VO: You are listening to Cool Air Hot Takes.
Charles Jelen: Welcome, welcome to Cool Air Hot Takes of building HVAC and Energy Podcast, mixing a little bit of Dan's mustache pomade, and we got something special here. I'm Charlie Gellin, along with my running mate here. Dan Gentry, thank
Dan Gentry: you so much for being here. Every couple weeks we get together and talk about HVAC headlines.
We, of course, give you some hot takes. And then we have an expert interview with industry
Charles Jelen: leaders, and this week it's Steven Zaki, he's the Chief Operating Officer at Nolo. They're a cloud-based software company that's all about asset management. So they're helping companies manage their people, their places, and their equipment.
Later on we're gonna do HVAC headlines. We have a new feature, we don't really have a title for it yet, so if you have ideas, please send them in. Cool air.hot takes@trane.com. We're generically calling it Dan in the factory.
Dan Gentry: Dan in the factory. It's a working title
Charles Jelen: and then we're gonna wrap it up with stat of the day.
Dan Gentry: Quick shout out before you proceed. Uh, Stephen Scott did the right thing. He sent an email in to Cool Air dot, hot takes@train.com, and his email goes to answer the burning question from season two episode one. Yes, there is a place where the construction industry shuts down during the summer. In Quebec.
Quebec only. By the way, the construction industry has a two week shutdown at the end of July, so even better than one week as requested. Steven, I have to say that construction holiday actually was the inspiration. Oh,
Charles Jelen: really? Of
Dan Gentry: four months. So Steven, thank you very much. Speaking of hot Takes, Charles.
Charles Jelen: You always wanna jump right into the hot take.
There's no bonding and rapport, you know? No, no chitchat. Well, we do have to talk about one thing though, because I got ahead of myself. Okay. I was just
Dan Gentry: getting a little excited. We're both a little tired.
Charles Jelen: You, you, Ron Burgundi, that one you just read. What was, what was in the notes? Good night. San Diego. Yes, we have been traveling today was an odd one because we both got back into lacrosse today.
Where were you?
Dan Gentry: I left uh, San Francisco at 1250 this morning. Got to Minneapolis six 30 this morning. Drove home, closed my eyes for a little bit and uh, here we are, we're in the studio.
Charles Jelen: You had me on three hours. I was up at about four and I was out in Boston. By the way, I think we might have some new listeners.
Charles Lee, Sam Elizabeth, the rest of the team, if you hear this, thank you. But we were out there for some data center work and uh, we met with the team out there. It was great. Thanks for hosting us guys. Really appreciate it.
Dan Gentry: Cool. Air hot. Takes coast to coast.
Charles Jelen: There you go. There you go. So I do, I I'm, I'm gonna get into this hot take here.
I think the most commented on Hot Take. That I've had is, do you wanna take a guess on what it was? I'm gonna guess the water heater. Yeah, it's the water heater. Alright. So I thought for season two I'd try to bring another one back. Okay. So my hot take is that everyone should clean their dryer vent once every two years.
Danny, how often do you clean your dryer? Vent
Dan Gentry: cleaning might be relative. So I haven't done like the full on beginning to end clean, but I did. Pull out like all the fuzzies that were collecting at the outside vent started a nice fire with it in the fire pit, which made me realize that could probably be hazardous.
Yes, it's extremely
Charles Jelen: hazardous. Yes.
Dan Gentry: Burning down of one's house. All
Charles Jelen: right, so here you go. Listen, this is a very easy one. If your house is 10 years old or older, and you've never done this. You gotta do it. It's super easy. Go to Amazon, Walmart, Menards, wherever. It's a $15 vent dryer with a drill attachment.
So it looks like a chimney sweep, but it's small fits in your dryer vent, and it hooks up to your like Milwaukee drill
Dan Gentry: and it just got
Charles Jelen: some extenders or whatever, and it's got some extenders. So all you do is you put it in the vent. You turn your drill on, you push it down in there and it cleans it all out, and then you turn your dryer on and it just
Dan Gentry: blows off.
It's gotta be peer satisfaction on the, uh, it's,
Charles Jelen: it is on the outlet. So there you go. That's my hot take for the week. What
Dan Gentry: do you got? I'm gonna go culinary on my take today's, so I was out in California and when one does I landed and I went to In-N-Out Burger, I came to the conclusion that Culver's has a better burger than In-N-Out Burger.
That is my hot take. And, uh, email us cooler hot takes@train.com. I'm imagining there's some folks that may disagree out there, but so
Charles Jelen: the listeners out there that have no idea what Dan's talking about, Culver's is a Midwest, it's a Wisconsin product. It's farm to table, burger shop, food
Dan Gentry: and their thing of butter.
Fast food variety. It's a butter burger, so you got the nice grill my yard on it.
Charles Jelen: So that's my take. Alright listener. Remember we want your hot takes and questions as well. So let us know. You can send us an email, cool air.hot takes@train.com. You can leave us a review on Apple. You can leave us a comment on YouTube or Spotify and you can also find all of the information from the show in the show notes.
Dan Gentry: Next, let's get to your HVAC headlines,
VO: HVAC. Headlines your news today.
Charles Jelen: Alright, listener, it's 3:00 PM in Mankato. Here's your headlines. Headline number one. Top emerging technologies of 2025. Sounds good, right? I don't even know where to start here. So, uh, proceed. All right, I'll read through some of the interesting ones. So, number one here, structural battery composites.
Gonna have to explain that a little more. All right. So these are batteries, but they're part of a frame, so they're structural instead of just a battery. Oh. So think of like a door that has batteries in it.
Dan Gentry: That could be like anything like from cars to like buildings.
Charles Jelen: Absolutely. All right. Number two, osmotic power systems.
So these are special membranes that generate electricity through the differing salt concentration between seawater and freshwater.
Dan Gentry: Oh, I think I've heard of this.
Charles Jelen: I don't know much about this. In my mind, it sounds like a fuel cell where we're doing similar technology, but we're using the salt concentration difference to drive electrolysis or to drive some sort of electrical charge where we can get energy out of it.
Yeah. Ah, that's interesting. Mm-hmm. Advanced nuclear technologies. That one we've talked about a couple times on the show. So decreasing costs, simplifying designs, improving safety. A lot of modular reactor technology coming out. This one's interesting. GLP ones for neurodegenerative disease. Oh, so some medical advancements here, huh?
Well, GLP ones, it's like Ozempic, so it's like re-engineering those weight loss drugs. For things like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. Oh. So that, I think that's really cool. Yeah. Okay. Collaborative sensing. This one's cool. Distributed sensors combined with AI for better decision making and autonomous technology.
So this is like autonomous driving cars and super cool drones and all that good stuff. Right. And the last one, which I think is very important is generative watermarking. So invisible watermarks on AI content to trace the origins and promote accountability. Oh, so you go, those are your emerging trends for 2025, or technologies I should say.
I like it. Yeah. What's your favorite? You got one in there? That battery thing is pretty cool.
Dan Gentry: I, I hadn't heard about that before.
Charles Jelen: Yeah. My only problem with that is it's like batteries are already pretty expensive and makes it more expensive. I mean, imagine like, I need to replace my battery. All right.
Four new car doors. Okay. Sounds expensive. True. Yeah.
Dan Gentry: So let me guess your favorite one is autonomous biochemical sensors. I do like
Charles Jelen: that one. I think that one actually. Uh, I think that one's gonna be something that we actually see. And generative watermarking is very important. Yeah, it seems like that's something that like, just should be a thing.
Alright, headline number two. I purely put this in there because I'm hoping somebody at Solo Stove is listening and they send us a cooler. Two coolers, so we can try this out.
Dan Gentry: We will be checking our, uh, inbox, our UPS delivery store.
Charles Jelen: Yes, yes. Reach out solo. So please. So they came out with a new cooler, it's called the Windchill 47 Cooler and Mobile Air Conditioning System.
So it is a cooler that has an air conditioning system built into the lid. It looks just like a cooler. It doesn't look like a for ice, crazy contraption. No, you have to have ice in it. It uses the ice as part of the cooling mechanism, but there is a fan in there. There's a misting mode. Oh, Uhhuh.
Dan Gentry: Okay.
Charles Jelen: And it's got a battery in it, like a Milwaukee or a DeWalt battery pack.
You click that in and then you can hook up your phone, you can hook up whatever. There's probably speakers in it, but it's got a little bit of everything fancy and sounds really cool
Dan Gentry: from what backyard wood stoves to, uh, powered coolers. It
Charles Jelen: is very
Dan Gentry: interesting
Charles Jelen: how they made the leap from. Fire pits to coolers.
Dan Gentry: Hey, they're keeping things hot, keeping things cold. Maybe we got, uh, some synergies here.
Charles Jelen: Yeah, it's a cool looking cooler though. So if you're looking for product testers and you want some feedback, uh, send them our way.
Dan Gentry: Yeah. And so we can send you some stickers if that you're interested. That's right. I like it.
Charles Jelen: Put 'em on your cooler. Yep. All right. Up next, we've got Steven Zakys, chief Operating Officer at Nolo. Don't go anywhere.
Let's talk comfort, eh? Dan, what's your favorite kind of comfort?
Dan Gentry: I would say, uh, sunny
Charles Jelen: South Florida in like July. Okay. Well mine is the kind of comfort that doesn't make you cry when you see your utility bill.
Dan Gentry: I like that. We've just, the thing introducing trains precedent, hybrid rooftop, dual fuel, heat pump, the system, that's basically the HVAC equipment of having both brains.
And biceps.
Charles Jelen: Unfortunately, we have neither of those things. So in mild weather it runs on electric power. When things get frigid, it flips to gas heat, giving you the best of both worlds.
Dan Gentry: So whether you're heating or cooling in a mild climate or cold climate trains. Got you.
Charles Jelen: All right, listener, we've got with us today a real adventure seeker. This man loves to get out in nature and is described by his friends. As restless. His family vacations often revolve around camping, hiking, including a recent trip to the Galapagos Islands. Uh, speaking of the family side, Steven lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and three daughters.
He grew up in Massachusetts. So I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume he's a Red Sox, a Patriots fan, and he probably loves a good bowl of chowder, who doesn't? So welcome to Cool Air, hot Takes. Steven Zaki, how you doing? Good. Good. Thanks for having me. And yes, I love a good bull chow. Absolutely. Well, that's good.
Well, Steven, we're gonna get into Olo and, and what asset management software is and how it works. But first, the name of the show. Cool Air Hot Takes. We ask all our guests to come with a hot take. What do you got for today?
Stephen Zetarski: So my hot take is information is a diminishing. Commodity. And what I mean by that is the more we drive to ai, the more we drive to internet availability and information, the less common knowledge is of value and the more expertise is needed.
Charles Jelen: Yeah, that's interesting. You know, one of the general topics or. Threads that AI usually generates is like, is it going to take over massive amounts of people's jobs? And I think what you're getting at is like there is still going to be a human layer in there with the expertise side of it. Mm-hmm. It's just there is a layer that is going to probably be taken over.
Stephen Zetarski: Absolutely. Yeah. I don't want to date myself and sound old 'cause I was definitely not born before the calculator, but a calculator doesn't change people's need to know math. Mm-hmm. But it does change your need to memorize the the math tables. Yep. You also have to know if it's directionally correct. If you made a mistake in the calculator, did I actually hit divide instead of multiply?
You have to know and have the intelligence and the thought process to make sure what you're inputting is actually coming out with output you need.
Charles Jelen: Absolutely. That's good. Okay. Let's get into some of the basics. I think a lot of our listeners, Steven, are probably in the same boat that that Dan and I are in, which is basic level understanding like what is this stuff when you hear asset management software.
What does asset management software do? What are the kind of different flavors of it in the space? And then we'll get into some of the specifics on nulo.
Stephen Zetarski: Yeah, absolutely. So asset management software at its core manages the large equipment and sometimes the small equipment within any enterprise, uh, operation, whether it's the back office facilities management like an hvac.
What Nolo has done is taken that and really tried to drive the future along with a few other companies to move it not just from the actual devices, but all their interactions with the real estate portfolio. So what we started was as A-C-M-M-S,
Charles Jelen: one thing I learned really quick, when you type into Google Asset management software, it is a jumble of three and four letter acronyms.
So perfect. I-W-S-I-W-M-S-C-M-M-S. Yep. Explain those a little bit more.
Stephen Zetarski: Perfect. Perfect. Yeah. A-C-M-M-S is a computerized maintenance management system. Basically it's managing the break fix and repairs of assets. It's that simple. What we've done is we started there and now we've moved into what's called IWMS, which is integrated workplace management software and solutions.
So it's not very complicated at all, but you think about it as, so we managed the real estate of that building. And we manage the assets in that building. We're still in the facilities business. Mm-hmm. But we've also added things like space planning and space management. So Charlie, where you and I would sit in a building, you may not need to sit next to me, but you wanna sit next to Dan if you're in a corporate office.
'cause you guys work together often. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. Absolutely. But it's, the three of us are going to a, a location in Boston, Massachusetts, and we wanna work together. You're gonna use your mobile app to say we wanna sit near each other 'cause we're working together for the week. Hmm. And then the last part of it is really around capital planning and capital projects.
So all these assets are very expensive, as we know, A chiller, a large hvac, an MRI, what those are, are capital expenditures. So they run over a very long period of time, somewhere up to 40 years. Mm-hmm. And you wanna manage that capital expense in understand the system, when's the optimal time to replace it?
Yep. Or repair it or plan for it in your budget cycles, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 years out.
Charles Jelen: That's something that I've, I've always been curious about that decision to do the replacement. How has that historically been handled?
Stephen Zetarski: Traditionally, the CMMS would send a report over to a finance team and just talk about how old the equipment is.
Yep. How much repairs has been done. And unfortunately, is it dead? Did it break right? Mm-hmm. Do I need to repair, uh, in an emergency? What you do by combining those into a single asset database is you start to actually make decisions based on more information, right? Evidence-based decision. I'd liken it to a car like you wanna run your car for 10, 15 years, you're gonna do your basic maintenance, you're gonna do your repairs, maybe even replace your brakes.
But when your transmission starts to fail, the asset's no longer worth the replacement cost. Now, if you only have so much money, you might have to replace that transmission because you wanna extend the life of that car. Same thing with an hvac, same thing with an MRI. What the software will do is they'll take that information and build a capital plan for those particular assets.
That rolls up to a much larger capital plan for a corporation around things far more advanced than the facilities and the clinical devices, but into the entire operations of a company. Yep. But the goal is to continue to drive evidence-based decisions. Around even where you're located, right? If you move locations, do people still come through the office?
Why are we running a bunch of HVAC cycles in a floor that nobody's occupying?
Dan Gentry: Got it. Can you give us an example of where asset management really pays off? Like what's a real world example of that we can think through?
Stephen Zetarski: I have a great example. Uh, somewhat embarrassing example 'cause it's actually novela themselves.
These are the best. By the way. These are the best examples.
Charles Jelen: You know, we intimate knowledge
Stephen Zetarski: of the issue. Good real life. Yes, indeed. I was the customer and the salesperson, right? We're talking with some folks about how efficient our building was. We're trying to explain why IWS, as I stated before, that that full integrated solution matters.
So I showed an example of a building we have in Massachusetts, a three story building, and I compared it against the energy of some of the other buildings in the area in terms of their utility bills and the maintenance on the equipment and um, the cleaning crews, et cetera, et cetera. And if you looked at it singularly, you'd say, wow, that's an amazing building.
What are you doing? I said, you know, respectfully, we're missing some key information. I said, the building is housed for 300 people. It only sits two people a month. So if you look at it, it's the ultimate waste of your financial resources. Yeah. We're running a building and we're running an hvac. We're doing a cleaning crew once a week because we have to.
Nobody's in the building.
Charles Jelen: Yep. Wow. So
Stephen Zetarski: without that information on the people, it doesn't matter what we're doing to maintain a building, it's is it being occupied? It doesn't have to be people. It could be a manufacturer, it could be whatever. Sure. Yep. But you need processing. You need business activities being done in that building.
Else, you're just, you're just doing nothing. Absolutely. Great. Great example. That's a critical
Dan Gentry: component of bringing those two super important things together to problem solve. Got it. Yeah. I was gonna say, so you've talked about HVAC, you've talked about MRI. What kind of customers are we talking about?
Stephen Zetarski: So we started in healthcare.
So a majority of our install base is still in healthcare. Our second largest vertical that we focus on is the convenience retail business. So you think gas stations and grocers stuff that has wet retail, we call ITT wet retail. I've never heard that term. Yeah. Wet retail means you have a refrigerator. Or any cold storage.
So if the three of us open a store and we sell whatever water bottles, yeah. Uh, yeah. Milk milks matter. Water bottles don't, right? You don't really care about fixing a shelf. You know, the shelf's broken. You replace the shelf. If we have milk and we have to tell a government that our milk is at a certain temperature, it's never hit below or ne never hit above.
And we're doing maintenance to make sure that refrigerator stays within those specs. It's important, it's valuable, right? We like to focus on industries that see value in it, and then obviously large corporations who have a lot of seats, employees, a lot of locations that need to consolidate that information and prepare for the next generation of the industry around what AI is gonna do to impact them.
And decisions around where to locate buildings. And it's making a lot of real estate executives makes decisions, which impacts. Everything down to the technicians and who work in that building of whether they're gonna be employed or not, based on whether that location's gonna stay or be moved.
Charles Jelen: Alright. I wanna ask about like the the cool stuff.
What are you guys working on? Because my guess is there's an AI component that's coming. Talk a little bit about what you guys see as differentiating into the future here.
Stephen Zetarski: Yeah. I think anyone who says AI isn't gonna impact them, uh, is not paying attention, right? So I think, I think AI is. Absolutely where we're gonna focus a lot of our energy.
There's two things. One is, how do we make the experience in the workflow better for the technician? Can I eliminate steps? Mm-hmm. Can I give them guided advice? But really it's about the entire environment where I see AI being amazing. If I can look at a building and tell you if it's efficient from its people usage, its occupancy.
Can I tell you? It's devices are being managed properly and can I tell you that the energy is being consumed properly? You can't do that through spreadsheets and through just the information on the screen in front of you. You gotta take large models of information and drive that over time. Mm-hmm. And then compare it to others.
So, yep. If all three of us are in the same location, and your, your energy bills are three x mine y, right? Mm-hmm. What can we do to inform that decision?
Charles Jelen: Yeah, I think that's, that's such a, if you think out into the future, right? That's kind of the dream scenario, right, is you get to an area where it's like, Hey, your building's not operating well and these are the top 10 solutions that you could go after.
And you build the business case and you rack and stack based on whatever their financial criteria is. The part that I'm most curious to see how you guys get this information is where that data comes from. We interviewed John Simone on on this podcast, and we talked a lot about AI and HVAC, and that's a lot of building centric data, and the data is.
Learned over time for that building. What you guys are looking at requires a lot more outside information than just what is happening inside the building or than the weather, right? Because to your example, early on about the car and you wanna drive this thing, you wanna maintain it, and the transmission goes out.
Now you've got a cost. Do you repair the. The transmission or do you buy a new car? Those are outside factors for the building. Like how do you know how much a compressor replacement costs versus replacing the chiller?
Stephen Zetarski: It's uh, interesting. John Simone and I talk about this a lot because it's, can we subscribe to outside data feeds?
Can we pull openly available information? Weather is a perfect example. There are also, uh, a lot of regulatory environments we can build and pull best practice from and integrate those in, and we can start to inform them of actualities, right? So if it says this device should last for 20 years, but we have a a, a set of data that says they're not lasting more than 15, we need to reinform that decision and that will change the capital.
Design of it, right? Again, it's everything we do is similar, right? It looks at this, our personal lives, look at this. If you own a house, if you own a car, you have an expectation of how long it's gonna last. I worked in the auto industry and I saw companies who were still thinking cars were get turned over every four years, and then someone like Kia builds a car that last 10 years.
And all of a sudden people have to think about selling a car that lasts 10 years and making a profit over 10 years versus three. Right? I think the HVAC industry went through this at times, and I think everything will go through it, but we're in an interesting spot from a novela perspective because we technically don't own our customer's data right now.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start to talk to them about pulling their data in and building a community of information that allows everyone to gain. So how do I get all the hospitals to benefit from each other around what they're doing around the buildings, the mrs. The HVACs, as well as other items within their environments.
So we really started as someone who didn't wanna touch data 10 plus years ago, and now we're realizing the value of that data. Our customers are also willing to go on that journey with us 'cause they want the same results. Yeah.
Dan Gentry: I think John Simone would agree with the value in that data.
Stephen Zetarski: Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Charles Jelen: When you go and talk to clients, what are you most excited to talk about?
Stephen Zetarski: I'm excited about long-term investment to drive outcomes for the business. Right. The two most expensive things in, in any company are the assets and the people and Nala. We have information on both, and we can help drive some of those decisions.
Charles Jelen: That's great. Elevator speech right there. That was nice. That was good. I like that. That's not your first rodeo there. Done
Dan Gentry: this a time or two.
Charles Jelen: All right. Last one from me. It's magic wand time. If you had a magic wand, what would you change either in the industry or in Klein's mindset? What would you go after?
What's that one thing that's holding people back or holding new Volo back?
Stephen Zetarski: I think what I would change most is getting people to understand how all these things work together and why they matter. Right? Ultimately, an MRR or a CT or an HVAC has no value unless people use it. Mm-hmm. So getting that bridge between convincing people what they do matters.
Is probably what I wanna change the most. Right? There are so many folks who, who wake up every day and they don't think about the impact they have on people. I think that changes behaviors and it changes a couple things. It, it makes you feel prouder of what you do. Mm-hmm. And it will then make you also understand why it's important you do it in a timely manner and a successful manner.
Yeah. So I think it's really important to put a outcome on the actions that we take. Yeah. And why we do it.
Charles Jelen: I was just thinking of like a visual in my head as you were describing that, of like where the various parts of the organization, those different areas of the company that you're talking about, that don't talk together, that don't really communicate today, or their data isn't shared.
Where they come together is probably incredibly high in an organization like COO level, right? Where all of that data finally comes together. It feels like what Nuvola is trying to do is to bring those decisions and to bring that information down layers inside the company to make it faster, to make decisions and go faster and, and, and be more efficient.
Stephen Zetarski: Absolutely. Right. We've all been technicians in parts of our life. You know, I supported servers and, and I supported storage units in my early days. Wouldn't it be great to know if you had three different. Work orders or cases, incidents, which one has the most impact on people or on the business? Mm-hmm.
Real time. Yeah. Right. You know, you gotta turn left or right at a stop sign, and the turn left is there's a hundred people in the building and they're working on something really important if you turn right. Mm-hmm. There's five people in the building and. You know, they can work remote or they can like, that's really important information.
We don't tend to share that today. Why don't we share it? Right. We don't share it 'cause there's not a great system. Building that system and making people see the impact, I think is the coolest thing we could do. It
Charles Jelen: takes three calls with it, two calls with hr, and one call with legal. And then you'll, you'll have your answer exactly.
A couple emails follow up,
Stephen Zetarski: you know, and it's, it's funny, I'll say something about that, Charlie, that was the biggest challenge in the industry is, oh, you can't know where Charlie sits. You can't, you, you can't know Dan's in the building. Okay, great. Just tell me someone's there. I don't need to know. It's Charlie like, yeah, the space, people need to know who you are and who you work for, but I need to know there's 20 people there and the temperature in the building is going up a degree every, every 10 minutes, every five minutes, right?
Yeah, yeah. Or it's down hard, right? And we're working on something very important to the scientific community, or I've got a major store for a convenience retailer who has no ac, so they're losing money every minute.
Charles Jelen: Interesting. Steven, that was great. Thank you so much for coming on. That was really fun.
Thanks for walking us through all that.
Stephen Zetarski: Absolutely. Thank you. I enjoyed it. Thank you.
Dan Gentry: A higher building IQ is a no-brainer. Right. And you betcha. Train autonomous control. Powered by Brainbox, AI uses artificial intelligence to make AI work for your building. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so you can focus less on the little things and more on the most critical bingo. Go to trane.com/autonomous control to find out more about trane's latest AI offering.
Charles Jelen: All right, listener. Here's our new feature. We had an email come in from Gary Hill out in Dallas, Texas, and his email read, Hey guys, love the show. Do you ever get to make it out in any of your trained factories where the equipment is being made? If so, would love a tour to see what's going on and who's working out there.
Dan Gentry: Well, Gary, because you asked so nicely and we love the question, and I head out into the factory. I'm gonna look at some cool stuff, give you guys some insight into some of the processes, what that sounds like. So here we go. Let's go to the factory. All right, Stan, here I am in Crosse, Wisconsin today at Plant seven, which builds, uh, centrifugal chillers for train.
I have with me Estee Tierney. Estee, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
Esti Tierney: Hi Dan. Thanks for having me on your podcast today. So we are looking at the main centrifugal manufacturing line of ECTV chillers. My role is product manager, which means I am involved in a lot of the going to market of the chillers, who's gonna be using them, building and developing for our customers.
Dan Gentry: And what is an ECTV chiller?
Esti Tierney: Well, this is a centrifugal water cooled chiller. This particular line is primarily used for data center customers, and the reason is that we can achieve the higher evaporator temps, higher condenser temps needed for dry cooler applications, as well as the large capacities needed for cooling.
Dan Gentry: Awesome. And because we are a podcast, naturally an audio, uh, platform. These things are huge. Uh, we're standing across from a machine right now. It's got like two big barrels bolted together. Uh, it's gonna have two big compressors on it. These things are like 80 to a hundred thousand pounds or something.
These are big machines.
Esti Tierney: These are very big machines. I think people who are not familiar with water cooled chillers walk into a factory like this and are impressed by just the sheer physical size of what it is we are doing. And when you really think about the fact that, you know, on a residential unit it's probably only three or four tons.
You look at something like this and the amount of cooling that a water cooled chiller can do is just impressive in itself.
Dan Gentry: We're talking like four or 5,000 tons a piece here.
Esti Tierney: That's correct. That's exactly right. Uh, the amount varies by application, but uh, we definitely have a lot of applications which are upwards of 5,000 cooling tubs.
Dan Gentry: So Cool. Yeah. Awesome. Well, so we're, uh, we're gonna take a little walk and we're gonna go see some, uh, talk about some innovation.
Esti Tierney: Alright, let's talk about it.
So what we're looking at here right now is a yellow arm machine that is actually an automatic tube expander. So if you've ever looked at the heat exchanger of a chiller, there are a lot of copper tubes, and I'm talking hundreds in these big chillers. Prior to having an automated machine, this was truly done by machine, but by hand.
So an actual employee would go through and go to the, you know, hole number one, two, number one, expand it, go to the next one, and down the line. It was monotonous. Uh, and it looks
VO: incredibly tedious. It looks very tedious.
Esti Tierney: Very tedious. Yes, it probably used to be the most repetitive job from an ergonomic standpoint in the factory.
Awesome. So. So when we were looking for improvement, as we made this new brand new manufacturing line, what we actually did was brought in our innovation from all of our factory floor employees. And what that means is just we asked for ideas, what would make your job better? How could we do your responsibilities faster, more efficiently, and from a better quality standpoint too.
So the birthplace of this automated machine truly came from the factory floor itself. That really was a collaborative effort between the factory engineering and design.
Dan Gentry: Teamwork makes a dream work.
Esti Tierney: That's right Dan.
Dan Gentry: Well, this has been awesome, nest. Thank you for the time.
Esti Tierney: Thanks, Dan.
Dan Gentry: Bye.
Charles Jelen: Dan. That was pretty good. Did you like that?
Dan Gentry: That was great.
Charles Jelen: That was gonna fun. There's gonna be all sorts of stuff we can get you with.
Dan Gentry: Ooh, we got some content.
Charles Jelen: All right. We'll have more Dan in the factory. More to come, but next up we've got stat of the day.
Dan Gentry: Here you come, Joe.
Charles Jelen: Stat The day, the day of the day.
All right. Listeners, state of the day, this one generated from the family trip we just came back from. So Dan and I were both down in St. Louis. I saw a article come through from the School of Culinary Arts, and the title of the headline was, which US States Eat the Most Fast Food.
Dan Gentry: I have to admit, I'm a fast food guy.
I know you are fast food many times a week.
Charles Jelen: No one adopted the McDonald's app faster than this guy I'm looking at right now. I
Dan Gentry: get a lot of points,
Charles Jelen: you know. All right, so the School of Culinary Arts came up with a grading system for which states. Eat the most fast food and it was fast food restaurants as a percentage of total restaurants in each state.
Number of fast food restaurants per capita spending on fast food restaurants as a percentage of total food spend in each state. So very official here. Yeah. So we've got a top 10. I'm gonna roll through 'em quick. Dan, you gotta guess at a, at a top 10, gimme two on the top 10.
Dan Gentry: I'm just gonna go with Wisconsin.
I think we eat a lot of fast food. And then I'm gonna pick like, uh, Nebraska,
Charles Jelen: Nebraska. I
Dan Gentry: have no idea. All right.
Charles Jelen: Throwing a dart. Okay, here we go. Number 10, Oklahoma. Number nine, New Mexico. Number eight, Massachusetts. Number seven, Ohio. Number six, California. Number five, Hawaii. Number four, New York. Number three, Illinois.
Number two, Nevada. Number one. Maryland, that's of fast food. C Crabb cakes, huh? A lot of fast food out in Maryland. I could not believe that Wisconsin wasn't on it. I thought for sure Wisconsin is gonna be on. I thought we would be. I mean, I think I hang out with you too much apparently. 'cause I think I have an outweighed sense of Wisconsin just 'cause here Culver's in and out.
Burger and McDonald's app.
Dan Gentry: Yeah, it's just me. I'm diluting the pool.
Charles Jelen: Alright. Thank you for listening to this episode of Cool Air Hot Takes. Thank you so much to Steven Zaki from Olo. Thanks to the cool Air Hot Takes production team, you are always top notch. If you wanna get in touch with us, send us questions, send us hot takes, you can do that by leaving us a comment on Spotify or YouTube.
Leave a review on Apple or drop us a message@coolair.hot takes@trane.com.
Dan Gentry: And don't forget, you can also leave us a rating wherever you listen. Five stars. Only please. And until next time. Hey, you wanna give it a go?
Charles Jelen: I, I'll, let's try it. Stay cool and No, that doesn't, you do it.
Dan Gentry: Stay cool and keep those Takes hot.
