HSB’s Journey from Boiler Inspections to IoT Solutions

Pete Miller [00:37]:

Welcome to the Predict & Prevent podcast!

Today, we’re thrilled to have John Riggs, Chief Technology Officer and head of Applied Technology Solutions at Hartford Steam Boiler, or HSB.

HSB has been protecting customers from devastating losses for 158 years. From its start as a think tank focused on making a better steam boiler, HSB has been at the forefront of engineering, technology, and insurance.

In this episode, John will share how HSB is advancing risk management technology through its innovative “connect and protect” strategy.

They’re partnering with tech giants like Amazon to develop cutting-edge sensor technologies that can detect and prevent problems before they cause damage.

John will also reveal an exciting new credit card-sized sensor that could transform property protection.

Get ready to learn about the future of insurance technology and how HSB is leading the way.

So John, let me just start with, would you mind just giving us a quick background of HSB? It’s such an interesting story and the company has been doing sort of preventive things for so long. Would you mind doing that just to start?

John Riggs [01:52]:

Happy to, Pete. It’s a story that I love to tell because of the context in terms of the history of this country. About 18 days after the signing of the surrender papers at Appomattox between Grant and Lee, 18 days after that, there were prisoners, union prisoners in a CSA encampment in the deep south in Mississippi. And they were freed. Took some time, right?

No email, no internet, no social media. So it’s some time for the news to make it to the deep south. And the prisoners were released and they were trying to find a ride home. And what happens next is literally the catalyst for the birth of Hartford Steam Boiler because they board a steamship called the Sultana to head up north in the Mississippi.

Ship was rated at a capacity of about 300, 350 people. And there were over 2,000 passengers on board, standing room only, literally crammed into every space you can imagine on the steamboat. And there were some boiler maintenance issues on that ship as it was a steamboat propelled by, you guessed it, steam. And there were multiple boilers. But the captain knew of those maintenance issues and said, We gotta go, we gotta get these guys home.

About two, three o ‘clock in the morning, two of the boilers exploded, instantly killing hundreds in the tight confinements around the engineering space of that ship. Resulted in the greatest maritime disaster in US history, with more casualties than the Titanic. The fire that ensued on this wood vessel, consumed many more lives, men jumped overboard, were swimming aboard shore.

Three weeks earlier, the soldiers pulling them onto dry land were CSA Confederate soldiers, pulling Union soldiers out of the water would have shot them three weeks earlier and were pulling them to safety. Over 1,500 casualties by some reports. Also many slaves undocumented as passengers, released slaves undocumented as passengers aboard that boat. That’s why the numbers vary because there wasn’t an accurate manifest.

Well, at the same time in the history of this country, there was a boiler exploding about once every four days. A quarter of a building, a half of a building, a half of a city block just being decimated and many lives were being lost.

The industry at the time viewed these boiler explosions as acts of God. And a bunch of gentlemen, businessmen and technologists alike were part of a club in Hartford called the Hartford Polytechnic Club. These were gentlemen that came together as a think tank. And they came up with the conclusion, no, I’m sorry, this is not, regardless of your faith, this is not an act of God. This is something we call physics. It’s material science and it’s physics that’s causing the overheating and the explosion of these boilers. And we think this can be solved.

And they actually patented a loop that provided steam regulation and steam relief to boilers. That became part of their journey. But they also were the founding members of what became Hartford Steam Boiler, engineering and inspection. And…

It all started around engineering a better boiler, getting into the material science, setting standards for the industry that would be applied in the manufacturing of boilers, but also something we call jurisdictional inspection because it relates to the jurisdiction, the actual locale, inspection of a boiler after it was installed.

And so to this day, first of all, the company started as an engineering and inspection company. Insurance wasn’t part of the picture. It was setting standards and doing inspections.

And I’ve heard different reports six, seven, eight, nine years later, they said, you know what, we can probably have better success in the market selling these inspection services if we give a financial guarantee post inspection, do the inspection. And we’ll give you a guarantee of its quality in terms of the boiler remaining safe. That was a risk transfer product. That was an insurance product. It was a warranty of sorts, a performance guarantee on the inspection.

To this very day, we are still using that business model. Utilize IoT, utilize this solution provider’s technology, a Schneider Electric, a Carrier, will provide a performance guarantee around that service. And so it’s still this concept of engineering, this Venn diagram of engineering, technology, and insurance.

And I would say the greatest foray in the technology circle of that Venn diagram has been in the last 12 years as we’ve gone head first in pursuit of an IoT strategy for the business. But that’s the long and short of the birth of what is Hartford Steam Boiler 158 years later. And we’re all fascinated by it because fundamentally the model is the same. And as an insurance company, almost 50% of our employees are engineers. No other insurance company in the world can say that, but it is what drives our uniqueness and our compelling value prop in the business. Because unlike many other great insurance companies, there’s a lot of other great insurance companies out there that are very good at insuring against risk. We influence the risk. And that’s the difference.

Pete [07:57]:

I love that story. Good ideas are long lived and in some cases eternal, right? And the foresight of those folks is pretty amazing to me. Not to mention the fact I’m a Civil War buff. So tell us about your role at HSB and what Applied Technology Solutions does.

John Riggs [08:23]:

I am honored to serve as the Chief Technology Officer of the firm and the head of Applied Technology Solutions. It is a three-pillared business. You could argue that it is the division in the company that represents our thrust into technology in a very meaningful way. And we do that, as I said, along three distinct pillars.

The first is sensor solutions. That’s a commercial and residential IoT business to mitigate losses. It focuses on property losses. So leak, freeze, fire, in the commercial realm, perishable goods —  leak, freeze, fire, perishable goods — that’s the long and short. There are many permutations of that because if you can detect water and you can detect temperature, you can also do things like mold.

So there’s other types of perils that fit under that broader umbrella, but we like to say leak, freeze, fire, perishable goods. Perishable goods is a flavor of an equipment breakdown offering because you’re actually focused on the outcome with perishable goods. But what you’re actually protecting is the integrity of the cooling unit, the freezing unit. It’s about causing your goods to not perish. So it’s about refrigeration and and commercial freezers. So we have solutions focused on that. That’s the sensor solutions business. And that’s the first of three. It probably gets the lion’s share of my time and my attention.

But we also have two other compelling businesses. First, sensor solutions. Second, risk solutions. Third, data solutions.

Risk solutions, think of it as more classic insurance, but it is truly specialty insurance, keeping with the focus of HSB on specialty insurance. But it’s specialty insurance where the asset that we’re protecting or the service that we’re providing the risk solution for is a connected asset, or it’s a service that deals with connected assets or utilizes an IoT solution and performing the service. So that’s a special type of risk solution. Think of it as performance guarantees, uptime guarantees, energy efficiency guarantees, energy shortfall guarantees. These are all different flavors of performance guarantees. What sets it apart and puts it into my shop, Applied Technology Solutions, is when there’s that IoT component. The asset is connected or the solution, the IoT solution being provided, is a connected solution.

The third is data solutions. Data solutions in the simplest sense is about monetizing the data. How can we take an ever increasing level of connectivity amongst assets. Take OEMs, take Schneider Electric, take Carrier. These companies, Siemens, they all have a digital backbone. Schneider Electric has EcoStruxure, Carrier has Abound, Siemens has MindSphere, GE had Predix. And those are the digital backbones for the assets to be connected and for the companies to maintain that digital fiber, that digital connective tissue to the asset, even after the sale. In the case of those digital backbones, we can do a cloud-to-cloud integration. So we could actually get a data feed from those assets. And if we’re talking about a performance guarantee and I’ve got a cloud-to-cloud integration with the OEM, I can data enable the performance guarantee. I can actually trigger it based on the monitoring of that equipment. So I can take it to the level of a truly connected 24/7 environment where I can do equipment condition monitoring. That’s a general industry term to a class of sensor technology for equipment condition monitoring.

I can utilize what the OEM already is built into that asset, the built in sensors. and I can utilize the cloud to cloud integration and I can trigger a claim. I can actually trigger a claim without anyone picking up a phone. Hi, there’s been a problem, my machine broke down. I can bypass all of that because I can see that the unit is not performing within the bounds of its SLAs or within its specifications. It’s gone outside the bounds and the moment it goes outside the bounds, I can trigger an event and that event could be a claim. And then we follow the terms of the performance guarantee and we can actually trigger a payment as well. The entire thing can be automated. And so under development as we speak, I have the world’s first industrial parametric performance guarantee. We call it a data-driven guarantee, a DDG. And that is when I take my data solutions team and I have them work really closely with my risk solutions team to data enable the performance guarantees I’ve been doing for the last five years.

Pete [13:30]:

Very, very cool. That’s really very interesting. So we talked a little bit about HSB’s history, but can you sort of expand on the journey that HSB has had in developing technology for prevention? And you mentioned that a little bit, but maybe a little more background on equipment protection and prevention.

John Riggs [13:51]:

Yeah, I have to take my hat off to our CEO. He has been in his role for 12 plus years, Greg Barats. And when he came on board as CEO, it was in his first or second year, he looked at the future of our core business and our core business, the lion’s share of our business is equipment breakdown. That’s the specialty insurance we’re providing. It’s almost reinsuring the equipment breakdown layer of a client company’s property and casualty policy, a typical property and casualty policy. There is an element of it that relates specifically to equipment breakdown. And we are effectively providing a white glove service of that. We call it EB, that equipment breakdown coverage, to the client companies, the state farms of this world. The list, the list goes on and on in terms of our 275 client companies that we work with.

He looked at that and said, you know, I’m concerned about being disintermediated. And he might not have used that word, but that’s effectively what he meant because he said the equipment that we’re providing EB coverage on is becoming ever increasingly connected. And he envisioned, envisioned today that with the OEMs providing the monitoring and the asset owners keeping on top of that, that they could see the need for maintenance of equipment long before it ever broke down. And if you had connected equipment that you’re actively monitoring and there’s software and portals being provided by an OEM, he could simply see the need for our insurance declining.

He felt it was inevitable that eventually our equipment breakdown insurance, the core of our business was going to instead of forever growing was going to turn the curve and start descending. And he said, we have to get ahead of this. We have to understand where this is all going. We have to play a proactive role in the deployment and the engagement around IoT. And so 12 years ago, he started a journey. It was around 2012, 2013. And he started off with an engagement with A firm that I was working with as a senior managing director, ultimately became a partner with, PwC, to do a sensor network strategy. Let’s understand the various layers of the IOT stack as it’s called. Let’s see who’s playing where. Let’s look at our own capabilities. Let’s figure out where we should play, how we should play. And that started the journey in terms of where we were going to go. And at the same time, our HSB strategic corporate ventures unit was born, corporate venture capital unit, to invest in startups and emerging tech.

And so he had that set up at about the same time to keep a sense of the landscape and who was doing what around various types of technology, be it cyber, be it equipment breakdown, the range of topics and themes that they focused on is many. And then coupled that with a move to build our first IoT related offerings. And initially we focused on where we thought we could get the most traction and guess who defined that? Our client companies. They said our greatest level of loss comes from water. Water is highest frequency and fairly reasonably level high severity. And in the aggregate, it is the highest volume of loss. And so help us address water perils and then with that comes freezing pipes. So that’s leak freeze, water and temperature. And then next, much higher severity but lower frequency, is fire. And for that we partnered with Whisker Labs to roll out Ting as a sensor that’s also part of our third-party ecosystem. We don’t operate with an NIH mindset, Peter. We aren’t needing to develop every sensor. I very much excited and interested in constantly combing the landscape to look for leading edge partners to tackle other perils that are of high priority to our clients. But we tend to be very driven by what’s most important to our client companies.

Pete [18:17]:

I love Ting. I have a couple of them and I’ve interviewed Bob and a great idea and a great product.

John Riggs [18:25]:

Yeah, mine is four feet to my right.

Pete [18:30]:

Yeah, mine’s about the same. So there you go. We hear these two sort of terms, tech into insurance and tech alongside insurance. Can you tell us how you view those at HSB?

John Riggs [18:44]:

First, tech into insurance. This is where technology is embedded within the insurance policy, within the terms and conditions themselves. Because it’s embedded within the insurance, in most cases, it requires regulatory approval because insurance products require regulatory approval. Sometimes we’re the ones that are seeking that on behalf of our client companies. In most cases, we put a rough outline together and then the client company has to seek regulatory approval. And the technology is an integral part of the admitted insurance product. If you subtract the technology, that insurance product doesn’t exist. It does not exist without the technology. They are integrated fully.

Tech alongside insurance is exactly what it sounds like. It’s where I can deploy a technology solution, a sensor kit, in parallel with an insurance policy. But the insurance policy makes zero explicit reference to the technology. The technology is not an integral or a prerequisite part of the policy terms and conditions. That’s the difference between the two. Often, we’ll start with a tech alongside insurance deployment. And if we see an excellent impact or a beautiful synergy between the two, then we can pursue the longer development cycle required for a tech into insurance solution. But, most insurance professionals agree at the end of the day, it is tech into insurance.

We see it with telematics. Your car insurance by some providers will require an IoT device if you want to get preferred rates. I see eventually IOT in a residential or commercial setting going the same way that a fire pump goes today in a commercial setting. It’s required. Some type of fire retardant, some type of fire mitigation system, fire suppression system is required, just like smoke detectors are required and fire extinguishers are required today. I see us ultimately going in the same direction with IOT.

Pete [21:02]:

That’s very, very interesting. But I would just want to shift a little bit to your data solutions. And how do you view that as giving you an edge to better manage risk?

John Riggs [21:15]:

So, as I mentioned earlier, when you have a platform that you can utilize to drive integration with partners, partners like OEMs, partners like IoT solution providers, you can automate performance guarantees. That’s the simple aspect of having a data enabled performance guarantee. But on the other side, in terms of working with IoT solution providers and understanding how you can enable, maybe through a license, maybe through the platform, you can unlock their capability within a home, you get a different risk profile. You then can develop risk insights. You could have something we think of as a water risk score. You could have a fire risk score. You could have a location risk score relative to geography, relative to wildfires, relative to floodplains and nat cat events.

You can begin to have a different view of the inherent risk in a property depending upon weather conditions, depending upon geography, depending upon the infrastructure of the home or the commercial property. And you can develop risk insights to drive what is the most important thing at Munich Re’s level. And that’s more intelligent underwriting.

So we believe that ultimately this type of integration will unlock that potential for the business and that the value through more intelligent underwriting can be passed along to the policyholder in terms of potentially better rates. But at the very basic level in the beginning, higher levels of capacity, lower deductibles, there’s many different levers you can pull on in the multivariable equation of insurance and data helps to put some oil, some grease around those levers and unfreeze some of them and really go after what I’ve always called the holy grail of technology and insurance and that’s data. So we’re looking to monetize that in a couple of different ways.

Pete [23:30]:

I believe HSB has sort of broadened its strategy from predict and prevent to connect and protect. So can you sort of tell us what that means and sort of the implications of that?

John Riggs [23:43]:

You can imagine Pete, in the world of insurance, words are important. And I might be somewhat responsible for this direction toward connect and protect. What I want to be careful to say is it’s not broadening HSB’s strategy. It’s putting different light on a particular component of it. So I got to walk you through a quick journey.

You’re familiar with repair and replace. I know you are because you own a home or a car, or you have maybe kids that are on your insurance policy. So you’re very familiar, at least with the repair and replace component. There’s been a fender bender. What do you do? You pick up the phone or you go on the app and you file a claim. The entire paradigm there is focused on understanding your risk relative to your credit score, the experience of the drivers, the size of the engines, the types of vehicles, and I’m just focusing on auto as an example. But the entire paradigm is repair and replace. You have a problem, we’re here for your worst day, we insure you and help you cover your damages and get back on the road, and it’s a big focus on minimizing your downtime and having a good customer experience through the process. But ultimately, it’s about paying claims.

And…there was a move, and I don’t know the exact timeframe for this, but I think it goes back a good 20, 30 years, maybe more, towards predict and prevent. Instead of just being there for you on your worst day, we believe there’s enough data to help us help you avoid your worst day, and that we can get ahead of some of this by looking at engineering data, claims data, geographical data, weather patterns, you name it. So whether it’s home or whether it’s business or whether it’s auto, the predict and prevent paradigm helps to get ahead of the actual loss.

Now, predict and prevent still being talked about a lot today. Nothing wrong with the phrase. I personally just wasn’t enamored by it because I didn’t feel that it told a technology-centric story well enough. Predict and prevent. Where in there is tech?

OK, maybe a little bit with some algorithm science, but you would only know that if you were a bit of a data scientist. So I came up with this concept of a flavor of predict and prevent, which is technology infused or technology enabled. So that’s how I want you to think about connect and protect. It’s still predict and prevent. It’s just the technology flavor of predict and prevent.

Connect is a direct homage to telecommunication, wireless, networking. It’s connect. It’s a connected device. It speaks to IoT. It speaks to network connectivity. I feel that prevention is great, but accidents will still happen. And in the case of them happening, there’s a higher level of value and that’s protection. So that even if something does happen that I wasn’t able to prevent, I want to extend beyond prevent and say, I’m going to extend beyond predict with connect, and I’m going to extend beyond prevent with protect.

So predict and prevent extended as a value proposition is connect and protect. And it’s the specific flavor of predict and prevent for a technology enabled world.

Pete [27:09]:

Obviously, your group is very innovative. Can you talk about, and you talked a little bit about with your risk solutions, but perhaps other areas where collaboration, the role it plays in driving innovation and success at HSB Group? And whether it’s collaboration with your customers or collaboration with your ecosystem partners, I know you talk about ecosystem.

John Riggs [27:34]:

Yeah, I’ll talk about it locally and then I’ll talk about it on a macro level. So locally we have what we call the innovation floor. It’s the 13th floor at our headquarters building at 1 State Street in Hartford. And that innovation floor has a nickname. It’s called the mashup. And it’s called the mashup because it was literally built upon this concept of creating a space where you can go get your coffee, get your flavored water, have a nice bright environment, good working tables, high tables, low tables, couches, whatever works for you to have a highly collaborative environment where we are sitting down with clients, with engineers, with data scientists, with marketers, with product developers, with people writing code, doing hardware development, firmware development, and we can bring all of these thoughts together to share ideas and make a better product. And it was this mindset that this is absolutely a team sport.

This is not a rock star performance. It is not, you know, me and my band. It is every member of the cast of characters representing critical value to the overall solution. So that’s within our own four walls.

But you picked a really great point of timing to ask this question, because I just came off of a three-day workshop in New York City with AWS. And we’ve been public with the ecosystem partnership, the strategic ecosystem partner that we see AWS to be and Amazon to be for us as a company, because our future is dependent in terms of our dependent upon our ability to partner with some very key clients, partner with companies like Whisker Lab that has the best electrical arcing fire mitigation technology that I’ve seen on the market today.

Partners like Schneider Electric that represent the cutting edge of what’s taking place in terms of electrical infrastructure. And so much of our equipment breakdown insurance is focused on their types of equipment and helping to make sure they stay up and operate well for the small to middle market player, as well as the residential homeowner.

But then I look at partners like Amazon and AWS. And I utilize AWS for the IoT core. They’re literally the piston, the camshaft within the engine of my IoT hot rod. But then in addition to that, utilizing some of their AI technologies like Amazon Q to focus on knowledge capture and knowledge transfer to new employees.

And then also something we’re super excited about, leveraging the Amazon Sidewalk network. This is a shared network that leverages a chip set that’s already on board, whether it’s a LoRa radio frequency or a Bluetooth radio frequency. It’s part of the radio head of a sidewalk network where I can deploy my devices and I can deploy the world’s first sensors enabled with Sidewalk technology so that my sensors talk directly to the Ring device, or the Echo or the Dot. They have a list of products that are enabled with the Sidewalk technology and those products can serve as my gateway.

So I can have a cheaper solution overall because I don’t have to deploy a gateway that cost me several hundreds of dollars for my bomb. I can deploy a gateway list solution. It’s not gateway list. It’s just already there. And it can utilize the business down the street or your neighbor’s Amazon product up to two miles away. If you’re talking about typical just stick frame construction line of sight, it can go 10 miles. I’ve been up in the air with a sidewalk sensor and maintain connectivity with the ground the entire time because there was nothing in the way. And I maintain the signal contact the entire flight. Please don’t tell on me for that. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t interfere with any of the safety protocols of the flight because it’s a different frequency.

It’s not the frequency that any equipment on the aircraft is communicating on. So I know I was safe from a technical perspective. But regardless, that is super exciting to us because I will be able to rapidly deploy sensors, ease of deployment, activation will be simpler. I’ll take battery life from three to five years to five to 10 years. The entire customer experience is going to be better.

And it also is going to be at a much lower price point than anything I’ve been able to bring to market to date. And we all know price is of critical importance if you really want to break the log jam around IOT adoption. And I see our ability to do that coming early next year.

Pete [32:45]:

I’ve always wondered that. It’s like Wi -Fi routers, right? If you go in between, how many routers would HSB have to deploy in order to get your data communication? But going through this Sidewalk, that solved a big problem, right? That’s fascinating.

John Riggs [32:52]:

We’re seeing some fantastic connectivity numbers in our first pilot. We prototyped about 200 products just to get them out there, just to test connectivity. Super excited about the results. And there’s even additional advancement that we’re able to build into our first release to take those numbers even higher. Every percentage point counts. If you’re at 80 getting to 85, getting to 90, you’re constantly trying to drive your connectivity to something very close to a 100%, if possible.

Because as you know, you take your cell phone, you go to a cabin remote in the woods, you don’t always have connectivity. So even with my existing sensors that work off the cellular network, I have lots of places where I don’t have the connectivity I would want. But here, I have an ability to take that ball much further down the field in terms of connectivity at a lower price point. So.

Pete [33:43]:

That’s awesome. So HSB, 158 years old, obviously has innovated. Any company that’s 158 years in the market obviously has been able to innovate. And it would seem that HSB has an approach to innovation. It’s obviously been highly successful. So what can you share? Any insights about how HSB goes about it? And how has it been so successful?

John Riggs [34:12]:

I think I would be remiss to not say that first and foremost, it’s the culture of the company from its inception. So when you think about a company founded on a think tank, that’s a polytechnic club. I mean, that’s a pretty unique founder story. But the attitude has never waned because of the emphasis on engineering and technology, when you have a company that has nearly 50 % engineers, you’ve literally got a mindset walking the halls every day of the week. That’s just interested in trying this or trying that.

If anything, I would say we struggle with, maybe our experiments not being as short as they, they possibly should, should be. I think we could get better at, at killing things, but we do have a lot of irons in the fire. And I would say if I just am channeling my CEO, his biggest guidance to his direct reports is to maintain focus. Try to constantly be thinking about, okay, I get those are your 15 initiatives, which three to five are critically important. And let’s make sure those are getting the resources, those are getting the time, those are getting the attention. So it’s innovation coupled with discipline.

And interestingly, engineers can tend to be fairly rigorous in terms of methodology. Sometimes we suffer from analysis paralysis. So you have to battle against all of those tendencies. I think of it as a double-edged sword. Our engineering and our innovation history is our greatest strength, but that means I got a blade edge pointing back at me at the same time. And your strength is also your weakness. So we’re constantly mindful of that in a very respectful way. We challenge each other. We shoot down ideas, not people. And so you can bring an idea forward. You need to be prepared to face the challenge. But if you can argue that idea and you can continue to build interest in that idea, you can continue to invest time and energy on that. But eventually some ideas get killed.

Pete [36:32]:

You talked about projects being successful and things like that. Are there any ones that really kind of, solutions that you’ve had, that have prevented? I’m sure there’s many that have prevented significant losses, but any that really stick out in your mind and that you’re proud of?

John Riggs [36:48]:

There are two that come to mind. I have spoken of these, but I will stick with them as being the ones that stick out the most. The one was at a university in Ohio. Invariably when we deploy sensors, it seems like it’s JIT, but it’s not by design, just in time. Because we’ll have case after case after case  where I deploy a sensor kit and within the first 30 days, we mitigate a major loss.

Second floor, plumber had been in a utility room. Sometimes you just question the design of things, but a utility room was over an art vault, right over top the art vault. And a coupling had caused, that had been worked on by a plumber, caused some back pressure. You fix one thing, something else breaks. And that coupling had broke over a weekend, broken, and the water alert went off.

And typically for a university setting, there’s multiple contacts that are lined up and they got the alert quickly. They were able to respond to it and they came and found the source of the leak. Had the leak continued, they estimate the damage to the artifacts in the vault could have exceeded $17 million.

So that’s not even the amount that we recorded. We maintain an ROI calculator for our clients and we don’t put the number in there. Someone says 17 million. We don’t type in 17 million right off the bat. We have a conversation and we reach an agreement based on their claims history, their loss history, and based on the context of that actual event. That one was, I believe, recorded at $3 million. But the potential value was 17.

There’s another one that’s very close to where my home is in Northern Virginia out in Loudoun County. There was a Victorian home where a Ting sensor was deployed. And it was able to, within 24 hours of deployment, triggered an arcing event occurring somewhere in the home. And Ting’s product includes a thousand dollars of an electrician coming to investigate. And within a day, they found the source of a faulty outlet sitting behind a piece of furniture where you never would have seen it. You would never have seen the blackening that would occur. It would have just typically gotten worse and worse and worse till the plastic had ignited and there was a fire that had ensued. And given the location, they felt it was central to the home. It could have caused a total loss on the home and it was a $1.7 million home. So those are two that jumped the mind. One from Meshify, from our leak freeze sensors, and one from a partner, Whisker Labs.

Pete [39:29]:

So you talked a lot about some really cool technologies. Is there anything new on your product roadmap that you’re comfortable sharing within the confines of competitive advantage?

John Riggs [39:41]:

Well, I already let the cat out of the bag with regard to the Sidewalk sensor that we have coming. But imagine, I don’t know if you’re an ice hockey fan, I’m a huge Hershey Bears fan. They feed the Washington Capitals. I grew up four rows behind the goalie. So that’s where I got my indoctrination to semi-professional sports. That puck, that puck, that hard puck, we call our waters and temperature sensors pucks. Why? Because, well, they look like a hockey puck.

So, imagine the size of a hockey puck and your inability to slide that under a refrigerator or slide it under a washer and dryer or slide it in a crevice along some other type of maybe commercial asset. Well, the sensor that we have coming was inspired by some other technologies that you’ve seen on the market. I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials, the credit card size form factor, where you place your thumbs on it and you can basically do an EKG at home.

Well, we saw that and we said, hmm, I wonder if we could fit all of our sensor technology into something the size of a credit card. Well, we came close. It’s four credit cards stacked together. It’s four millimeters thick. It’s the form factor of a credit card. The antenna wraps around the edges. It lays out perfectly for a temperature and a water sensor.

We’re able to use a lot of real estate for a battery pouch. So five to 10 years on battery life.

It won’t require a gateway because it’s going to leverage the Sidewalk network. You can leverage both Sidewalk Bluetooth and Sidewalk LoRa will leverage both technologies. The sensors have the potential to even provide a relay from one to the other so that if one sensor is up higher and it can see the Sidewalk signal flowing across your neighborhood, and another one’s in your basement, maybe behind cinder block, and it can’t see that signal, the two sensors can provide a relay one to another, and you’ll still have your sensors connected to the network and performing their function.

All of that is in prototype as we speak, and we’re super excited about a launch in the first half of next year.

But also on my roadmap, you can’t have sensors everywhere. You just, you simply can’t. It’s price prohibitive to place a sensor next to every single sink, every single toilet, every place where a pipe can freeze in a home. So, I still believe that both in commercial and residential, you have to have a meaningful product that’s monitoring the flow. We have a partner called WINT, and WINT has an invasive flow detection where you cut the pipe, you insert the technology. It is sensitive enough to tell if you have a dripping faucet on the second floor. It is that sensitive in terms of the flow monitoring, all of the data analysis that occurs in the cloud, the sensitivity of that to pick up the smallest trickle.

I think you couple that and ultimately embed shutoff capability in that along with the water sensors. And I think you, as I like to say, you’ve got it coming and going. You can cover it at either end of the pipe, either where it’s leaking or where it’s being fed into the property. And I think ultimately that’s the right way to address leak and freeze. And so we have a shutoff for residential today and small commercial, and we have with WINT a large pipe partner for water flow monitoring and shut off. I think more to come, more to come in that space as I continue to try to push the envelope there. And then more to come in terms of monitoring the electrical of a home and protecting the assets within that home as we extend the partnership with Ting and look what else we could do there. So.

Pete [43:31]:

So, John, this is great. Thank you so much.  I really appreciate this. This has been fascinating for me.