, I’d be happy to be on a podcast and I completely play both sides. Whether edge versus cloud, when you talk autonomous vehicles, I don’t need the car calling the cloud to tell me to stop the car.

Ken Smyers
Right? You can’t just the time won’t allow it.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I even as fast as you want to dream of the internet speeds. But on the cloud side, there’s, there’s a in that cake drawing I showed you. There’s statistical pieces in machine learning and statistical pieces in in the prediction that you you kind of meet the power of the cloud to do that kind of computation across a large data set and a large area. So it’s, the reality is you’re going to need both. You’re going to need devices to do that command and control and work on the edge and you’re going to need cloud to just constantly rebuilding the model rebuilding what’s possible.

Ken Smyers
Well, to your point, Chris, you know, the The cloud thing I know we know Elan Musk is putting up all these GPS satellites. Again, this pilot friend of mine, he saw them, following them in succession, they’re around 60,000 feet. But as soon as that gets deployed in 5g really becomes a reality, then the cloud will become, you know, every bit as important or more important, I guess. But the, the person we talked to recently about the cloud edge discussion says that edge has to be where it happens because like the autonomous vehicle, it’s there’s no time for latency it has to happen. Now, you’d have to know that that’s a dangerous situation, hit the brakes. And if you don’t hit it, the car does or vice versa, you know?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And for us in our market, right. I think that there’s things in the building that you would want to know now and you can make decisions now. And then there’s other things where you can see over time what’s really going on and then apply it and I think, you know, again, it’s it’s a great, it’s a fun debate to have, because there’s not really a right answer. I think it’s choosing the right tool for the job.

Ken Smyers
I just try to say about your evolution. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And in that sample, I was talking about the market. A little Cuz like we get asked, like, Who’s your competitors? And, um, I mean, I think I one hand you see, we talked about this kind of all encompassing products that are out there. And then you also have the products that you can kind of build a lot, you can build whatever you want, we’re kind of somewhere in the middle. Again, looking at our pricing, we have an opinionated library of rules and analytics that we apply. What we ask is that you, you map and tag and identify what’s in the building as simple as you can. And then whatever you do, the system will best fit the analytics to what data set you have in your building. And then if you can start producing the reports, the root causes and the analytics and you can start seeing insights into your building. And for us, we’re hoping that that is is is valuable for a price that is is worthy. And then you can go and I think again, it’s choosing the tool, what you’re comfortable with and what you’re trying to do. And Chris,

Unknown Speaker
I want to hop in for our podcast listeners who might not be watching the video casts so The screen we’re looking at, by the way, I encourage you to go to Chris’s website. But just to give you guys an idea, select your plan and get started. No setup charges, no additional hardware to buy small option 1500 dollars a year, annual subscription up to 1500 point. Your base is 3000 annual subscription up to 3000 points. It goes all the way up to large up to 10,000 at $7,000 a year. So that gives you an idea sort of where it plays because among other things, Kenny it sounds like and by the way, this does, you know you can use he works. I think Niagara is the engine that drunk drives is key to explain that and haystacks involved too. But Kenny I think what it does is a really allows the smaller players or buildings to have access to this this horsepower in this information.

Ken Smyers
I want to revisit something you said earlier real quick it was an oxymoron when you said the Tesla driver because I thought that was kind of funny that Tesla is an autonomous vehicle when you say driver so there is no Tesla drivers but in Yeah, but By analogy was teasing you, I was teasing. I like that I wrote that Tesla driver, I’m gonna say that again, in a post. But Chris, the thing that Derek is getting at is something that we toyed with on a daily or weekly basis where the drive, there’s a, you know, race to the small space. In other words, a lot of things that you’re saying are being done for these large projects that have the budgets and it can pay for everything because they have the consistent budget, they’ve got the monthly revenue and whatever else they have the budget, that you guys have come up with a way to configure Connect, configure us in a single day. And then you have two specific products that we need to talk about. One is the resident synergy and one’s the resident fusion. I mean, let’s talk about that for you know, that’s exciting.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Let me pop up my screen. I know I when I hate watching videos, just stare at the screen sometimes

Unknown Speaker
or the.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, so the way our product works, and I’ll try to do this very light. Anyone can can go to our website, you can click to schedule a demo, you can call us at You know, we’re just trying to get our brand out there, we’re trying to get this in the hands of people listening. Again, because we move fast every two weeks, we’re able to take, you know, things people, we hear certain things, we, we listen, we make changes, and we kind of keep that that evolution approach in our products. So yeah, we have two products, right. So we call them synergy and fusion, as you can see on the screen, and all this, again, is on our website. synergy is really the configuration tool. That’s where we spent almost the last whole year because we built our analytics engine A few years ago, we had that running, we started working on the root cause which I’ll show you that shows up in our reports, which just basically takes all of those rules and then tries to bubble them up into something that you can take action on. And then of course, you can graph and because everything’s unlimited trending and those are kind of the commodities that that everyone’s doing, but the heart and soul is how can I get that configuration down? as as as easy as possible? right and and what I love is challenge us from I mean, let’s do a demo, let’s try to connect to a niagra. supervisor, Jace you have and let’s see if we can get that data flowing as quickly as we say, because we’re also going to learn, right? If you have a pirated Bay version of Windows or something, I mean, we got to figure that out, right? We can’t test every scenario possible. And that’s kind of the fun, fun of what we’re doing. And it’s really as simple as you know, when you do the building configuration, you pull the points in, you map and tag them. And then you can start applying the rules and the reports. And then you can start going into our fusion app. Our orange app is really where you see all the results of the of the,

Unknown Speaker
of your configuration of the rules engine.

Unknown Speaker
And so that’s kind of like that. That’s our package. That’s the app. So again, they’re all cloud based. So you can reach them on any web browser, tablet, whatever you whatever you need to kind of talking about niagra. So you know, when we did this Originally, we built some of our own niagra modules that that sat in The supervisor and push the date out and did all this stuff. And that was great. But again, what we started learning is, I don’t want to build another thing that’s new, I don’t want to add to something that you have to install or something that you have to put onto your box that you already have. And so we leverage the N haystack connector for niagra. We don’t require you to use niagra or haystack tags, we’d like you to because that would only help the process. But it’s not a requirement. We really just use it to transmit the data. And you know, we’re hearing rumblings that we’re hoping that the N haystack surplus, the module part of Niagara will be part of the base niagra going forward. That’s kind of been rumors for a while. And then because that haystack community is a great open source community. You know, we want to contribute back to that module so that you know, when we see things that are broken in it, we can fix it and kind of give that back so others can use it to to transmit data. We’ve been asked you know what We do with our analytics, can we take that data and push it back to another system? Absolutely. You know, again, we, we want to be part of these multiple choices, someone has to apply a tool to a building and get insights. You know, everyone’s got got some, some different pros and cons of which one you would use for what application. So the real simple kind of quick one for the technical guys, that you know, this is, this is a kind of a simple thing for everyone to understand. But you know, based on the niagra connector, all we do is we we have an open VPN connection that we bundle and create in our cloud. So it just as a one click, you download it, you you when you install it on your on your, on your supervisor, that’ll Connect home make a secure certificate, VPN, and then we use the N haystack to to supply the data on jaysus. You can’t do the VPN as well, that one click just yet. So those Jason’s would have to be open up over HTTPS. These are things that we’re learning and hearing about too. There’s some great products that we’re testing and trying. There’s some great gateways out there that we’ve been working with to try to figure out other ways and again, is trying to use all that’s out there in the market to to better transmit data safely and securely. We got really lucky with our first customers that we started doing this early, early on, and we built were hospital systems. So everything we do is under our sock to compliance. So as a software company, we’re very security conscious. And we have all the creds around our sock to audit and everything. So that helps, right, because as you’re, as you’re making, you know, when we come in, we want to make it light and easy. But we also want to make your bill building a little bit safer than maybe it was when you connect. And so that’s kind of a connector. We also have. We worked with KMC they have a great product called the commander. It’s an IoT gateway.

Unknown Speaker
Very familiar with that.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So if you have a commander, it’s actually the Easiest way to get data because we partnered with them where if you have a commander, the setup in the app, and I’ll show you when we get into the product demo, it’s it’s literally six character project ID, you press Save, and we have data sinking between their cloud and our cloud. And I think that’s where I’m hoping to see more and more people, you know, and more and more companies start doing that we’re sharing the cloud, the Cloud Connector and connect to the data, right,

Ken Smyers
not to throw a curveball into here. But you know, we’re seeing a surge now this mq TT protocol, and there’s a couple of classes coming up in the industry is that does that have a margin? Call it the protocol for the cloud? Does that throw a wrench in anything? Are you just able to adapt to that? No.

Unknown Speaker
So yeah, so the way we do our connector were able to use any connector and when you start saying things like mq TT to software guys, I’m weren’t having that protocol that’s been received yet, but I just want to hear it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those are the thing that I love, tell whenever we bring in new software developers, we talked about, you know, the building space, you know, software developers don’t know, the building’s, they’re just kind of confused by it. And they’re like, Well, why is the connector so hard? You know, it’s like in software, we’ve had HTTP for 30 plus years, we’ve had protocols that are known where if I have a protocol and software, and I’m an IBM mainframe, and you have a protocol, and you’re a Cisco, whatever, those protocols work exactly the same on both like it is like law, right? And you get into buildings, and you’re like, well, your back net isn’t my back net, which is in your back net. And it’s like I thought we were all the same. Why is this and it’s like, you start talking mq TT or anything that is just going to enhance it. It I mean, it makes it even easier, right? Sweet,

Ken Smyers
because I think there’s mq TT driver for Niagara already, too. So maybe that’s that’s an alternative to the

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, we’ve been playing around with with security. We’ve also been playing around with throughput a little bit right, how quick is it versus others? What does it cost to do? How do you set it up? And then also just being mindful of You know, if someone’s got a three, eight system, they’re still struggling on to, I don’t want to be a product that says, Hey, I got all this that works. But you’ve got to get the latest and four, you’re gonna have to not want to slap it on and get some data and then and then we’ll evolve with you, if you upgrade the machine, well, you’re going to get a better connector, or maybe it’s a better, better way. But again, try not to make it where I’m requiring you to change the points, change the names or do anything in that in that system.

Unknown Speaker
You know, Christmas is fantastic. Anyway, give us a quick demo here.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, sure. So, and, again, you guys can sign up online for a demo, we can do a demo of the product. When you sign up and you make a connection to your supervisor and get data flowing. The first seven days are free. And then you know, once the data is flowing, and everything’s running, you can see the results of the reports and everything. And then I think, you know, if you if you sign up for a demo, and you get this through controls now, in the next, you know, 60 days, you know, we’ll give you 10% off that that first year

Unknown Speaker
oh hi Got a second, I didn’t even get to do that. Let’s make a deal. That’s awesome. So you’re saying that they sign up with the demo and said control trends sent us. And then they actually bought the product in the next 60 days, they get a 10% discount on their first first year subscription. Is that what you’re saying?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think, sweet one wanting this in more people’s hands to get the feedback and to understand like, you know, what, what is working and not working in that market? Right, and making it a tool that you can use? Chrome is

Unknown Speaker
very generous. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. Thank you guys. So I’ll do a quick, quick, abbreviated demo, just to kind of show I think one of the parts is that we’re real. We actually do this. It’s not vaporware. So I’m going into the configuration. I’m showing a system here that I’ve connected. I have a connector. It’s connected to a supervisor that has four buildings, it’s like 18,000 points, I believe in this system. And then you know, once you map them in, the quick and dirty is we need we need the tags on the equipment. We need the tags on the on the points. And then you let the analytics engine start finding the analytics that it can apply the rules that it can apply, right? Obviously, all of our tags that we do in our cloud are based off the haystack tags, and we’re constantly keeping that updated to as the community grows and changes. It’s all about giving us more information. If you tell me more about the building, you’re going to unlock more rules that can apply. Right? If you tell me what parents on the air side of the box has, I can use that to do more expansive rules. I can do that to do more root cause correlation. But it’s not a requirement, right? It’s again, it’s how much you can give me about the building and then trying to get the results to do something that you didn’t know or provide you insights you didn’t already have. So the clever thing we kind of did around our mapping and tagging is you know, we found that you you get everything in the sun when you hook it up to to a system right. And so what we’ve done here and this is the classic demo version that I had a perfect integrator. And they had a, you know, if you look here on the right, they had 753 zone temperatures and the name of the vas was zone temp, all that was so sweet of them that they didn’t, they actually made it a legible name. But the idea is that if you group them up, if that was I N six, like we have an example of 1000, Bv boxes that had i n six, it’s not a requirement to go change that in the building coming in when you have the data in our app, now you’re working in our cloud app. And I can easily go and change what point a set of tags I want on that, right? And we’re using the haystack guidelines to the to the to the group of tags. So I say that’s zone temperature, right? And once I make that change, that’s going to change all 753 of them. And as you start Dude, this is where you really work in our app. This is where we say it can be done in a couple hours of you start working through this list of points. And then what happens in the background is our rules engine is constantly trying to Find what now matches what you’ve just told me about the building. If all you have is own temperatures, well, then you’re only going to get a handful of rules on each VIP box. Right? Then you start adding me about you start adding stuff around the boiler, you start adding in around the chiller, all of a sudden, more and more rules can be applied. We call those candidates in our system. So in this example, there would be 5000 candidates, and I would select them all and I would apply them and now I’ve just applied 5000 rules to those four buildings. And now we can jump into fusion and start seeing, what does that telling me right and then let’s go let’s go to work. Let me see what that’s doing. A quick question we always get here is, well, can I can I write my Can I write my own rules, we do two week sprints. We do have some computed points. And we have some advanced features that allow you to write your own logic but again, in the quick and dirty of how can I just make this something you can use on your building a couple hours and start seeing what’s happening. You can come into our rules. Let’s do a what’s a good one that said the dead bands always a good one. Right. So what you’re able to do is when you bulk apply these rules All of our defaults parameters, and all of our rules are based on ASHRAE, 90 dot one, and ASHRAE high performance. So the dead band example, right, it’s going to look at and it’s going to use the ASHRAE, five degrees. Not everyone loves that. Right? You might say that’s a little too noisy for me, I need that to be, you know, two degrees, you can come in here, and everything we do, you can do individually, or you can do in bulk, right. So when I can make a change, I can say, you know what, I want all of these to be two degrees, instead of five degrees, I apply it and immediately those rules now we’re gonna use a 30 minute delay and a two degree deadband instead of a five degree. Right? So having those knobs to quickly be able to adjust.

Unknown Speaker
And then really the, you know, not getting too much in and we can do a deeper demo for those that want it. We have a lot of pages around auditing of the points that are coming in because we believe that you have to monitor the data integrity as much as you have to monitor everything else and Really the end of it is down to our reports. We’re coming out with new reports constantly. And these reports start encompassing our, our root cause. So we take all those analytics we apply, and now we can bubble them up into something that maybe you can, you can take action on. So quickly for this one I’ll go into, you know, you can see all the results of the analytics. That’s great. Oh, really, it boils down to a weekly or monthly report. Let’s do monthly because it usually shows a little better data. Let’s go monthly. I mean, look at this guy. Right. So these are automatically run. So again, after you configure your points, there’s nothing left to do. you’ve applied the rules, the machines running, you can come in here and start seeing the results of it. So did you guys see this pretty clearly? Right, so now I can look at it as this is a simple VAP scorecard. So this goes through and it looks at all of the VA V’s that I have in this in this building. I have a score on them that’s based on zone temp airflow damper Some parents stuff again, all those rules we applied. I could go into detail I can show you all the charts and graphs but really I want to get down to Why are my five vv boxes? Why are these the five worst ones? Well there’s some root cause right maybe your minimum airflow set points too high, maybe your your your sense and your sensor seems to be inaccurate. Right now I’m giving you poignant checklist to go and do something in the building. And this is where we spend a tremendous amount of time and this is kind of where we see this evolving right charts and graphs turning into actions and answers and like you saw on the list there we have reports for o Rs. We have them for air handlers. We have them for controller performances for you know actuator throw, I mean you start getting a bunch of engineers in a room and they come up with enough reports the last two years of development right? They’re pretty pretty excited to start building this stuff out. So

Ken Smyers
you know, you said something real quick and I might be off topic just a little bit you said two week sprints. And then you said earlier how you make improvements enhances is that really your style so everybody else’s problems. Getting Things Done. You guys work? Yeah. I mean, they commence two weeks to make enhancements.

Unknown Speaker
That’s extremely so. Yeah, that’s not what I mean. It’s that’s kind of normal software. So any software company out there unless you’re really big, you start actually doing deployments like live like Facebook and Netflix, they do live deployments. What we do is every two weeks, you know, the devs are working on a bunch of code, that code goes into a staging, it gets QA and then that goes into production. And so like clockwork, every two weeks, we are deploying a new version of both of our apps. And that can include more rules, more reports, better graphs, better graphics, you know, we’re always constantly trying to improve every aspect of our app. And you’ll see that and so if you say, Hey, you know, I need more rules on chilled water beams. Well, they’re coming, and I can tell you that they’ll be on this date. And then when you log in on that Friday, you’ll see Oh, I’ve got 50 chilled water beam rules I can apply to this building great. You press click, you apply them, you start seeing the results of them.

Unknown Speaker
Tell you what you are really, really on the road. Right Path here, man, I can’t tell you much. Thank you for coming in and doing a demo and talking with us today. Can we get to come back on the show? Maybe in a couple? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. post on what’s happening. So let’s remember, Chris, thank you so much for the time. Remember, if you sign up, get a demo in the next 60 days and buy the product Chris has graciously if you say control trends cenis has graciously offered to give you 10% off on off of your first year’s subscription rate. So, Chris, thank you so much. resolute, bi calm. Is that the web right?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, actually will change it if you mentioned Tesla driver.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, there you go, brother. Well, what do you think? Uh, Chris, man, you and I both dabbled dabble in the world of analytics. And, you know, we’ve seen them all and are most of them at least people in our industry. And Chris sort of brings a fresh perspective how you think he’s gonna do here?

Ken Smyers
I think they’re gonna do remarkably well. They’re gonna get their share market blood, that’s for sure. Because of the, you know, I just want to bring something back, you know, to talk about real quickly and that was, you know, five, five Six years ago, we’ve wondered where Silicon Valley or that what Silicon Valley represented, that was a new perspective into our industry, you know, and slowly but surely, you know, we did pass a logic last week, you know, resolute ability intelligence, my goodness, is this refreshing that we’ve got a whole new launch of innovative products and solutions that we can be a part of, because as we saw our industry be disrupted and shrink with components and the architecture flattened the opportunities to sell as a distributor where they were parts. Now we’re getting really truly pushed into the smart section of the solution side of the equation where we do still have a very important role to play distribution is going to do Long live distribution.

Unknown Speaker
Well, absolutely, I think so. Kenny, and well listen, you know, hats off to Richard Newberry and the team at KMC. I mean, the fact that, you know, they’ve gotten together with these folks and you can use the commander as a way to patent the passes information, these the through is, I think Again, a testament to how you know KMC is just continually, you know, staying on top and staying out front.

Ken Smyers
Yeah, you’re right. And we again, we got to be a part of that and seen saw behind the curtains of how Richard Newberry and his team were were the first people to partner with Dell and IBM, back when it was not fashionable. And it was it was, you know, it was definitely a departure from the standard vendors approach towards the market. It was the collaboration.

Unknown Speaker
I think the story of you know, talking about fashionable I think this story bears repeating, especially for you know, our younger listeners about you know, the power of perseverance. And if you haven’t heard this story before, it’s like this, Richard Newberry, the CEO at KMC controls, really sees that Silicon Valley and smart building controls are going to merge. So he goes and starts calling on Dell and IBM and Intel and all these folks, and you know, sort of to no avail right and then was it Dell, who originally contacted Yeah, so so the story goes after, you know, months and months of persistent persistence. Dell calls up and goes, Hey, we lost this guy’s card but he’s but he’s been trying to get us to talk to him. He’s a really well dressed guy, the Oh Richard Newbery, that was it so So, appearances matter. And as I like to say in sales be memorable. So if everybody else is wearing a suit and tie then maybe you wear a T shirt, if everybody else is wearing t shirts, wear wear a suit and tie, but be memorable and Richard was number one, and then you know, the partnership with Intel and Dell. Again, so again, Richard Newberry one of our favorite people in the industry, a great leader and KMC like so many of the companies or industries really make great products so KMC controls comm check them out,

Ken Smyers
Dieter

Unknown Speaker
well, Kenny spires I tell you what, what an education we’ve gotten this week. So good stuff.

Ken Smyers
Yeah, go again, in these periods of black, you know, with the pandemic, you know, just settling in around us. The the The important thing is to maintain a good positive disposition we will come out of this it will work you know don’t don’t expose yourself You don’t have to of course take care of looking on the people that you love and may don’t you might not think of them very often but you know, the neighbors and people in your community might need help and don’t have the means to reach out so you know, go look for somebody to help but don’t touch them maintain your social distance. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker
And in for me, you know, my sort of solid form of protest against this this horrible virus is I will not allow my facial hair to grow back until this thing is done. So please,

Ken Smyers
thank you think he shaved about five years off, you know, hey,

Unknown Speaker
well hope so. My wife didn’t like it so much, but, but I told her man until the coronavirus is done shaving every day man gonna help support the razor blade people. And the shaving

Ken Smyers
was interesting. Like most hockey teams, nobody shaves until they get out of the playoffs or when they win the Stanley Cup. You’re going in the other direction.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, like I said, you know, one of the keys to sales and market is be memorable. Do something different than other people do so all right buddy with that man a very, very special thanks to our guests and good friend least Modarres for the for the great knowledge he shared and also to Chris holiday from resolute we appreciate both those guys and and their contribution to our industry. We appreciate you our community. Hey, stay safe out there. And remember, be bold, stay in control, wash your hands

Ken Smyers
In deed

Transcribed by https://otter.ai