[Kurt Armstrong]
I'll give a quick introduction for myself. My name is Kurt Armstrong, and I am the Chief Information Officer for Armstrong International. My primary responsibility is, of course, keeping all of the I.T. Operations and business systems up and working at Armstrong, but passionate about the Internet of Things and software development, specifically where we're providing tools available to our customers and specifically with an application called Sage that I'll talk about a little bit more later. Bob, introduce yourself, please.
[Bob Nunn]
Yeah, I'm Bob Nunn. I'm the CEO of a technology startup company called Everactive, and that's what I've spent most of my career doing is building startup companies from raw ideas all the way up through big commercial businesses. So we'll talk more about Everactive as we go forward. But I'm very excited to be here with you, Kurt, and looking forward to the conversation.
[Kurt Armstrong]
Yeah, me too. So, a little bit more about Armstrong International. Armstrong was founded in 1900 by my great, great grandfather Adam Armstrong. We've changed a lot over time, but our core has really been around the thermal utility space for a while now, specifically in the steam and hot water industries. We focus on the industrial side and also on the commercial side petrochemical refineries, chemical refineries, hospitals, universities, government facilities, food facilities all across the board, and again we specialize on the utility side of those systems. We've got over 20 locations around the world in both manufacturing and sales, and we provide these products and services to over 100 countries throughout the world. Really important to me is our culture, and who we are with our purposes, as I've always been told through generations before me, we're not just trying to be the biggest company, we're trying to be the best company, and with that, we want to provide enjoyable experiences to every one of our customers. Every partner like you, Bob at Everactive, in every employee that we deal with; that's truly who we are at the core.
I'll let you share a little bit more about Everactive in a minute, but I wanted to really kind of dig into what this topic is about that we want to speak about, and it's the movement towards a decarbonized world reducing carbon emissions, reducing energy waste. A lot of companies are making pledges to be carbon neutral by a certain time, 2050. Some companies are more aggressive than that, and it requires a lot of planning and strategy, and time to get there. It's, it's a journey. You don't just get there on your night, as you know, and I'd like to talk about a couple areas that Armstrong has really provided opportunities for companies to reduce their carbon footprint. Specifically with Sage, our IoT platform. There is an opportunity within a steam system that I consider very low-hanging fruit that some customers might be aware of or maybe not, and that's their steam traps. On average, 5-15% of customer steam traps are in a failed condition, specifically blow through or leaking, and that's wasting energy. It's putting extra CO2 into the atmosphere that's not needed. And it's as simple as going through a process of auditing those traps at least once a year at the bare minimum, identifying the failed traps in repairing or replacing them. You see instant savings from a monetary standpoint, and you're helping the environment. So this is Armstrong's recommendation for a first step at going towards decarbonization which is minimizing your waste. We have some solutions with our Sage platform. It's an IoT platform that allows you to track all of these steam trap assets all the attributes about them. And most importantly, we have a tool called the UMT, our Universal Mobile Tester, where anybody with very little training can go test the steam trap with the acoustic sensor listening to the trap, take a temperature reading through our I. R. reader and send that data via Bluetooth back to our Sage mobile app, goes to the algorithm and it tells you the condition of the trap right away. This is giving you real-time information on is a trap good, blow through, bad, if it is, it tells you real-time losses, pushes into the cloud, and if you're on the corporate side, you can see this across all of your locations around the world. So real-time data from the UMT. But, to be best in class, you shouldn't be just testing these just once a year, and this is where Everactive really comes into play. So I'll pass it over to you, Bob, and if you can, talk a little bit about what Everactive does in the real-time monitoring space.
[Bob Nunn]
Well, I think our partnerships are so great because we do share a lot of the same values in terms of delighting our customers and not just trying to be the biggest, but being the best and solving real problems. At its heart, Everactive is a technology company. We are started by two professors that really have invented breakthroughs in semiconductor design that allows ultra low power circuits. What got them excited was the concept of removing the battery out of the IoT sensor, and they got excited because of the forecast people were making early on in the development of the internet of things, about a trillion connected devices. And they did the math and said if there's a trillion connected devices and they all have batteries, even if the battery life is extended out to 10 years, you're going to be changing a quarter billion batteries a day. And that's just no one's gonna do that. If you think about your own home, it's a pain in the butt to change just the smoke detector batteries. So it's a real problem. It's going to limit the use of this new technology if we don't figure out how to remove the battery. So that was really the reason the company got started. Unlike Armstrong, we've only been around for about 10 years. We really only have been in a commercial sales mode for about two years. So the first eight years of the company was focused on technology development, really changing the way things were done and then developing new products. And just out of pure coincidence almost, we chose steam trap monitoring as the first application of this technology. So that you can imagine if you had a battery list sensor, you can apply it to many, many different problems. But one of the problems we're looking for is something that would have a big impact, So the decarbonization would have an ROI, a compelling ROI for our customer, we have something that we could be proud of in terms of what we're delivering, And then also take advantage of the idea of putting sensors everywhere. So that by removing the battery, you can really move towards pervasive sensing and get to where we wanted to find something where there's a lot of a certain asset that we could go monitor, which happens to be steam traps. And as you said, state of the art today is to use a UMT and check your traps once a year, and a lot of people don't get around to it once a year. So they do it once every other year or whatever they can. So with our battery-less technology, we've enabled the concept of continuous monitoring. So you're checking your traps every minute and developing a rich set of data around what's going on with the steam traps.
[Kurt Armstrong]
Yeah, into, you know, maybe it's helpful for some people to kind of quantify what this difference is between the UMT, which is good, testing once a year to real-time monitoring. So, a single steam trap in a blow-through condition is the equivalent of having 2 to 23 cars on the road depending on pressure going to the trap and other variables. So if you have a trap in a fail condition, that's a lot of waste and CO2 emissions. If you test the trap once a year and it fails the next day, you could have 364 days of a failed trap that you don't know about with real-time monitoring. You're getting those readings every, you know, 15 minutes. So you're going to know within 15 minutes so that you can take action, huge savings. Best way to go for sure. Can you talk a little bit more about the technology? One thing that I'm a technology guy,, of course, and one thing that intrigued me about Everactive wanting to push our organization forward with digitization and the internet of things, is not just the energy harvesting, but really how you guys have developed a very unique product to be able to be battery-less and still get the data sent out to, to the cloud.
[Bob Nunn]
Yeah, it's a complex problem, and harvesting is just part of it, and it's interesting. Harvesting technology has been around for a long time, so you're probably familiar with a calculator that runs on indoor light. The thing with that, the calculator didn't do much because it wasn't enough power. The problem with indoor energy sources is you don't get much power. You don't get much energy to drive the electronics. So that's really what the founders have Everactive decided to approach was okay. We know how much energy we get from indoor harvesting, and we can harvest energy from different sources. We can use light, we can use temperature, temperature differential, like a hot steam pipe, and then the air temperature - that differential can generate energy. We can use vibration or RF waves. There are some new harvesting sources coming out, but they all have the same thing in common, which is a very small amount of energy, and it's like 1000 times less energy than what you need to run a traditional full-powered calculator, much less than iPhone or something like that. So harvesting had not really, even though the technology has been around, it hasn't really caught on because you can't run the electronics effectively to do something useful with it. And so that's what the founders at Everactive really tried to attack. They set the goal, let's reduce the power of the electronics 1000 times versus what we could get off the market. And it was a complex problem from the point of view that you not only have to collect and store and manage the small amounts of energy that you get, but you also have to be able to communicate that out to the cloud. You have to do some compute locally because of the trade-off between how much computing you do at the sensor versus sending data up to the cloud, and then you have to integrate in all these sensor technologies as well. So a lot of those sensor technologies are quite common today, but to use them in a way that reduces the power is really the hard part. So that's really the key to Everactive. It's not just the low-power electronics that we've created but really the integration of all these technologies along with the new networking technologies, specifically focused on battery-less operation, that allows us to do something that no one else has been able to accomplish.
[Kurt Armstrong]
Yeah, it's very underestimated how much effort and work that you guys have put into that thing to make it work. I appreciate it very much. One other thing I'd like to kind of go through is for a customer that is interested. Maybe they've done a survey three years ago on their trap system, not very active with it trying to move them up that ladder of getting to best in class. I'd like to talk through how they might do that. How can they take action? For one, of course, reach out to an Armstrong Representative or to Everactive. But in reality, for Sage, and from my standpoint, the very first thing to do is get Sage. So it's free right now; you can track a certain amount of traps for free. It takes five minutes or less to get set up on the web and on the mobile app. start putting some of your traps in there, understand the system. And then work with a company like Everactive to perhaps do a trial, depending on how many traps you want to start monitoring. Can you talk a little bit through how a customer would engage with Everactive to go through a trial and hopefully a full system at some point?
[Bob Nunn]
Yeah, we're huge fans of Sage, and I think part of the reason we've ended up together is that you, as Armstrong, have been very proactive in bringing technology into the industrial space, and Sage is a great example. I think it's been on the market for more than five years as a way to collect data about your steam traps, whether that initially was manually or now automated through the UMT. But when we engage with the customer, the first question we have is what kind of information do they have on their same traps. And you would be surprised a lot of it's very old or very incomplete because the factory look setups can change. Steam trap steam systems can be adjusted over time, and then they just don't know where their steam traps are, what's going on. So our first mission with most customers is to do is what we call a site survey, which is, we'll go out with the UMT we'll go out and help them figure out where all the traps are. We'll take what we call metadata, but it's really just the information about the trap. So you know what kind of traps are using the size and the take down the pressure of the steam system and the cost of steam, and with those parameters, we can actually figure out a very accurate return on investment using continuous monitoring technology. And that's normally where the conversation starts, around what are the economics, how much will it cost me, versus what do I get back from the savings that you talked about in terms of wasted energy. Oftentimes the sustainability or the reduction in greenhouse gases become equally important as the ROI. But the conversation normally starts around ROI. We do trials or pilots with customers more and more now because of the reference customers that we have. we've been able through our partnership, we've created a great list of reference customers, world-renowned names that are using the continuous steam trap monitoring product. But for customers that want to engage on a trial basis we'll start a trial, will normally pick some subset of the steam traps that are available, and we'll run that trial for two or three months. And what we say is we like to get enough data to prove out the premise. So well, do you know we'll shoot for 50 or 100 steam traps right off the bat. And then, with that data, it reinforces all the premises that were making during that discussion around the ROI. Because the data sells itself basically when you start seeing that the failure that you're catching or even other issues, you'd be surprised. But maybe some of the people listening to this would. When you start collecting data across your entire steam distribution system, you start getting new insights about what's going on even beyond your steam trap. And so the expertise that Armstrong brings, along with the technology that Everactive applies, has really been a great combination to not only address the steam trap problem but really the efficiency of your entire steam system.
[Kurt Armstrong]
Definitely, yup, collecting the data accurately in an organized fashion allows the experts with the domain knowledge to come in and help give suggestions based on that data, but it's critical to have that good data there. Maybe just since we have a little more time here. What are some of your thoughts towards the future? So we're obviously doing things with real-time monitoring IoT. You're using algorithms to help determine the condition of the trap from your sensors. We're seeing a lot of things happening in the space of machine learning, artificial intelligence, you know, building up skillsets and outcomes, and solutions for providing those. Any thoughts you have on where that space is going, maybe in the next five years.
[Bob Nunn]
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are absolutely critical. So we already have a data science team at Everactive, and part of what we've done, the actual measurements that we take in the factory are quite simple, but it's really making those measurements into insightful information. That's where the data analytics come in. And so it's already a huge part of what we do, but it will be even more important as we drive more of that compute capability down to the edge, and the edge is the asset itself. It's not some artificial gateway or something but really doing the compute in the sensor so that you can trade off how much power you're using for compute versus sending information up into the cloud. So if you can, if you can take raw data turned into information then send out KPIs or other indicators, you save power, you can do more with your battery list device. So that's a big part of the future. I think probably the biggest thing, there's a couple of inhibitors to the adoption of the IoT. There's probably more than just a couple, but one is batteries. People are unwilling to put, you know, right now you send someone around once a year with the UMT to do it. If you were to put batteries, let's say you have 500 steam traps in your factory, all of a sudden, you're gonna need a full-time guy to go around and change batteries.
[Kurt Armstrong]
You might, you might do it once, but you'll probably not do it again.
[Bob Nunn]
Exactly. And then those sensors end up just being dead weights on your pipe. They're without the power; they're not doing anything. So that, that's one of them is removed the battery and that's really Everactive's mission. The other is to make the data usable. Make it so that it's information that is an active part of the operation of the facility. And I think that's where we're working together with Sage as a great interface for all that data, improving the ability for people to use that to make real-time decisions and feeding that information into work order systems and historians and things like that. I think that's the other big obstacle. People, we really got to make the data useful. It's not just present raw data,
[Kurt Armstrong]
Yup. Give suggestions recommendations based on the data output as well for sure.
[Bob Nunn]
The future for this technology, we'd like to say we create new data streams where you didn't previously think data streams were possible. And so the idea is that we're creating these new connection points between the physical world and the internet and then once you get those new connections, what you can do with that data is amazing. And so a lot of it we don't even know yet. As you were talking about the secondary insights, you get from a steam system. Imagine if you had all your steam system and all your motors supporting that same system, All feeding up into the same analytics database. So I know that sounds science fiction, but it really is where we're going. The idea of pervasive sensing and machine learning. You're going to change the way that we optimize our factories.
[Kurt Armstrong]
No, I completely agree. When you get monitoring points on things outside of just the trap, you really get better insights of the system as a whole. And that's where the experts income in and really help tailor, you know, adjustments that might be needed to truly fix the root cause of what might be hurting a processor system. Very good. Anything else that's on your mind, Bob?
[Bob Nunn]
I have a simple question for you, which is how did you get the insight to create Sage five years ago? Do you know what drove you guys to think that far ahead? Because it really was pioneering?
[Kurt Armstrong]
Yeah. You know, I think for me coming into the organization relatively young growing up with technology, I expected something different, and in our industry, when I saw the ways that things were still happening, literally still clipboards and paper in a lot of cases with trap management, I saw an opportunity for bringing technology to improve, make things faster, better, simpler too. It was very labor-intensive and complicated to get systems set up. My goal is five minutes or less than you can get started, which is what we've done. So really just a passion for making people's lives easier and simpler. And the advantage of having that, that data when you need it, where you need it at any time so you can make better decisions. That was where my passion came from
[Bob Nunn]
And that's why it's been such a great partnership.
[Kurt Armstrong]
Glad you guys chose to go after steam traps as your first product. So Bob, maybe just to wrap up, here again, I think if customers are interested in taking that first step specifically towards improving their energy efficiency, reducing CO2 emissions in the thermal space, look at your steam traps, reach out to Armstrong International. You can go to armstronginternational.com/decarbonize to learn more about the services and products we offer. And then Bob for you Everactive.com. They can find out we're active in your technology, and these products are seamless, so I don't know if we hit this, but on everything from the sensor collecting the data comes through Sage seamlessly, so you get all that information through this entire solution, this platform. Anything else you'd like to add to take?
[Bob Nunn]
No, just there's been a great partnership, and I really see this as the example of what industry four dot oh can be where you take 100 plus years of experience with the application and combine it with brand new technology that's really doing something no one has ever seen before and making it into a solution for the customer, so I'm super excited about our work together,
[Kurt Armstrong]
Agreed, agreed, looking forward to what we're gonna do next to the future. So thank you, Bob. I appreciate it. Thank you, everyone.
