Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Cool Air Hot Takes.
Charlie Jelen: Welcome, welcome to Cool Air Hot Takes. This is a podcast about anything and everything from the world of HVAC, energy and the Built Environment. We're your hosts. I'm Charlie Gellan.
Dan Gentry: And I'm Dan Gentry.
Charlie Jelen: We kicked this season off with something a little different, uh, for those of you who are, uh, you know, longtime listeners.
We started with the hottest takeaways from hr, but that's not what we normally do. Normally we get together. Every couple of weeks and we bring you the latest in HVAC headlines. We go through some of the things that happened over the past couple of weeks. We give you our take on it. We usually do an expert interview This week we have Mr.
Mike Dawson, and we're gonna talk acoustics. Now. Dan, who do you go to when you have acoustics questions?
Dan Gentry: I'm going to Mike Dawson. Now
Charlie Jelen: you going to Mike Dawson? Now?
Dan Gentry: Before I would go to Eric Stern.
Charlie Jelen: Eric Stern. That's what I was gonna say. I got, I had two before Mike Dawson. I had two. I had Dave Guck Berger.
Dan Gentry: Okay. Okay.
Charlie Jelen: Remember him? [00:01:00] Yep. Were you around for Dave?
Dan Gentry: Uh, know the name and I've met him at an event but didn't work with him.
Charlie Jelen: Top five. Last name of all time.
Dan Gentry: Great. Last name.
Charlie Jelen: Dave Guck Berger, Eric Stern. Those are my acoustics guys. We're gonna add Mike to it. Uh, Mike is the VP of Sales at Park Lane Mechanical.
They're a company that's been solving industrial noise problems for over 30 years. We're gonna talk to Mike about all things acoustics, how they do it, why it's a problem, how they're fixing things across the industry. And then of course, we end every episode with. The stat of the day.
Dan Gentry: Stat of the day first we gotta kick things off with some hot takes.
Charlie Jelen: It's
Dan Gentry: hot
takes.
Dan Gentry: Quick shout to Ashley Holmes with UMC. She was at the a EE West Conference and talked with one of, uh, our friends from train out there, and she was looking for the cool air hot takes. She
Charlie Jelen: was looking for the cat booth. We didn't make it to that one.
Dan Gentry: No, we didn't. Sorry, we
Charlie Jelen: missed you. Ashley.
Dan Gentry: Very sorry.
Charlie Jelen: Next time,
Dan Gentry: next time. It's my hot take first. What I'm trying to do here, I'm trying to, I'm trying to channel the water heater servicing. We got so much feedback from that.
Charlie Jelen: Got a lot of, got a lot of feedback on the [00:02:00] water heater, maintenance, and I had no idea it was gonna take off like wildfire.
Dan Gentry: I mean it's, it's like still a thing. So another thing that you can do at home, change your water cartridge behind your faucet. No one does that for your I've, I've done it. I'm just kidding. I've, I've had to, so what happened was the kids' handle was getting really hard and I was like, what the heck? And I cranked on it, busted it.
So then the waters stuck on full blast. There's no isolation valve back there, so I gotta shut off my water. So this happened in the kids' bathroom. It's starting to happen in my bathroom. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna try to do this myself. You know, my buddy Josh helped me out last time.
Charlie Jelen: Oh yeah.
Dan Gentry: So I got this thing out, kind of took a little while, and I got it almost back in and I couldn't get it in.
So I called Josh, I'm like, dude, what's going on? He's like, just give her hell man. He. And got some leverage and I got this thing in there. Now my handle spin so freely. This thing costs like, I don't know, 10 or 20 bucks. And it's like if your handle start getting hard, guys. Don't ignore that either call somebody and get it replaced or just try to do it yourself.
'cause when it [00:03:00] breaks, you're in a world of hurt.
Charlie Jelen: All right. I'm going in industry enroll. My hot take is absorbers are taking off.
Dan Gentry: Oh, okay.
Charlie Jelen: Absorbers are gonna be a big deal here for a little while. For a little while. I don't know how long
Dan Gentry: I'm listening.
Charlie Jelen: Uh, but they're gonna take off and it is a hundred percent because of onsite power generation.
Do
Dan Gentry: you think like American manufacturers are gonna like dust off their, uh, drawings and start building these again?
Charlie Jelen: I don't know. I don't know what the runway is. I haven't put a whole lot of time into this. Why It's a hot take and not a,
Dan Gentry: no,
Charlie Jelen: not just a take. Uh, it is not, I don't know how long it's gonna last.
So listener out there, a lot of, uh, primarily data centers, they're getting either getting pushed towards bringing. Onsite power, whether it's regulatory or speed, they want to go faster and the utility can't get 'em power. They're looking at bringing onsite generation and when you do that, you combust natural gas.
You combust, probably not hydrogen yet, but maybe, and you have a bunch of off gas in that process, or waste heat [00:04:00] that just leaves the system. You can put that waste heat into an absorber. An absorber is a type of chiller that takes in heat and creates chilled water. Ultimately, if you're doing this for a data center, you need a bunch of cooling to cool the data center down.
So it's a great kind of makes sense. It's a great way to do it. Does. It makes a ton of sense. If you look at pues like power use effectiveness, like how efficient are you at using the power that you have available to you? The lowest P UES that I've seen involve using absorbers to do this. Or not using mechanical cooling at all, or a little bit of mechanical cooling.
It's a really good way to use what you have. Use the assets you have available. Mm-hmm. Use the energy that you have available. I think the hard part is, is like how long are people gonna be designing these systems with onsite power generation?
Dan Gentry: Hmm. So that's a good question. Here's one I mentioned dust off the plans.
Why did absorption chillers go away in the first place?
Charlie Jelen: Uh, they are not as efficient as electrical chillers. So if you look at the vapor compression cycle versus the brine cycle, [00:05:00] instead of a A three COP, we're talking about seven COP double the efficiency to go to an electrical, an electric chiller
Dan Gentry: over.
So because the absorber. Because of this change in the industry, this technology now does make sense again.
Charlie Jelen: It does. Yeah. Absolutely. And there's, you know, generally like cities have been electrifying like for since the industrial revolution. And so the more electricity you have and the more effectively that you can use that electricity to do things, people have generally been moving that way.
Now there are some end loads, like we're talking when, when people say electrification today, they're talking about electrifying heat loads, cooling loads electrified a long time ago.
Dan Gentry: That's very interesting. That's a good hot take.
Charlie Jelen: All right. Okay, next time I do have, next time, we're gonna give you Uncle Tom's hot take.
We don't have time for it. Uncle Tom lives up in the city. He's Megan's uncle, my uncle in-law. He gave me some great HVAC content.
Dan Gentry: Well,
Charlie Jelen: so next time on
Dan Gentry: pins and needles.
Charlie Jelen: Yes, listener. Next time, next episode, we're gonna give you Uncle Tom's hot take. Um. But what we got next, we got your HVAC headlines. Stay tuned.[00:06:00]
Intro: HVAC. Headlines your news today.
Charlie Jelen: All right, listener, it's 3:00 PM in Bogota. Here's your headlines. Headline number one. How data centers provided power during Winter. Storm Fern. This is from Fast Company, so here's the headline As Winter Storm Fern swept across the United States in late January, 2026, bringing ice, snow and freezing temperatures, it left more than a million people without power.
This is mostly in the southeast. So scrambling to meet higher than average demand. PJM, which is the grid operator like in the Mid-Atlantic area, they asked for federal permission to generate more power. The Energy Secretary, who is Chris Wright, he agreed, but then also took another step. He authorized both PJM and Ercot to tell data centers and other large power consumer businesses to turn on their backup generators.
Dan Gentry: Oh.
Charlie Jelen: Which I think is really interesting. And so. Data centers, you know, there's pros and cons [00:07:00] on all of it and you hear about it all the time and why you shouldn't or why you should. This is one in the why you potentially should or, or what it can add in terms of benefits is most all of these data centers go in with a level of redundancy and reliability that requires them to have onsite generation
Dan Gentry: and that onsite generation can be 100% of their needs or more.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Gentry: Which means you have a backup power plant,
Charlie Jelen: you have a backup power plant, and, and most of those are diesel generators or you know, a small percentage I think is, is natural gas, but they can turn those things on in situations like this and shed all of that utility power back to the utility grid.
Dan Gentry: That is really cool.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah. So it gives you a lot of flexibility. If you're a grid operator like Kotter, PJM, where you have that flexibility, you have that ability to tell them, Hey, turn on your backup generators.
Dan Gentry: What do we got next?
Charlie Jelen: Headline number two. A little bit of home cooking on this one, but I thought it was cool and I wanted to talk to you about it.
Trane collaborates on oil-free compressor technology. This is from cooling post, [00:08:00] so Trane has announced that strategic collaboration to accelerate next generation oil-free centrifugal compressor technology for commercial HVAC applications. So this collaboration is with a company called Garrett Motion.
So Garrett Motion is a developer of oil free, high speed centrifugal compressors. They're headquartered in roll, I believe is how you. Sure. Pronounce that Roe roll. It's probably not Rolle. R-O-L-L-E. Roll
Dan Gentry: Roll
Charlie Jelen: Switzerland has already demonstrated clear performance benefits and together with Trane Garrett intend to launch the next generation of high efficiency HVAC systems and accelerate the adoption of ultralow global warming, potential refrigerants, the range of compressors that they currently use.
Seven to 500 tons.
Dan Gentry: Wow. Quite the, quite the range.
Charlie Jelen: I know, I thought that
Dan Gentry: was seven tons. Centrifugal compressor.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah. Which means they even talk about it in the article I was reading is they're targeting rooftops,
Dan Gentry: Terry rooftop units,
Charlie Jelen: unitary applications.
Dan Gentry: So what does this mean? Is that gonna like introduce [00:09:00] higher levels of efficiency to these?
Charlie Jelen: Oh, big time. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Dan Gentry: I mean, from a scroll to a centrifugal,
Charlie Jelen: right?
Dan Gentry: That's pretty cool.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah, and and so as efficiency requirements or as the need for more efficient equipment comes out, or as you have to switch to lower GWP refrigerants, either one of those could drive the need to go to a centrifugal.
Dan Gentry: I noticed the headline talks. Specifically about oil free, but doesn't mention magnetic bearings.
Charlie Jelen: Danny. Oh man, that's good. I'm glad you read into that. That was one of the things I wanna talk about. Yeah, they don't. So Joe Hagger, shout out to Joe Hagger. He was guest in season one. He's a engineer. You kind of looking at next generation compressor and bearing technologies.
Do you remember what his, his hot take was?
Dan Gentry: Is this like an air? Well, is this like an air foil? Bearing his, his was about not focusing on the,
Charlie Jelen: yeah. Don't fall in love with the bearing technology.
Dan Gentry: Yes. Don't fall in love there.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah. Yes. Which, and so I think this is love
Dan Gentry: the hot take.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah. This is like right in line with that is I, I [00:10:00] think, I don't think this is magnetic bearing.
Dan Gentry: I would say it's not based on this information, because if it is, everybody says it is.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah. Right.
Dan Gentry: You like tout that. So it's
Charlie Jelen: probably gas bearing is my guess, but I don't know. Hmm.
Dan Gentry: Interesting. I, I mean I think that's kind of, uh, if maybe patting our backs, but kind of moving the cheese, you don't see the, you know, everybody's developing oil or magnetic bearing
Charlie Jelen: mm-hmm.
Dan Gentry: In our industry.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah. All right, listener. Up next we've got Mike Dawson from Park Lane. We're gonna talk about acoustics. Don't go anywhere.
Danny boy. Hey, how you doing?
Dan Gentry: Great.
Charlie Jelen: Have you heard about train's AI reference designs?
Dan Gentry: No, but the way you're saying it makes me deeply suspicious.
Charlie Jelen: Good. You should be, uh, train partnered with major chip manufacturers to create sim ready digital blueprints that help engineers design next gen AI data centers ridiculously fast.
Dan Gentry: Sim Ready? Sounds like sci-fi Continue. [00:11:00]
Charlie Jelen: These reference designs are validated, cooling system blueprints that speed up decisions shrink time to market and lower risk. Basically a little brain fuel for anyone building AI data centers.
Dan Gentry: So magic, but with math and
Charlie Jelen: spreadsheets. You got it. Where do I find this?
Wizardry, easy train.com/reference design. And now back to the show.
All right, listener, if you're new to Cool Air Hot Takes and how we do our guest intros, we let the guest do their professional intro and we try to deliver. A little bit of the, the, the softer touch, a little bit of the personal intro. So I reached out to, uh, some of mine and Mike's mutual friends, and the first line that I got was, he's a family man.
He's a businessman, an athlete, and just an all around good dude. And so listener. We're gonna have Mike Dawson on here. Before we do that, we've got a couple more things we gotta say, but he was described [00:12:00] as a fitness enthusiast. He is a CrossFitter, a competitive power lifter for a little bit of time, is what my understanding is.
He even played a little bit of, uh, professional lacrosse. Oh, okay. My personal favorite brush with Mike's fitness enthusiasm is at conferences. Alright. So. At these conferences we have get togethers, you know, a lot of happy hours, dinners, maybe even some breakfast. But not Mike. Not Mike, Nope. Uh, he goes for the, the Monday morning 8:00 AM spin class to get everybody together.
Alright, now outside of all the fitness. Mike even found time to start a venture called Fresh Mitts, which is a deodorizer for hockey and lacrosse gloves, and oh yeah, he does a little bit of work for Park Lane on the side as well. So welcome to Cool Air Hot Takes, Mr. Mike Dawson.
Mike Dawson: Thank you. Thank you. I think, um, the listener wouldn't assume that I paid for that intro.
That was all, uh, it was mute. The word athlete is, uh, being used extremely loosely in [00:13:00] there as well, but.
Charlie Jelen: I love it. So was it pretty accurate? Did your friends lead you astray?
Mike Dawson: Yeah, they might have been a, a little bit of some exaggeration, uh, in there, here and there. I would say, uh, washed up athletes, probably more accurate.
Uh, but, uh,
Charlie Jelen: and I'm assuming this fresh mix company came from growing up playing hockey, playing lacrosse.
Mike Dawson: Yeah, that was like way back in the start of my career. I was in the field as an electrical engineer, kind of more running guys on the tools and my way of getting, say, pivoting outta that, ended up taking me into tech.
But was, I founded my first company, which was fresh mit. So, you know, built that out to a few hundred stores around, uh, five countries. The businesses, I don't do it anymore, but, uh, but that was sort of my. Pivot outta that world.
Charlie Jelen: That's really cool.
Dan Gentry: I love that idea. 'cause I work with a lot of Canadians and I ride around in with Canadians and a lot of 'em play hockey and some of their cars are so disgusting smelling from hockey bags that I might have to, you know, throw that name out there for a couple of guys.
Charlie Jelen: There you go. I love it. Alright, Mike, name of the show. Cool Air Hot [00:14:00] Takes. We ask all of our guests to come in with a hot take. It can be anything from your personal life, your professional life, anything in between. Did you bring us a, a hot take for the episode today?
Mike Dawson: You know, a little different than some of the conversations we've had in the past.
Uh, there, Charlie, 'cause it just came up last week. But I think my hot take is that there's been all this talk, you know, lately about the data center bubble. And, you know, I think there's an understanding. Everybody knows, you know, it'll eventually start to, uh, have some inflection point. But my take is that it is.
A lot farther away than people understand from a infrastructure build out standpoint. And for some reason I feel a significant amount of mainly the tech space, but even all stakeholders are not entirely under wrapping their heads around what could happen in terms of inference load requirements in the near term.
Charlie Jelen: Let's go. Like, what do you mean?
Mike Dawson: Yeah,
Charlie Jelen: where is it headed? So there's like this, this kind of spectrum of where inference can happen. Everything from massive data centers to edge data centers, down to device. Like where are you headed with that?
Mike Dawson: I mean, the main thing for [00:15:00] me is, you know, you look at a significant proportion of the big announcements, the ones that make the headlines, they're always the big kind of AI factories.
You know, like the just physically large facilities, which are almost all for model training purposes from a compute standpoint. Mm-hmm. And it seems that from some of my analysis, that the model compute capacity across the US as really started to completely. Runaway from inference base compute capacity.
They were kind of more neck and neck it seemed for some time. Mm-hmm. Which maybe is natural, but what no one seems to really be talking about is Meta said it in their recent release when they did their new glasses that they announced. You know, Sam Malman announced that they're coming out with hardware soon.
AI hardware. Has not yet even really started to scratch the surface. Mm-hmm. And Zuck said it in his keynote. He put up a huge slide called live AI talking about all day, always on inferencing. And if we start getting to that from some of this hardware coming out, the inference compute requirements are going to exponentially skyrocket.
And so the need for the facilities to [00:16:00] service that would be needed. And I don't really find anybody's talking or about that or really forecasting right now.
Dan Gentry: I haven't heard that yet. I think it's fascinating because like, I feel like I walk around a lot of doomsdayers all the time. Like, oh, you know, this data center stuff, we gotta be careful.
It's a, it's a bubble, you know? Then what are we gonna do? And it's like,
Charlie Jelen: I think I, yeah, and I, I think your hot take is gonna be a little foreshadowing here. I think the listeners probably wondering, like, this guy works at an acoustics company. Why are you talking about data centers? So, so let's start walking down that path.
Let's start walking down that path. So let's start with. Who is Park Lane and what do you guys do?
Mike Dawson: So really simply, we design and manufacture either large barriers or big metal boxes. That make things that are loud outside, less loud. Park lane's been around for over 30 years. The history of the company was largely in, you know, large institutional commercial industrial, which would be no different than large, you know, uh, heat rejection OEMs.
Yep. And what was everybody's bread and butter up until data [00:17:00] center right. We are uniquely a one stop shop for all things environmental noise control, environmental being noise propagating outside. Of facilities and reaching nearby noise receptors, so homes, buildings, offices, et cetera. So that's where we play is purely in that domain.
And when I say one stop shop, what I mean is we do every potential solution that could be needed. 'cause there's an array. Uh, we do those. And so when it comes to data center. To make a very simple example, if you got a data center, big building with a bunch of, say, chillers on the roof or, or beside that noise is propagating out towards maybe neighboring community, you might start with, you know, a louver or solid barrier wall, you know, to block that off.
That may or may not get you to where you need to be from a noise standpoint. In which case maybe you move closer inward to what we would call at source, which was, which is what I say, big metal boxes on top of equipment. That's where we would apply a custom engineered solution to say a chiller or dry cooler, whatever it might be.
Mm-hmm. And, uh, I think a couple key. Factors to [00:18:00] what we do is we're uniquely modular in what we do. Everything we tend to cite is, is modular and pre-constructed for, uh, you know, getting rid of risk of install and, and timelines. We've got, you know, in a structural engineers, because frankly, acoustic design is one thing, but the difficulty of integrating to an existing structure and structural design is arguably more complicated.
And so we've got that in-house as well as CFD and other things that make us kind of unique and in the way that we can take on this world.
Charlie Jelen: Love it. So you talked about your, your in the environmental acoustics or environmental noise. What are the other areas that encompass acoustics?
Mike Dawson: So the main other areas would be, you know, you'd think architectural.
So that might be, if you imagine a sound hall or concert venue, for example, a movie theater that would need interior architectural acoustic treatments or another area is, is a lot of ducks. If you think about HVAC ducks throughout large buildings and moving air. In any form is loud. Yeah. And so when you move air through ducts, [00:19:00] there's a lot of companies that will focus on treatments within duct work and neither of those things, uh, we focus on
Charlie Jelen: what are the actual things that are making things quieter, that are absorbing sound?
Are you using special materials that you can't talk about? Are you using run of the mill material? And it's about how you apply it. Like what, what is the space of the, the thing that is actually absorbing the sound? What does that look like for, for acoustical treatment?
Dan Gentry: And also with that too, what do you.
How do you like decide? Are there different like levels, like we do this thing to get this db, or we have to look at this certain package to get to this level? Like with those options, how do you apply those?
Mike Dawson: Essentially none of the say materials per se, are unique or novel or proprietary for the most part.
It's more of the way that they are architected from a design standpoint to kind of work together, you know, shape, sizes, uh, all of that, the way, the way that the sound energy propagates through those mediums. So to sort of like [00:20:00] simplify it in the way I. Can describe it is if you imagine everyone in their head could picture sort of a sound wave and what that might look like, those waves can get longer.
They can get taller and shorter. You know, amplitude and frequency can change. And when that happens, the way that they would get absorbed into. Say a material that absorbs sound. Mm-hmm. It differs depending on the, the nature of that sound and the frequency and the amplitude. And so in terms of kind of Dan's question, you know, how do you design something that's specifically gonna hit this target versus that target?
That's the underlying engineering science that goes into the designs is identifying what, you know, how the perforations in, in terms of the. Steel that allow the sound to go through it and into a absorbative material. How much of that absorbative material, in what shape is that absorbative material? So, you know, if you picture.
Everybody, a lot of listeners could picture, let's say a chiller. So a fan deck up on top, you know, blowing air vertically upwards. The sound that propagates from that office is going in three dimensions. Uh, spherically from that noise source. If we were to [00:21:00] put just picture for a listener, a big metal box up on top within that metal box, you know, the walls are absorbative, there are baffles, so you know of a certain shape, there's a piece of metal.
That includes within it absorbative material at a specific measurement distance, one from the next all within to specifically absorb as much of that sound across many frequency bands as possible.
Charlie Jelen: Interesting. Is there, is there a particularly when, when you talk about, we're gonna get into some of the regulation stuff that you guys try to help with.
Is there, in that octave band or those frequencies, is there one that you focus in on? Is there one that's harder to abate or is there one that kind of drives the overall sound that people are looking to abate at the lot line or whatever the requirement is
Mike Dawson: to really simplify it the way that noise. And I, you know, or let's just say sound, the difference between those words being noise and something that you don't want sound is, is, you know, you can't avoid what
Charlie Jelen: it is.
Yeah.
Mike Dawson: And so the way it's typically described is in an AOC band, what that means is [00:22:00] for this piece of equipment that makes this total amount of noise in a measure of say, decimals, that could be broken down into eight. Sections of different frequency and each of those slightly different in the way that sound wave looks.
And so to your question there around difficulty, arguably it's more difficult to attenuate low frequency sound. Okay? Uh, and, but at the same time, the human ear can only really. Fully will only appreciate certain bands of that full eight Octa band. And so there's something in the industry that's called a weighted sound or c weighted sound, uh, c weighted being something that probably a lot of people in the industry have not necessarily heard of a weighted, A lot more people have have heard of DBA, and all that's doing is it's just carving off the bar ends of the barbell of that eight octave band in a specific way.
To focus on the sound that actually the human ear is more noticeable.
Charlie Jelen: Got it.
Mike Dawson: Now c weighted is a little different where it includes a little bit more of that low frequency, like deep hum noise, and we've [00:23:00] just recently started seeing a couple of sites that are using a c weighted, but it's not very common.
Charlie Jelen: Alright, so next couple of questions around like the stuff that's changed, like does in your industry. You've talked a lot about data centers because that's where a lot of the attention is, and part of the reason we're talking about data centers and acoustics is because of the pushback, community pushback against data centers.
Sound is, is one of them. What are you seeing in this space? Because there is so much community pushback around acoustics.
Mike Dawson: It's been a kind of wild, from a noise regulation standpoint, how much has changed in just the past? I, I've been saying kind of nine months, like, to me it's not even a year, but the pace at which this has been changing is wild.
So if you take a, a bit of a while, like I can kind of, I'll, I'll run through sort of the story of what's happened where. You start, regulations are all, to your point, Charlie, they're largely local. So municipal based as opposed to say state or even federal. And so you started at a point where these regulations were written for industries of the past, right?
No one ever anticipating what is a data center, what does it [00:24:00] even look like in terms of sound, right? So they were always designed for largely. Factories manufacturing, you know, to avoid those types of facilities getting built near a neighborhood.
Charlie Jelen: Yep.
Mike Dawson: And so they didn't really encompass a lot of the things that are unique about a data center and the way that it operates constantly and, and the, the noise and whatnot.
And so all of a sudden you've got these data centers come in. You know, we all know Virginia being sort of the, the start of it all now, other regions obviously are exploding and, and catching up to some degree and. What quickly happened, obviously is the noise started to get recognized by community members and it quickly got realized that these regulations were behind.
And so this has led to what some people have said is one of the fastest regulation reforms in US history where municipalities across the entire country are racing to figure out how to write regulations that will enable. Data centers to come in because of the tax dollars and everything that they bring, but also protect their communities, which is a very fine balance.
And it's led, I mean, we've even said a ton of moratoriums of the, you know, municipalities just saying no to everything while they try to figure things out. And so. [00:25:00] That is how it all began. Then you kinda get to where we are today, which is really in the last nine to 12 months is very quickly noise became, you know, along the top of the conversation track of WA with water and power about a data center being built and the things that get brought up at the very outset of a permit processor or community engagement.
Mm-hmm. And. What's happened was the hyperscalers kind of started, which often happens in large colos, where they first started saying, okay, we're not gonna just write a spec that says meet local noise requirements. That was the first step. Then they moved past that to say we're gonna actually have a bit more of a standardized approach where we're gonna have noise requirements in our spec for a data center that might be kind of more out in the sticks that's gonna match the one that I might build and like.
You know, urban Illinois, and reason being, I don't want 10 years from now a cul-de-sac to get built nearby and a bunch of people with signs out in front of my logo up on the side of the building. Mm-hmm. And so they started that trend and then, you know, it kind of started propagating through to a lot of others who have started to do the same thing.
And then now it's taken another step further where we've even heard of a [00:26:00] few large sites that are in the news that people know about that are writing their spec to say, you know, the local regulation minus 10%.
Charlie Jelen: Got it. Yeah,
Mike Dawson: so that's all happened in 12 months. Let's call it.
Charlie Jelen: Wow. Have you run up against requirements that are so stringent that the data center didn't move forward or the, any construction didn't move forward?
Mike Dawson: Um, yes and no. So the way I would say it is that it was not very long ago that we were brought to the table. Let's just say we, you know, any noise control provider was brought to the table as sort of like a, a last step. You know, we already bought the land, we probably already built the building, the chillers or what have you, was already selected and, and purchased.
Oh, and we gotta do that. You know, whatever that acoustic guy said, then the stories, I think started making their way through the industry. To your question of sites that, uh, either shovels, you know, got put in the ground or not yet, and then they get canceled. You know, we've now started to get pulled in even before permits to be able to provide that information right up front, because yeah, the worst thing you could do is start building a data [00:27:00] center.
And we have multiple in the go right now where a. Uh, say platform or rooftop or what have you, has already been either purchased, maybe even built, and they now have to figure out how they add tens of thousands of pounds in per unit of noise attenuation onto that platform. And it's not built for it. And so the repercussions are significant.
And I think what we see happening is, I would say, call it. You know, 75% of the data center owners, developers, builders are, they've learned a lesson along the way, or they heard of others learning a lesson along the way, and they now include it in the spec. Mm-hmm. And so, right from the outset, it is a consideration and it's baked into the way the whole place is being designed.
Yeah. What happens though is you've got a lot of players, some massive. Logos that have largely been building these training capacity out in the sticks, haven't had to deal with it yet. And then they are, you know, everybody's working their way closer and closer to communities. And as you do that, then they run into the first time.
And so, you know, we're trying try to inform them at the outset. [00:28:00]
Charlie Jelen: If you look to the future, especially on the technology side, are we gonna get to a spot where we can do, and in my mind it goes to like passive filters versus active filters on like a, on like a harmonic distortion on chillers or, or fans or whatever, where.
It's, it's just fundamentally a different type of technology that gets you the output. Today, it feels like a lot of the acoustical treatment we do is, I'll call it passive, where it's a sheet metal box or it's a box with a material in it. Are we getting to a spot or is there already technology around like active.
Filtration or active noise reduction. I don't know if you like resonance or noise canceling headphones for chillers.
Dan Gentry: Yeah,
Mike Dawson: exactly.
Dan Gentry: Yes. I was trying to,
Mike Dawson: I just say it
Charlie Jelen: so funny. I was, I was trying to ask the question without saying that, and I'm glad, I'm glad you threw that in there.
Mike Dawson: That's what I think of too.
So you're not alone. Yeah. Uh, and I mean, we could design it to look just like that. It'd be perfect, but I [00:29:00] think, uh, that's
Charlie Jelen: too funny.
Mike Dawson: I think, yeah, no, it's a good question. Um, the problem is that active noise canceling is just difficult in environmental noise. Like when you talk about noise propagating outside as soon as it leaves the unit, it's, I mean, that's very, it's essentially impossible or, or very difficult if, if technology ever came up.
But if you look at what we talk about outsource. Solutions we put right on the chiller, right on the dry cooler.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah.
Mike Dawson: Potentially. It's an area of that I, from my understanding, the research just isn't, hasn't gone there and maybe isn't at that point where it's been a big enough sort of problem statement to require sort of the, the research to go into that.
Where we're a little more focused is how do we enable more airflow with more acoustic attenuation? 'cause what's important mm-hmm. That everybody. Needs to know is that, you know, acoustic continuation and airflow and you know, indirectly correlated in the sense that no matter what you do, you put anything on, let's just use a chiller.
You harm the hair flow in subway, I mean you hold a sheet of paper up, technically less airs [00:30:00] getting into the unit. And so what we're really focused on is optimizing, and we have a lot of RD going into this, but some new ways of increasing or optimizing the airflow. To enable us to do more attenuation without any impact on the equipment.
I mean, it's worth noting up until very recently in when Chiller OEMs had to do what we're talking about today. Mm-hmm. Most, as you guys could tell the listeners, like a lot of guys I talked to in sales at any OE em, they've been told their whole career, do not put anything on our chillers. And there's been some reeducation of the level of CFD analysis and, and engineering that goes into our solutions is largely in cooperation and co-engineering with the OEMs to ensure we.
Maintain all airflow, have no D rate to the equipment while also attenuating. That's sort of like the secret sauce or kind of what's needed.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah, that's it. And you're, you're spot on. Any adjustment, like our, our chillers have gone through, you know, years and years of engineering and the analysis that's in there is, is to predict the performance.
And so anytime we start to flow less airflow for a machine [00:31:00] that's supposed to operate at. X and now it's at y it has a significant impact and a lot of that funnels back to, you know, how do you warranty some of those things or how do you provide guaranteed performances to it? And so yeah, you're, you're, you're spot on.
It's one of those things where as the industry moves to lower noise levels, it's gonna require us to work together or bring these solutions in-house as we're developing the units.
Mike Dawson: Yep, exactly.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah.
Dan Gentry: I always tell people like we, I'm running these all the time. It's called an air cooled chiller. It needs air to be cooled, so if you restrict the air, it's not doing the cooling.
I get it's loud, but we, we have to like, it's has to, has to do its job. I love it. At the end of the day,
Charlie Jelen: I love when, you know, the noise canceling headphones, air cooled chillers. You're really bringing the common sense today. I love that.
Dan Gentry: That's it. I love it. I could honestly, uh. Talk about this. I, I wish this could go on for a couple hours.
Charlie Jelen: Well, unfortunately it can't. So we, we, we gotta leave you, Mike, but anything you wanna leave [00:32:00] us with, you know, what are we missing? What does the industry need to know about acoustics? What does the average consumer need to know, or
Mike Dawson: the average consumer call it? You know, the general public needs to know that data centers don't have to be loud.
And again, I know we talk a lot about data centers. It, it trickles into anything, right? A hospital being built, whatever it might be. Um, but, you know, these large facilities don't have to be. Noisy to a point that it, you know, causes disruption in, in their life. There are solutions and, you know, to those who are stakeholders in the infrastructure build out, you know, whether they know or don't know.
Yet, as soon as you, uh, have the opportunity to investigate a facility, if you can get a conversation going on noise, you know, there's ways to mitigate and get ahead of things and, you know, manage that costs and schedule.
Charlie Jelen: Love it. Mm-hmm. If you wanna get ahold of Park Lane, how do they get ahold of you?
Mike Dawson: Yeah, I mean, you know, by emails, Mike doDawson@parklanemechanical.com, the whole team, you know, the website, park lane mechanical.com. We've got enough ways on there to hit us up, but happy to hear from anybody. Of course.
Charlie Jelen: Love it. Sweet. Thanks for coming on the
Dan Gentry: show.
Mike Dawson: Thanks for having me guys. Great to chat with [00:33:00] you.
Dan Gentry: Oh, thank you again, Mike. That was awesome. I didn't know that acoustics could be something that we could go on for hours about. So thank you for your time. Up next outta of the day,
Charlie Jelen: looking to level up your data center in high performance computing environments. Without chaos, say hello to liquid cooled load banks from Trane Rental Services.
Dan Gentry: These cutting edge solutions allow you to commission your data center on time and on budget. So you can stress test like a pro before the real stress hits,
Charlie Jelen: right? Whether you need scalable cooling, heating, or power for temporary HVAC setups, Trane has the flexibility and the brains to keep your operations running smoothly.
Dan Gentry: Trane Rental Services, making temporary feel seriously. High performance,
Charlie Jelen: uh, ride Listener. We are back with season four, the first stat of the day, wait, did we do a stat of the day in episode one?
Dan Gentry: I think, uh, I don't think so. So, so we're back.
Charlie Jelen: Mel, did we do a stat of the day?
Mel: You did not [00:34:00] do a stat of the day?
You only did? Hot takeaways.
Charlie Jelen: There we go. All right. Stat of the day is back. Season four. Stat of the day is back. Here we go.
Dan Gentry: Here comes Joe.
Charlie Jelen: Stat of the day. Of the day. Stat of the day.
Alright, this one is from visual capitalist, one of my favorites for stat of the day. Tagline, which US states gained the most residents in 2025. Where do people wanna go? Where do people not wanna go? We're gonna do top five, bottom five on who gained the most? Who lost the most? This is net migration per 10,000 residents.
So it is, it is weighted. Alright, Danny, buddy, you wanna go? Who lost the most or who gained the most first?
Dan Gentry: Uh, let's whatever. Who lost the most?
Charlie Jelen: Who lost the most? All right. Take a guess at who lost the most residents. Per 10,000 residents in 2025,
Dan Gentry: uh, I'm gonna, uh, top three are California, New York, Illinois.
Charlie Jelen: Oh, you [00:35:00] got two? Two of the top. Five. Five. Alright, so we'll go 46 Kansas minus 20. Hmm. Minus 20. Yeah. Minus 20 people per 10,000 residents. Hmm. California minus 25 Maryland minus 27 New York, minus 28. Massachusetts minus 38.
Dan Gentry: Massachusetts. I didn't, uh, I wasn't gonna put that on my list.
Charlie Jelen: Alright. Top gainers, who gained the most?
Where do people wanna live?
Dan Gentry: Florida. North Carolina and Texas.
Charlie Jelen: Ah, didn't get any of 'em. Oh wow. Starting with number five, this one was a surprise. Alabama.
Dan Gentry: Oh, okay.
Charlie Jelen: Sweet Home Alabama 37.
Dan Gentry: Wow.
Charlie Jelen: 37 people per 10,000 residents. Tennessee next. Not a big surprise. I feel like Tennessee's got, okay. Yeah,
Dan Gentry: I hear about Tennessee's.
Got things going on
Charlie Jelen: Delaware.
Dan Gentry: Oh, would not have picked that.
Charlie Jelen: Would not have picked that one either. No offense to Delaware. But no, it wasn't on my list. It wasn't my radar. Uh, number two, [00:36:00] not a surprise to me, but probably a big surprise in general, but Idaho.
Dan Gentry: Oh, okay. Yeah. I guess I've heard about Idaho and Utah, aren't they?
A bunch of people moving? Californians are moving there.
Charlie Jelen: Yeah, maybe. Hmm. Apparently Idaho number one, South Carolina.
Dan Gentry: Well done.
Charlie Jelen: It's huge. It's 80 people per 10,000 residents they've gained in 2025
Dan Gentry: South Carolina's Got it going on.
Charlie Jelen: That's a big one. Alright, well there's your dad of the day listener.
Dan Gentry: Alright. Thanks for listening to this episode of Cool Air Hot Takes. We're very happy to be back for season four. Remember, new episodes are released every two weeks on Tuesdays.
Charlie Jelen: Leave us a comment on Spotify or YouTube, A review on Apple, and a big thank you to Pat in Chicago. He's the self-proclaimed biggest promoter of Cool Air Hot Takes.
Thanks buddy. We appreciate everything you do.
Dan Gentry: Yeah, we do. Thanks, pat. That's awesome. We've also got merch, so send us your hot takes to Cool air.hot [00:37:00] takes@trane.com. If we feature you in the show, you might find some of that merch in your mailbox. Derek Knight has some merch heading his way for doing just.
That the title of his hot take into our inbox was broadband. Jesus has blessed the world with Energy net.
Charlie Jelen: I saw that one come into the inbox and, and that was a instant click. So, uh, 100%. We are definitely including that hot take on the next episode. So stay tuned. We've got Derek Knights Hot Take, we've got Uncle Tom's Hot Take coming up.
We got a, we got a lot of good content for the next episode.
Dan Gentry: Stay tuned and until next time, stay cool and keep. Those takes hot.
