Nick And Brian: Welcome to the daisian integration advantage. We've got Nick back to this week. So Glad to be here. here. Thank you, bud. got our our guest David Lincoln from ⁓ Rosewater Energy when I really to get here sooner than later talk about some really important topics today and let you do some introduction, David, about the history of the company yourself. let's an
David Laikind: Perfect, thank you. And thank you for having me out. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed talking with you in the past, Brian. So, Rosewater is going its ⁓ 15th now. ⁓ And Joe Picharelli, who's been a fixture in our industry for going on 50 years, started Sound Advice, started Avid. ⁓ And he noticed that there's a problem that we get blamed for all the time of things failing in people's homes. And what he set out to develop while he was at Avid was a way that we could cure this. And he found that it wasn't the products were put in, it wasn't the industry as a whole. We've really grown up as an industry, but it's the power that's coming into the home. ⁓ Before digital in an analog world, when the power sagged, your lights would turn brown. Today, they flicker on and off, and then the LED lights don't last as long. And so that's kind of started this whole thing. And what we've noticed is that we're going to put more microprocessors into people's homes in the coming years than we ever have in the past. ⁓ There was an interesting study. I'm sure you guys all remember the blue screen of death.
Bert Herrero: Mm-hmm.
David Laikind: We all work on the same thing, so it's awesome at that point, IBM did a study, and they found that the average home computer sees 120 power anomalies a month. So if you replace the word computer with microprocessor, of these devices that we're putting in people's homes see 120 power anomalies a month. And in your designing circuit boards, the first thing that you want to do is eliminate heat. So when the voltage sags down, it creates heat and it shortens the life of all of our products. What Rosewater is doing is they're starting to move beyond the rack. as all of you doing too, right? We're light fixtures in everybody's homes. Everything is starting to move around. But then you start looking at tankless water heaters, touchless plumbing, ⁓ You and I've got a client that's gone through a lot of small appliances and big appliances, and it's all grid related that we get blamed for. So, while we ⁓ try to control our destiny in clients' homes so that we can provide them with the best experience possible, Rosewater's goal is to really shore up the foundation that everything that we do rests on, and that's the power coming to the house. ⁓ The utility's responsibility ends at the meter, and it is our responsibility to protect our home from the utility, which is an odd thing, but that's really at the end of the day what it's all about. So that's the goal of Rosewater. ⁓ We've been growing, we're privately held, we're self-funded. We have a world-class manufacturer that builds exclusively for us and ⁓ we've been growing every single year just organically going out reaching out to dealers and people like Daisy to help us get into the clients that they work with.
Nick And Brian: right. mean, the ability to protect the entire home if you need to or your critical devices at the panel level is so much more effective than trying to do it at the edge, right? We all have to do power protection. know, we have our Watt boxes, we have our BigDog secure, you know, BigDog power, and they're great, but you know, and they're convenient for other reasons, but they're... they're not doing triple conversion, they're not cleaning up the power necessarily coming into it, they're surge protection, but getting that pure sine wave in those voltage dips everything that affect the low voltage electronics. I I think everybody's seen their wall warts die on smaller devices and sort of wondered why. Well, yes, mostly because manufactured in China and they're cheap, but they're also susceptible voltage shags and all that and spikes. ⁓ it happens a lot more than people ⁓ see. ⁓
Bert Herrero: . ⁓
David Laikind: out of it.
Bert Herrero: you ⁓
Nick And Brian: Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
David Laikind: Well, it's interesting because you notice we don't have fuses in things anymore. And they've developed these little devices called an MOV. And they were the resettable fuses. But it's like water erosion. The more often you use it, the longer it takes to heal.
Nick And Brian: Right. Right.
Bert Herrero: We're setting. Right.
David Laikind: And so you have something that, you know, it's sags, it stops working and wanting to protect. And it used to come back up and then it takes longer to come back up and longer. And then it's a service call because it's not coming back up. And then you agree that it's defective. You send it back to the factory and they go, thing works like a champ. And it's these things that are the annoyances for our clients. And quite frankly, annoyances for our teams as well.
Nick And Brian: Right. So David, could you just walk us through kind of ⁓ the structure and maybe explain a little bit what triple conversion means? so like, what's the food chain here? ⁓ You go from grid to the house, then what?
Bert Herrero: I'm great with that.
David Laikind: So what we do is from the grid power coming in, we convert that to DC or battery power. And we do that in real time all the time. We do not have a transfer switch. So all the power that's coming in to my device, it's immediately converted to DC. And then we immediately convert it back to AC. And we use a patented device. It's an off-the-shelf product. These are inverters. Inverters convert battery power to house power. And so we convert this back in. part of the patent on this is that I'm able to guarantee my output plus or minus 1%, where the grid and the utilities guarantee in spec of plus or minus 10%.
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm.
David Laikind: Right? So by taking it from the AC back to DC and then back to AC again, I can guarantee a perfect 120 volts at the outlet, perfect sine wave so that everything works constantly, unlike a battery backup system, which waits for voltage to go down and then it transfers over. Generators do the same thing. They have that transfer switch. So the unique part of my device is that no matter what's happening outside as the
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm. Thank
David Laikind: of currents going like this, ⁓ if it sags down, my batteries make up that difference in voltage. And if it surges up, my batteries absorb that difference in voltage so that I'm always able to output that proper voltage that all of the devices want. And as the technology becomes more microprocessor controlled, that 120 volts becomes much more critical.
Nick And Brian: Sure, sure. And then those batteries hold the load for a period of time as well, or they strictly kind of there to act as a buffer for the incurred power.
David Laikind: They're strictly there to act as a buffer. My inverters hold the load themselves. ⁓ And as Brian mentioned, we're at the panel level. So ⁓ everything that's on that panel is connected to my device so that everything that's on that electrical panel is always getting that protected or that clean power coming through. So we use clean power in a way that is more of very specific versus the way we generate the power. It's like having a water filtration system in your home.
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm. It's like you're on power grid. Yeah, it's like you're on power regeneration.
David Laikind: So does that make sense?
Bert Herrero: Yeah, that's awesome.
Nick And Brian: outside the realm of ⁓ there's no other way to do it, right? Like, we have – we don't have a lot of options, and there's – it took Rosewater to sort of like lead the charge, I think, and say, you know what, here's the problem, here's an actual solution rather than a patch fix. That was really what we've dealt with up until now.
David Laikind: Right, when Joe started Rosewater, mean, solar was something that do-it-yourselfers did, right? and now it's gotten to this, you the media has gotten behind it and the government's gotten behind it and all the credits that have come and gone and what have you. So we've always taken a look, let's look at power, making sure it's clean. And we're pretty agnostic to how we get that power coming in, whether it's from something like BrightVault or generators. You know, we don't really care on that. Same thing on the breaker side. If they want to use span panels or smart panels or just, you know, whatever panel happens in the house, know, 60 % of our projects are existing homes. They already know they've got issues there versus a new construction where they're hoping they don't have issues. We can work in specifically with whatever is inside the home and we don't have to have specific equipment to make our product work within that.
Nick And Brian: Mm. And I think that platform agnostic is important with that, right? Like you said.
David Laikind: Yeah, absolutely. And another design criteria of ours is that there's no product that's made specifically for rosewater. So all of the components inside my product are off the shelf components. Most of them are patented. They're put together in a very specific way. And my manufacturer in the enterprise side that they work on, they're considered to be the gold standard, based on this design. So in a data center, which is one of their primary clients, telecoms. broadband cable companies. They're expected to be on set for a minimum of 20 years and they have five nines of uptime. So it's 99.59 % of the time that system always has to be up and running and working. They can't have that downtime. My wife expects when she hits buy on Amazon that she's going to get that confirmation immediately. Funny how that works, you know? I wish there was a pause button there sometimes, but...
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm.
Bert Herrero: and
David Laikind: It is what it is.
Bert Herrero: So David, speaking about the mix being 60 % residential while the other 40 % let's say is from the new construction realm. And I like the way you put it, they hope that they don't have any problems. typically those are the ones that usually have the problems because they're building a mega mansion or some type of bigger sized home than what was there before. But it's still being fed by the same power lines and transmissions and transfers that
David Laikind: Correct.
Bert Herrero: are out on the road, right? So the more and more of these homes that you put up in the areas, the more fault you have in the power coming in your home. But so that our design build community really starts to understand why is it so important to lead with this when we're in the planning stages of a home? And do you have any scenarios where they didn't plan for it? And Rosewater showed up to the rescue and and made a difference, right? And really made a believer.
David Laikind: Yeah, that's a great question. mean, and you're absolutely correct. Florida, where Joe is based out of in our corporate headquarters is Joe moved out there in the 70s and they had 7 million people live in there. And the intercostal was made up of these little 2000 square foot bungalows. Right. You you move forward to 2025, there are 25 million people live in there. The intercostal, I think the smallest home is what, 10,000 square feet and they go up a lot bigger than that. park their yachts on it that they pull off that short part. And they built their first power plant in the last couple of years and put it online. And they've been feeding off the same garden hose for all these big homes. So ⁓ that's the challenge. And a lot of our builders are aware of this because they get the same pain phone calls that we do. We did a project for a client. He's got two homes in Lake Tahoe at 8,000 feet for a ski vacation. One's for him and his wife, one's for his kids. And they have 28 days out of the year they get to use this particular property. And for the last 10 years, the first seven days are people coming in and out of the house. trying to get things fixed, get it back up and running, right? So they're losing seven out of their 28 days by people coming in out of the house. The year before they called us, things were broken to a point they couldn't get parts. So they left, and that was the end of that vacation. We were able to put and fortunate to work with them. We put a hundred amp unit in each home ⁓ on the things that were the problem childs inside those homes. The next year when they showed up, they had all 28 days with nobody else inside the house. So for them, that privacy and time that they got back was invaluable. They purchased a house ⁓ in Miami area. were NDA'd on it. But in the Miami area, it's a large home, it's a 1,200 amp service. And the first thing that they said was, we have to put the rosewater in there for the entire house. Because when we show up, we just want it to work. From that, property managers talk, and we've done just about every other house up and down the street. because they got tired of getting blamed by their clients as to why things kept breaking all the time when they showed up. those are the existing, challenges that we have with them is that there's usually not a lot of space. We need space for this product. It's designed to handle a lot of current.
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm.
David Laikind: And finding the space is a challenge. We're in a lot of garages. We found a supplier for outdoor enclosures. We can put them outside now. ⁓ And that's the biggest challenge on the existing homes. But every time we go into an existing home, we cut service calls and the failure of products by an order of about 90%. And it's consistent every single time. We did a project up in the Hamptons early on in our delivering product. were integrator who called us up. was out there as a takeover because the first integrator was bad because they're out there once a week. He got blamed for everything. They called Joe up. We put a 100 amp unit into it. Service calls dropped by 90%. I'm in five of their homes right now. just keep doing the next one, the next one. Because again, they show up and everything just works again for them. And when you have multiple homes, that's really what's your time worth, right? And unfortunately, they don't know about the products and they're learning about the products. So we're not looking for VC money or anything like that. We're gonna grow organically. it's through companies and people like yourself is how we get the word out there for that.
Nick And Brian: we're talking about now, you know?
David Laikind: Absolutely.
Nick And Brian: do you have difficulty communicating the value of this? Like is there a, ⁓ it is kind of a new category in some respects, well it a new category, Living in a new world with everything on microchips. So ⁓ are you finding that people have to experience it to understand it ⁓ can you educate people beforehand?
David Laikind: No. You can educate people. The challenge that we have is that the mainstream media has said that if you put batteries in people's home, life is going to be great forever and ever, you don't have any more issues. That's not necessarily the case. So you're kind of swimming upstream against that. In the homes that we get involved with, if we can talk with the client himself, a lot of times we can show the value proposition, and they get it. ⁓ And ⁓ they may not pull the trigger right then, but it's always in the back of their mind. we're working through a second party, property managers, estate managers, client that are trying to save them money, sometimes that be more of a challenge because I have to allow that person to relay it on. Brian and I talking earlier, we've gotten on calls with clients. We're happy to do that. We get in calls with client representatives and property managers. And a lot of times they'll understand exactly what we're trying to get across. Then it's, know, the pain worth the big stack of money that they have? And we're finding that conversations we had a year ago, ⁓ get the phone call saying, okay, we're ready to pull the trigger now. Right? Because it got to the point where
Nick And Brian: And it is painful. mean, it's, you know, when you when you have no other way to protect like low voltage, low voltage lighting, if you have din panels, you know, there's nothing in between there's, there's no other way to to protect those, those circuits. So
David Laikind: Well, I was talking to one client and he's like, look, in the foyer, if a Ketrelite goes out, it's only $1,000. Like I understand, well, how many lights do you have in the foyer? Well, there's 30, okay? Well, how tall is the foyer? That's 30 feet. So I'm gonna spend two days building scaffolding. I'm gonna replace all 30 of them now because while I'm up there, might as well do 30 instead of one. So there's a couple days, and that's $30,000. Then a couple days more to take down the scaffolding, and I just interrupted your entire lifestyle for a week, for one land. And when you've thought of it that way, it's a whole different story than it's only $1,000. Pain point.
Bert Herrero: Right?
Nick And Brian: And to speak to the builders, mean, and they're eating crow because they're having to warranty, you know, for our trade partners, although they're warranting appliances and everything. Right. ⁓ they're sick of, you know, the conversations I'm having, they're sick of replacing that stuff, you know, and as we have on demand water heaters and all that stuff, this stuff is way more susceptible ⁓ to this stuff as ⁓ it's just it's getting for them. ⁓ And ⁓
David Laikind: Absolutely.
Nick And Brian: We can't we've got a solution for them. You know, we just need to start talking about and getting the conversation going.
David Laikind: mentioned on-demand water heaters. I had a call from a client we'd talked to a year or two before. ⁓ And called up and she says, all right, I'm finally done. I have eight tankless water heaters. And every other week, I have to go through and reset them all. ⁓ It's ⁓ you and again, it's just the paint. ⁓ You the builders, to your point, ⁓ supply appliances. They get the phone calls. ⁓
Bert Herrero: Crazy.
David Laikind: And they don't know how to fix it either. We met with an appliance supplier, does LaCruz No Stoves. They started at $100,000. And he said, my biggest problem is the grid. And they realize it too. So as an industry, we need to partner with these people because they're looking for a solution. And that's one of the reasons why we work through integrators like Daisy is because aside from the builder, we have the most relationship and the deepest relationship with the client of the home. We're there maintaining the networks and the lighting and all of the different things that support their lifestyle. And that's the our entryway and our integrators that are successful are saying, look, I don't I want to protect my rack. I want to protect my lighting. But let's look at the other technology in the house. And how do we protect that to make your lifestyle more valuable? Right. And we always go back to privacy and time. If that's the two things I can say to everybody, ⁓ ⁓ the two things every single one of our clients want. most of, right? And they can't put price tags on it.
Nick And Brian: And that's a very good point. David, what about like, you know, because you guys do custom tailor the solution, right? Because there's 100 amp, 200 amp, there's even three phase solutions. what's the process look like for looking at a, I know this, but let's talk to our partners and let's walk them through the process of what it looks like to. discovery mode through the process of implementing a water system right from the beginning.
David Laikind: So we've a power plan method. It's something we've been working on for about seven years. ⁓ And it a way to ⁓ sit down the property manager, the client, the builder, whoever we're interfacing with, ⁓ and to at the different categories inside the house and ⁓ isolate ⁓ them on importance. ⁓ What are things that they want to protect most? ⁓ bigger the house, there's much more products that you're gonna be covering on there. And so we sit down with the client and we talk about the grid and we start out quite frankly with a very innocent question, which is, Bert, what's your power plan for the project? Right? And when we started asking that question, it's like, well, hopefully FP &L is bringing me electricity. Today, it's we're looking at a generator Tesla, why do you ask? So we get that permission to have this conversation. We talk about the fact and our clients read about it in Wall Street Journal. They've experienced in their existing home, the things that have failed. So we talk about, talk through that and we work through the power plan to decide the items that we want to cover and to protect. If it's a new build construction, we want to look at the one line dines, the panel schedules, and we're going to work off that scope of work from the power plan to really isolate down to those specific items and we'll size it according to that. On an existing home, A lot of times panels are all over the place and relacing panels to get loads specific onto one panel is not effective, cost effective at most. So we can ⁓ put a meter on the or a test meter on the incoming electricity and we do an electrical stress test on the house. We turn everything on as hard as we can. We open up all our appliance stores, we turn all the appliances on, set the heat to 80 degrees, turn on the air conditioning. plug the car chargers in, get everything running as hard as we possibly can and then just see exactly what that house is drawing. A lot of newer homes draw 30 to 50 percent of what their service is rated for. From there we can then say this section has the majority of the things that we want to look at. and let's protect that section. In some cases, we've been able to put one 200 amp unit in and cover the entire house. And we just carved the car chargers off onto their own little island. And that particular house, the product is outside in outdoor enclosure. It's gone through two hurricanes. And the client loves us. We're going into two more homes for him. You know, so on an existing it's easier to nail that down. On new construction, with those drawings, the one lines and panel schedules, we can work with the electrician, we can work with the electrical engineer to isolate the loads that we wanna cover and create a critical load panel. Or for the electrician, we tell them it's a generator panel. They understand what we, and we just wanna put on there specifically what we want. And then from that we can protect that panel and we want to be very rightful shot. ⁓ While we have done Whole Home, ⁓ like in a brand new house, 80 % of the outlets that code requires you put in will probably never be used. So let's not spend any more money on it. A motor is much more robust than the controller, right? So a Jandy pool controller I want to cover, but I don't necessarily need to cover the pool pump motors.
Nick And Brian: Thank
Bert Herrero: Right.
David Laikind: I want to cover the controllers for the garage doors, but not necessarily the garage door motors. Same thing with elevators, right? So by taking that more rifle shot approach, then we're able to really isolate down to one, two panels and be very specific and cover that versus trying to do the whole house and then trying to do load shedding. ⁓ Load shedding doesn't work for my product.
Nick And Brian: Right.
David Laikind: Because I'm feeding that panel from my inverters all the time, I have to size that panel up to exactly what my inverters can put out. Because if all of them are on at same time, I have to be able to support that load. Whereas with a backup system, you can load shut down to only cover what it's doing when it's pulling from battery or the generator. Because off-generator, off-battery, it's got a bus bar. It's just passing all the way power through. And we don't really care about that. For us, it's much more important that we isolate down to specifics and then cover those panels specifically.
Nick And Brian: And do you, does your team provide, you know, design support for that, for the electrical riser diagrams and so forth?
David Laikind: We do. Our goal is to teach our dealers how to do this, because at the end of the day, it's just math. It's kind of like doing lighting control back in the day, right? RPM modules went into a can, it's on a 20 amp breaker, it's 1920 D rated, it's 1780 on a 15 amp breaker, you do all the math to it and it gets wired in there. So for us, it's math, what is the load that we're gonna cover on it? We find that for the most part, we work together hand in hand for the first two or three, and then they go, okay, I got another project, just double check my math and then they're off and running from there. You get into some of the houses that are mad. big houses and then you're doing a lot of design work and we have a design fee for that that we charge and then we try to work with that electrical engineer because they're typically stamped projects for that and then we'll interface with them to make sure everything goes to them appropriately and because they stamp it they can give us demand load which is lower than what the breaker sizes are and so we can be very specific in what we're covering exactly you know and make sure we have head but give them the best performance for as few products as possible. Internally, we don't provide stamped drawings. We can provide generic drawings for that. ⁓ But those big ones where we need design fees, we're typically working with electrical engineer at that point. So that's issue.
Nick And Brian: make sense.
Bert Herrero: Yeah. David, are there any like tips, like trade secrets, things that you would want homeowners and designers to know to be able to future proof their projects, right?
David Laikind: That's a great question. And we've run into projects. And I'll go to you as a franchise and a business owner, right? We work with clients and we know that they want to do this, but sometimes they just have check fatigue. Right? They've been writing checks in that $5 million house is seven. through no fault of their own, but it's more money than they anticipated, right? It never fails, right? And yeah, so what we always recommend is, look, let's plan for this. Let's schedule, get the drawings, let's get the panels all wired for this type of a product. It's kind of like if you're gonna pull two cat six to a location, we pull four, because it's just easier to do it now, right? Because you never know if you might need it down the road.
Bert Herrero: always.
Nick And Brian: everything.
David Laikind: So if we plan for the space and we plan for the panels, then when they're ready for it, the wiring is all done there. And all we got to do is just interface. Right? And then we can provide that protection much more cost effectively. So I recommend whether you're going to do the rosewater or not, let's isolate lifestyle critical panels and create the space to put something there to protect that. And you want something that is going to be a robust device. You don't want something that's a lot of rack mounted pieces stuck into a can and hoping it's going to cover you for the amount of period of time that you want. And from that point then it's just the feed has to get separated so it can go in and out of my product and feed that sub panel. And it's a relatively seamless process at that point in time. I've got a dealer in Memphis, Tennessee and that's his favorite. I understand, let's prep for it because in six months when you're ready for it, we'll be all ready for you.
Bert Herrero: Yeah, makes sense.
Nick And Brian: Right.
Bert Herrero: Hey, just an off topic question. And because Brian tells me I wear the tinfoil hat in this group. ⁓ How does it protect against things like EMPs?
David Laikind: nothing protects against EMP.
Bert Herrero: Yeah, that's what I figured. Glad to hear that answer.
David Laikind: Yeah, nothing does. Yeah. You can put tin foil on all your outlets and stuff, and it's still going to take all that stuff out. It is what it is. Or you can put a Faraday cage around your house. You'll never get any cell service inside there. it's all good, right?
Nick And Brian: Yeah.
Bert Herrero: Faraday cage, right. You'll never forget anything.
David Laikind: You know, the other one I get is, can you protect me from lightning strikes? Well, if lightning hits a chimney, I don't have a dog in that fight, I'm sorry. I have a project I did in Florida and I got a panic phone call on a Sunday afternoon that the whole system's down and everybody's upset and nothing's working. And it turned out that lightning hit the access point that was bolted to a tree. And it came in from the cat gate, and it's our network, and every single network jack in the rack shut it all down. The rose water was still working trying to power it, just nothing could come out. So we've had projects where the transformer got hit, and that power main feed come in, and I stopped it from there. But if it comes in from the outside of it, there's not a lot you can do. Fiber optics is your best friend. have a lot of solutions, right? But so far, we can't get lightning over glass. So that's a good solution right there.
Bert Herrero: Yeah, sure. That's it.
Nick And Brian: There's other solutions. Yeah.
Bert Herrero: Yep. Yep. I agree. I, uh, last year in August, so I live on a four acre property and it's really long and a tree got hit literally off of the roadway, which was on my yard. It wiped out my entire gate system, my DS2, control four, everything went down, everything gone. Right. But then it traveled into the house and then nailed some of the equipment in my house. But somehow My barn, which is 400 yards away from the house, or really I should say 400 yards from the tree, it's about 200 yards from the house, wiped out everything inside my barn. I'm like, how did it go that far? Right? That's lightning. It just goes.
David Laikind: Yes. ⁓ Yeah, I've seen it where it's blown dimmers out of a hallway into the opposite wall and left imprints there under the wall where the dimmer hit the drive wall. Right? It's when God becomes a bully, there's not a lot you can do about it. Yeah, it's why you buy insurance at the end of the day, right? So, but, you know, the fact that I can protect on a transformer hit though, that's a whole different conversation.
Bert Herrero: Wow. Wow. Yeah, sure. Sure.
Nick And Brian: Yeah, you have multiple I mean, you have you have fault tolerance right within your system just by having
David Laikind: Yeah, so that device we were talking about replaces fuses. We're rated for 40, 140,000 volt spikes. It's all non-sacrificial. This is enterprise level protection that we put in. So I cover current and voltage on the incoming power line for that. The other design criteria of ours is that there's no single point of failure. If you look at, I'm gonna pick on Tesla for a second. A Tesla Powerwall has an inverter and has a battery. If that inverter dies, that thing is dead. We have in my smallest unit, eight inverters. If I lose one, I don't lose capacity. So the advantage is that it's not a I have to get a truck out there right this second to get the house back up and running. I can schedule it, go out there, hot swap it without turning power off to the house, and then send it back and not have to worry about interrupting the client and their lifestyle on that. So it can schedule.
Nick And Brian: And you can get that stuff to the dealer quickly too, right? It's, know.
David Laikind: Yeah, so we advanced replace for these products and our warranty is three years nose to tail. So we advanced replace. Since we've been putting product in the field of replaceable product, my failure rate is less than 1%. So again, in a data center, it's expected to be up. The other advantage is once it's installed, Daisy's team can go out there and maintain it. I don't have to bring an electrician back on site.
Bert Herrero: awesome.
Nick And Brian: Yeah, I mean, your involvement in the project too is just, it's paramount because it's really, it's.
David Laikind: Well, and if there is something where it's catastrophic, I mean, we'll get somebody there within 24 hours. I mean, I got field engineers that I can get out on site if I need to get them out. Planes are easy.
Nick And Brian: Which from the integrators point of view, you know, like that's, that's huge, you know, that's, that's an emergency scenario. That's a, it's, you know, putting out a fire for us.
Bert Herrero: I love that. ⁓
David Laikind: Well, exactly. used to be if the TV didn't work, you you got an issue. Now if the power goes down, that's a little bit of an issue at that point.
Bert Herrero: Nothing.
Nick And Brian: We're staring down the barrel of that too. mean, we've got 150 year old infrastructure here in New England and we're just putting more more strain on it with no upgrades to the actual underlying infrastructure. Right. The future shall tell. boy. Thank God we've got rose water. Nope. Nope.
David Laikind: What could possibly go wrong with that? Hahaha
Bert Herrero: We'll find out coming soon.
David Laikind: Right? Right. Well, know, and to that point, data centers are really adding to the strain of our grid. While it may not be in your backyard, it's still on that same grid system, and it's still pulling that strain. And so I was reading a report I was telling Brian about that currently data centers are pulling as much power as New York City during peak usage.
Nick And Brian: Big time. ⁓ yeah. Big time. Think about that. Think about that.
David Laikind: It's the power, right? And so, and they hire companies to scour the grid for open capacity so that they can put a data center there, you know.
Bert Herrero: Wow. Crazy.
Nick And Brian: Well, they'll put them in someone's, know, they'll put it in a backyard, basically, you know, in a sub development. you know, now these people are, it's insanely noisy as well, because some of them are generating their own power, too. It's just
David Laikind: Yeah, they're starting to get to that point because they have to and they're being forced to But I got a call from a guy in Nebraska because we have the worst power in the country But they put a lot of data centers there, right? And so it's just what used to be fine is no longer fine so
Nick And Brian: Right. Well, when you had like three or four farms that were on, you know, that were on and now they've thrown a data center on their on their, you long road. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. These are things that weren't thought about him. was lack of planning for the infrastructure from an
David Laikind: Yeah. Well, you know, in the 60s, we built out the infrastructure and we're going to electrify the United States. you know, after they were done with it, okay, we're done, right? And then they just moved on. We just keep making the slice of the pie smaller. But if you remember the fire in Camp California in 2015, Santa Ana winds, really high winds, it broke a 90 year old bracket on a high tension power line.
Nick And Brian: Yes.
David Laikind: And when that swung down and arced off the base of it, that started that fire. was 90 years old. Nobody's maintaining this stuff. So now we have to maintain it. ⁓ And all the areas that have these beautiful power lines that are up in the air, when the windstorms come through, they just sit there and bang back and forth. then we get the calls the next morning to go fix things. Because nobody blames the utility.
Nick And Brian: Yep. No, no utility just points the finger anyway. Yeah, right. Right. Right. Just like nobody wants to blame Comcast. Or whoever, whoever, right?
David Laikind: Nobody blames utility. that's a challenge. No, can't be counting, it's fault. Right, right.
Nick And Brian: You know, getting the internet in the house and it's, it's, uh, well, let's, let's look there first. Well, it's the blanket term. Yeah. Yeah. My wifi is down because the perception of the client is yeah, that's, that's all they know. Something internal, not external. They love it that we deal with the, uh, you know, the, the, calls to the, to the ISP, know, and, and that white glove approach, but we have also seen a lot of the, uh, the, the lack of support from those companies more than the client does. You know, so I think we see that with the utility, you know,
David Laikind: sorry.
Bert Herrero: Okay.
David Laikind: Fabulous. Fabulous. I'll be there in the next three days between 10 and five. Yeah, love that.
Nick And Brian: Exactly. And so what's what's on the planning books in terms of ⁓ you know where the product you where you see it evolving and potential changes and.
David Laikind: Yeah, that's a great question. We're always evaluating battery technology, for example. We use sealed lead acid batteries. They're the most recycled product on the planet. I don't have restrictions that a lot of times lithium does. Like New York City, the five boroughs, there's no lithium going in there. It is what it is, right? The fire department has put a ban on that. ⁓
Nick And Brian: Mm.
David Laikind: So we're always monitoring that and looking, we're looking at one technology that's really cool. ⁓ As soon as they can build more than one at a time, we're gonna have a little bit deeper conversations with them. We're looking at two different approaches. One, we're looking at something for high rises, apartments, condos, that living has a real good opportunity there. It's placement. If it's hard to place it into a big home, it's even harder into a condo or a high rise. So we're looking for that. And then we're looking for bigger systems. Quite frankly, I could do a 400 amp unit.
Nick And Brian: Good.
David Laikind: be successful with tomorrow. it's all the engineering on that. that's ⁓ what I have Joe working on more. Joe is more on the sales side. That's what he enjoys, but he's working on the engineering side for that. ⁓ So we work closely with our manufacturers, their suppliers. There's some new inverter technology we're looking at that we're looking at implementing potentially. But we take a slower approach to it. ⁓ Entry unit, that's not really entering, hub 20 is nine years old. We haven't really made any changes to it and we have no intention to make any changes. It just works. My hub 30, what's that?
Nick And Brian: There's a of reasons behind that too, Dave? Because it's not just a matter of the technology works and if it's not broken, don't fix it type of, yeah.
David Laikind: Exactly, We don't have to do firmware updates all the time to this. ⁓ It was built to be very robust at that point in time and it's doing everything it needs to do. There'll be some evolutionary changes as our inverter suppliers got a new inverter out and so we're looking at implementing that into it. Our Hub 40 was evolutionary, taking it from 100 amps to 200 amps and giving us more flexibility and being able to go outside. Both of those units can do any two legs of three phase or standard 240, 120, So it's really a flexible product. So we're looking at again high rises and larger systems and keeping them in a way that has a footprint that's going to work in luxury homes. There's companies that make them for, that we compete, that our companies compete with on the data center side that are getting into really large, but they're not really designed to go on somebody's home.
Nick And Brian: Yeah, I wonder the data centers must have some version of this that's different, but. You're that into a luxury home. Yeah, it's such a challenge.
David Laikind: Well, I was... Yeah. So one of the things that when Joe went to our manufacturer, this is that I really like your product. I just need to improve it. And when you tell a company is doing half a billion dollars in sales that I need to improve your product, it's a little off putting and disconcerting. Right. So but what it was, what he really wanted was is the noise filtering. You know, when we stress my unit out to all four corners, we're about less than 1 % THD. So I lowered the noise floor on electronics and technology inside the homes dramatically. So the clients that have really high-end theaters and high-end listening rooms, they notice right off the bat that everything runs cooler. It opens up. It's like it takes a veil of gray scale off of that image.
Nick And Brian: All that noise floor is lowered.
David Laikind: because that noise flows are. And what we found from the amplifier manufacturers is their amplifiers are able to work more dynamically because they're not trying to make up that power difference. So they're working in that narrow range. So they're much more dynamic and efficient. And so they don't overheat a lot, you know, so you don't get that hot where you put your hand on it and it's really screaming hot at that point.
Bert Herrero: it
Nick And Brian: It's funny you say that one of my clients is a very, you know, audio, true audiophile, ⁓ know, a million dollar listening room and all that. And he has an apartment in New York ⁓ and he says he'll get up at one or two in the morning to listen to his system there because audiophiles down there know that at around one or two in the morning stuff just sounds better. Because you're figuring there's less demand on the grid, right? yep.
David Laikind: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we could do it for him so he could enjoy it at five o'clock in the evening then. Yeah. So he got a glass of wine to get his sleep back. ⁓ But that's kind of what we're looking at. We're just looking at expanding it out that way. Joe's got some other things that are on his plate that he's looking at and they've been developing and working out in the background. We're just not ready to chat about yet. So. ⁓
Nick And Brian: Hahaha
Bert Herrero: Hehehehehe
Nick And Brian: Yeah. ⁓ That's sad, isn't it?
David Laikind: But we're, unlike some manufacturers in our industry, where... They bring out products every single year and it's got new buttons or whatever to it. We just don't have that need, you know? The electrical industry is really boring, quite frankly. ⁓ Most electricians put in a lot of mechanical devices. You look at switches and circuit breakers and what have you. We've taken computer and electronics and electrical and combined them into a box. ⁓
Nick And Brian: Hmm.
David Laikind: But again, it's based off that mechanical device, which has been there since Edison brought it out, right? So there's not a lot of need to change things. It's just evolutionary growth.
Nick And Brian: David, the ⁓ product provide any sort of dashboard either via app or web page or otherwise that gives us and the client visibility on what it's doing or may have prevented or?
Bert Herrero: Good question.
David Laikind: Yeah, that's a great question. We do not have an app. We find that we have a web page that our clients can log into and our dealers can. We supply email alerts on various different alarm set points that we put in. Most of them are benign. AC light voltage is high, AC light voltage is low, and it's hit those thresholds. We've not baked AI into it, so whenever it hits it, it sends out an email. ⁓ And we get those to our dealers, and then our dealers have the ability to log into that unit and to see the incoming power and the outgoing power. by the seconds, minutes, hours, and days. So he can see in real time exactly what's coming in and then what's going into the client's home. I mentioned the dealer that I work with in Memphis and we did a project for a client. He had bought into a lighting control system, it was on 16.2 that... Wired his brand new 10,000 square foot house with all 16, two for every single lights fixture. And then they went out of business, right? So, ⁓ little bit of a bad day there. And we put the rose water in and we took some screenshots. There was a storm going through and it lost power in a 60 minute period about 12 times or sag down. But the output going into the house was perfect. and he had no idea that there was that kind of issues going on out there. So by looking at that and taking those screenshots, we shared them with the client and he was like, this is awesome. Glad that it's doing that job. But after a while, they're just like, as long as it's doing everything and I don't need to worry about it, they just don't care.
Nick And Brian: the problems go away or they never have problems to begin with because it's been put in at the beginning. Right.
Bert Herrero: Right. Right.
David Laikind: Exactly. A lot of times no news is good news, right? It's like everything's working, everything's fine. I got an email from a dealer. He goes, we keep getting these alerts. Is everything fine? Yep. It's just saying that you're getting 260 volts in the house instead of 240. Here's your screenshot. And they're like, OK, we'll call the electrician and reach out to the utility and try to fix it.
Nick And Brian: when your output metrics are on another scale because it's so finite, right? I mean, we've seen the output voltages and all that.
David Laikind: Yeah, so we'll just change the scale from like 125 to 0 to like 120.2 to 120.6. ⁓ Because that's the I'm working within that little narrow window there, you know, so it's
Nick And Brian: That's how clean the power is. That's how perfect that sine wave is coming out of the system. It's really incredible.
David Laikind: Yeah, it's really incredible when you see exactly what's coming in and then what's going out. People are pretty amazed on that. And sadly, again, you know, we changed our conversation from the category and the gear and all the technology to the lifestyle portion because the clients that want this, they don't care about the technology and the gear. They just want to know that it's going to do what it's supposed to do. An app for us, we looked at it and we did a lot of studies with clients and like, I'll never use it. We'll spend a lot of money on it, but I'll never use it because I really don't care. My property manager might look at it occasionally, but I'm not going to look.
Nick And Brian: Thank
Bert Herrero: It's pointless.
Nick And Brian: All right.
David Laikind: They'll use the app for the Rivian to start the Rivian when they forgot the key. But that's about it, you know, so.
Nick And Brian: I mean, David, I think you've got stories too. I know you have a in California. I think it was a memorable relationship that you have that stood out for me that you told me about quite a while ago. That the guy wouldn't even build right ⁓ without a rose system going into one of his homes, ⁓
David Laikind: Yeah. Yeah, so one of our dealers, this gentleman came on board with us early on. He's known Joe from back in the day. And called Joe up and said, look, I got a builder. taken over this project. And I know it's a power issue. And can you come out and meet with us and the builder? He's doing this development. He is the guy in the marketplace. just see if we can fix this because there's constant power issues. And the builder, what he told us later on, he goes, I don't want to be their bartender. I don't want to hear their crying when they dropped down me on 4th of July because things stopped working, right? So Joe went out there and met with them. And the builder's sitting in the back like this because he's heard all this BS before. And Joe's like, look, it's power. And this was really early on when we started the company. And the guy goes, What if it isn't? And just so I tell you what, I'll put it in. If it doesn't cure the problem, I'll pull it out at my expense. Builder said, put it in writing? Sure. So we put that in there and all the problems stopped. Builder looked at the deal and said, I got three more houses for you and then wrote it in with his contract. I'm not building a house without the rosewood. Because again, he doesn't want the phone calls like we don't want the phone calls. And what he said was when the control system drops down, the client makes two phone calls. They call me and they call you because they know that I'm going to make you do what your job is, right? Because that's kind of their mentality at that point in time. and see if I hit enough hotspots and hit enough buttons, somebody's gonna fix this for me. And so that's why we're finding builders are a great resource because they deal with the pain all the time. And they're just looking for a solution on it. But that's, ⁓ unfortunately that gentleman's retiring. Unfortunately, but we've enjoyed working with them and the dealer's got another one that is doing the same thing now.
Nick And Brian: It's good. good. It's gonna market that. ⁓
David Laikind: You know, he's a great spokesperson, right? So and then we're also starting to do more with the state managers and construction managers because we're finding that those are the guys, again, they're dealing with the pain on a different level.
Bert Herrero: Well, if anything, it's a good spokesperson.
David Laikind: You know, they've got a client that has five, six, eight, 10 houses. And I just, you know, we had one state manager say, look, I get 48 hours notice where they're going to show up. And I'm scrambling to get people out there to try to make the house work before they show up. So if you can put that in and it makes it so that I don't have to do that. The money right off the bat, just the flight saves us some time. But yeah, it's enjoyable working with this. I've been in the industry for 30 years and it's fun working with a product that you get immediate results once you put it in, you see how it does and how it impacts the project, right? And we find that once you get that first one in, after that it just starts to kind of clicked along. To that end, one of the things that we're doing right now is, We've dusted off of Joe's sales training that he did for Sound Advice back in the day. To work for Sound Advice, you had to go through a sales training process, right? And so we're doing sales training now for our dealers. It's not category, it's not about the gear, it's about building trust in the conversation, helping to have that sales conversation. Then taking that sales conversation and added power as a category into that. And we did it with a large dealer in Arizona and we got immediate results right out of it. We've had really good response on this because as an industry, there's a lot of dealers are out there that are doing business that have never had sales training, right? They've kind of learned the hard way, right? Going out there and being told, you didn't learn not to say that anymore. You know, so this has proven to be real successful for us and allowing us to grow our business even more that way. But we also find for the dealers, other things kind of move along for the client as well. And we're able to get more technology that benefits the client versus just selling things because we can.
Nick And Brian: I'm glad we had this conversation. Yeah, this is no very, very, ⁓ very interesting. I I it to people like, you know, ⁓ I get nerded out it. So David hears from me probably more than he wants to. ⁓
David Laikind: Not at all. I love getting the phone calls. It shows that you're looking and you're interested, right?
Nick And Brian: all the time, right? yeah, I'm, know, because I believe it, it's important. So it's one of those things that's a necessity. And it's why we're having the combo. That's why I want trade partners and I want people in the trades to know about it. And I, you know, know about Rosewater, the solutions there, the daisies, their path to that and that, you know, we're, you know, we want to talk about this stuff. So here we are.
David Laikind: Yeah, and one of that we have that we can implement with Daisy is we have a ⁓ one full CEU for AIA. And it's under health safety and wellness, which is always a challenging credit to get. We'd like to those in person. ⁓ And then we have a presentation that we work with with builders. ⁓ And that one's been well received as well. So we're doing very tailored presentations to these industry partners of ours ⁓ that really kind of speak to the points and the pain points that they see.
David Laikind: Perfect, thank you. And thank you for having me out. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed talking with you in the past, Brian. So, Rosewater is going its ⁓ 15th now. ⁓ And Joe Picharelli, who's been a fixture in our industry for going on 50 years, started Sound Advice, started Avid. ⁓ And he noticed that there's a problem that we get blamed for all the time of things failing in people's homes. And what he set out to develop while he was at Avid was a way that we could cure this. And he found that it wasn't the products were put in, it wasn't the industry as a whole. We've really grown up as an industry, but it's the power that's coming into the home. ⁓ Before digital in an analog world, when the power sagged, your lights would turn brown. Today, they flicker on and off, and then the LED lights don't last as long. And so that's kind of started this whole thing. And what we've noticed is that we're going to put more microprocessors into people's homes in the coming years than we ever have in the past. ⁓ There was an interesting study. I'm sure you guys all remember the blue screen of death.
Bert Herrero: Mm-hmm.
David Laikind: We all work on the same thing, so it's awesome at that point, IBM did a study, and they found that the average home computer sees 120 power anomalies a month. So if you replace the word computer with microprocessor, of these devices that we're putting in people's homes see 120 power anomalies a month. And in your designing circuit boards, the first thing that you want to do is eliminate heat. So when the voltage sags down, it creates heat and it shortens the life of all of our products. What Rosewater is doing is they're starting to move beyond the rack. as all of you doing too, right? We're light fixtures in everybody's homes. Everything is starting to move around. But then you start looking at tankless water heaters, touchless plumbing, ⁓ You and I've got a client that's gone through a lot of small appliances and big appliances, and it's all grid related that we get blamed for. So, while we ⁓ try to control our destiny in clients' homes so that we can provide them with the best experience possible, Rosewater's goal is to really shore up the foundation that everything that we do rests on, and that's the power coming to the house. ⁓ The utility's responsibility ends at the meter, and it is our responsibility to protect our home from the utility, which is an odd thing, but that's really at the end of the day what it's all about. So that's the goal of Rosewater. ⁓ We've been growing, we're privately held, we're self-funded. We have a world-class manufacturer that builds exclusively for us and ⁓ we've been growing every single year just organically going out reaching out to dealers and people like Daisy to help us get into the clients that they work with.
Nick And Brian: right. mean, the ability to protect the entire home if you need to or your critical devices at the panel level is so much more effective than trying to do it at the edge, right? We all have to do power protection. know, we have our Watt boxes, we have our BigDog secure, you know, BigDog power, and they're great, but you know, and they're convenient for other reasons, but they're... they're not doing triple conversion, they're not cleaning up the power necessarily coming into it, they're surge protection, but getting that pure sine wave in those voltage dips everything that affect the low voltage electronics. I I think everybody's seen their wall warts die on smaller devices and sort of wondered why. Well, yes, mostly because manufactured in China and they're cheap, but they're also susceptible voltage shags and all that and spikes. ⁓ it happens a lot more than people ⁓ see. ⁓
Bert Herrero: . ⁓
David Laikind: out of it.
Bert Herrero: you ⁓
Nick And Brian: Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
David Laikind: Well, it's interesting because you notice we don't have fuses in things anymore. And they've developed these little devices called an MOV. And they were the resettable fuses. But it's like water erosion. The more often you use it, the longer it takes to heal.
Nick And Brian: Right. Right.
Bert Herrero: We're setting. Right.
David Laikind: And so you have something that, you know, it's sags, it stops working and wanting to protect. And it used to come back up and then it takes longer to come back up and longer. And then it's a service call because it's not coming back up. And then you agree that it's defective. You send it back to the factory and they go, thing works like a champ. And it's these things that are the annoyances for our clients. And quite frankly, annoyances for our teams as well.
Nick And Brian: Right. So David, could you just walk us through kind of ⁓ the structure and maybe explain a little bit what triple conversion means? so like, what's the food chain here? ⁓ You go from grid to the house, then what?
Bert Herrero: I'm great with that.
David Laikind: So what we do is from the grid power coming in, we convert that to DC or battery power. And we do that in real time all the time. We do not have a transfer switch. So all the power that's coming in to my device, it's immediately converted to DC. And then we immediately convert it back to AC. And we use a patented device. It's an off-the-shelf product. These are inverters. Inverters convert battery power to house power. And so we convert this back in. part of the patent on this is that I'm able to guarantee my output plus or minus 1%, where the grid and the utilities guarantee in spec of plus or minus 10%.
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm.
David Laikind: Right? So by taking it from the AC back to DC and then back to AC again, I can guarantee a perfect 120 volts at the outlet, perfect sine wave so that everything works constantly, unlike a battery backup system, which waits for voltage to go down and then it transfers over. Generators do the same thing. They have that transfer switch. So the unique part of my device is that no matter what's happening outside as the
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm. Thank
David Laikind: of currents going like this, ⁓ if it sags down, my batteries make up that difference in voltage. And if it surges up, my batteries absorb that difference in voltage so that I'm always able to output that proper voltage that all of the devices want. And as the technology becomes more microprocessor controlled, that 120 volts becomes much more critical.
Nick And Brian: Sure, sure. And then those batteries hold the load for a period of time as well, or they strictly kind of there to act as a buffer for the incurred power.
David Laikind: They're strictly there to act as a buffer. My inverters hold the load themselves. ⁓ And as Brian mentioned, we're at the panel level. So ⁓ everything that's on that panel is connected to my device so that everything that's on that electrical panel is always getting that protected or that clean power coming through. So we use clean power in a way that is more of very specific versus the way we generate the power. It's like having a water filtration system in your home.
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm. It's like you're on power grid. Yeah, it's like you're on power regeneration.
David Laikind: So does that make sense?
Bert Herrero: Yeah, that's awesome.
Nick And Brian: outside the realm of ⁓ there's no other way to do it, right? Like, we have – we don't have a lot of options, and there's – it took Rosewater to sort of like lead the charge, I think, and say, you know what, here's the problem, here's an actual solution rather than a patch fix. That was really what we've dealt with up until now.
David Laikind: Right, when Joe started Rosewater, mean, solar was something that do-it-yourselfers did, right? and now it's gotten to this, you the media has gotten behind it and the government's gotten behind it and all the credits that have come and gone and what have you. So we've always taken a look, let's look at power, making sure it's clean. And we're pretty agnostic to how we get that power coming in, whether it's from something like BrightVault or generators. You know, we don't really care on that. Same thing on the breaker side. If they want to use span panels or smart panels or just, you know, whatever panel happens in the house, know, 60 % of our projects are existing homes. They already know they've got issues there versus a new construction where they're hoping they don't have issues. We can work in specifically with whatever is inside the home and we don't have to have specific equipment to make our product work within that.
Nick And Brian: Mm. And I think that platform agnostic is important with that, right? Like you said.
David Laikind: Yeah, absolutely. And another design criteria of ours is that there's no product that's made specifically for rosewater. So all of the components inside my product are off the shelf components. Most of them are patented. They're put together in a very specific way. And my manufacturer in the enterprise side that they work on, they're considered to be the gold standard, based on this design. So in a data center, which is one of their primary clients, telecoms. broadband cable companies. They're expected to be on set for a minimum of 20 years and they have five nines of uptime. So it's 99.59 % of the time that system always has to be up and running and working. They can't have that downtime. My wife expects when she hits buy on Amazon that she's going to get that confirmation immediately. Funny how that works, you know? I wish there was a pause button there sometimes, but...
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm.
Bert Herrero: and
David Laikind: It is what it is.
Bert Herrero: So David, speaking about the mix being 60 % residential while the other 40 % let's say is from the new construction realm. And I like the way you put it, they hope that they don't have any problems. typically those are the ones that usually have the problems because they're building a mega mansion or some type of bigger sized home than what was there before. But it's still being fed by the same power lines and transmissions and transfers that
David Laikind: Correct.
Bert Herrero: are out on the road, right? So the more and more of these homes that you put up in the areas, the more fault you have in the power coming in your home. But so that our design build community really starts to understand why is it so important to lead with this when we're in the planning stages of a home? And do you have any scenarios where they didn't plan for it? And Rosewater showed up to the rescue and and made a difference, right? And really made a believer.
David Laikind: Yeah, that's a great question. mean, and you're absolutely correct. Florida, where Joe is based out of in our corporate headquarters is Joe moved out there in the 70s and they had 7 million people live in there. And the intercostal was made up of these little 2000 square foot bungalows. Right. You you move forward to 2025, there are 25 million people live in there. The intercostal, I think the smallest home is what, 10,000 square feet and they go up a lot bigger than that. park their yachts on it that they pull off that short part. And they built their first power plant in the last couple of years and put it online. And they've been feeding off the same garden hose for all these big homes. So ⁓ that's the challenge. And a lot of our builders are aware of this because they get the same pain phone calls that we do. We did a project for a client. He's got two homes in Lake Tahoe at 8,000 feet for a ski vacation. One's for him and his wife, one's for his kids. And they have 28 days out of the year they get to use this particular property. And for the last 10 years, the first seven days are people coming in and out of the house. trying to get things fixed, get it back up and running, right? So they're losing seven out of their 28 days by people coming in out of the house. The year before they called us, things were broken to a point they couldn't get parts. So they left, and that was the end of that vacation. We were able to put and fortunate to work with them. We put a hundred amp unit in each home ⁓ on the things that were the problem childs inside those homes. The next year when they showed up, they had all 28 days with nobody else inside the house. So for them, that privacy and time that they got back was invaluable. They purchased a house ⁓ in Miami area. were NDA'd on it. But in the Miami area, it's a large home, it's a 1,200 amp service. And the first thing that they said was, we have to put the rosewater in there for the entire house. Because when we show up, we just want it to work. From that, property managers talk, and we've done just about every other house up and down the street. because they got tired of getting blamed by their clients as to why things kept breaking all the time when they showed up. those are the existing, challenges that we have with them is that there's usually not a lot of space. We need space for this product. It's designed to handle a lot of current.
Nick And Brian: Mm-hmm.
David Laikind: And finding the space is a challenge. We're in a lot of garages. We found a supplier for outdoor enclosures. We can put them outside now. ⁓ And that's the biggest challenge on the existing homes. But every time we go into an existing home, we cut service calls and the failure of products by an order of about 90%. And it's consistent every single time. We did a project up in the Hamptons early on in our delivering product. were integrator who called us up. was out there as a takeover because the first integrator was bad because they're out there once a week. He got blamed for everything. They called Joe up. We put a 100 amp unit into it. Service calls dropped by 90%. I'm in five of their homes right now. just keep doing the next one, the next one. Because again, they show up and everything just works again for them. And when you have multiple homes, that's really what's your time worth, right? And unfortunately, they don't know about the products and they're learning about the products. So we're not looking for VC money or anything like that. We're gonna grow organically. it's through companies and people like yourself is how we get the word out there for that.
Nick And Brian: we're talking about now, you know?
David Laikind: Absolutely.
Nick And Brian: do you have difficulty communicating the value of this? Like is there a, ⁓ it is kind of a new category in some respects, well it a new category, Living in a new world with everything on microchips. So ⁓ are you finding that people have to experience it to understand it ⁓ can you educate people beforehand?
David Laikind: No. You can educate people. The challenge that we have is that the mainstream media has said that if you put batteries in people's home, life is going to be great forever and ever, you don't have any more issues. That's not necessarily the case. So you're kind of swimming upstream against that. In the homes that we get involved with, if we can talk with the client himself, a lot of times we can show the value proposition, and they get it. ⁓ And ⁓ they may not pull the trigger right then, but it's always in the back of their mind. we're working through a second party, property managers, estate managers, client that are trying to save them money, sometimes that be more of a challenge because I have to allow that person to relay it on. Brian and I talking earlier, we've gotten on calls with clients. We're happy to do that. We get in calls with client representatives and property managers. And a lot of times they'll understand exactly what we're trying to get across. Then it's, know, the pain worth the big stack of money that they have? And we're finding that conversations we had a year ago, ⁓ get the phone call saying, okay, we're ready to pull the trigger now. Right? Because it got to the point where
Nick And Brian: And it is painful. mean, it's, you know, when you when you have no other way to protect like low voltage, low voltage lighting, if you have din panels, you know, there's nothing in between there's, there's no other way to to protect those, those circuits. So
David Laikind: Well, I was talking to one client and he's like, look, in the foyer, if a Ketrelite goes out, it's only $1,000. Like I understand, well, how many lights do you have in the foyer? Well, there's 30, okay? Well, how tall is the foyer? That's 30 feet. So I'm gonna spend two days building scaffolding. I'm gonna replace all 30 of them now because while I'm up there, might as well do 30 instead of one. So there's a couple days, and that's $30,000. Then a couple days more to take down the scaffolding, and I just interrupted your entire lifestyle for a week, for one land. And when you've thought of it that way, it's a whole different story than it's only $1,000. Pain point.
Bert Herrero: Right?
Nick And Brian: And to speak to the builders, mean, and they're eating crow because they're having to warranty, you know, for our trade partners, although they're warranting appliances and everything. Right. ⁓ they're sick of, you know, the conversations I'm having, they're sick of replacing that stuff, you know, and as we have on demand water heaters and all that stuff, this stuff is way more susceptible ⁓ to this stuff as ⁓ it's just it's getting for them. ⁓ And ⁓
David Laikind: Absolutely.
Nick And Brian: We can't we've got a solution for them. You know, we just need to start talking about and getting the conversation going.
David Laikind: mentioned on-demand water heaters. I had a call from a client we'd talked to a year or two before. ⁓ And called up and she says, all right, I'm finally done. I have eight tankless water heaters. And every other week, I have to go through and reset them all. ⁓ It's ⁓ you and again, it's just the paint. ⁓ You the builders, to your point, ⁓ supply appliances. They get the phone calls. ⁓
Bert Herrero: Crazy.
David Laikind: And they don't know how to fix it either. We met with an appliance supplier, does LaCruz No Stoves. They started at $100,000. And he said, my biggest problem is the grid. And they realize it too. So as an industry, we need to partner with these people because they're looking for a solution. And that's one of the reasons why we work through integrators like Daisy is because aside from the builder, we have the most relationship and the deepest relationship with the client of the home. We're there maintaining the networks and the lighting and all of the different things that support their lifestyle. And that's the our entryway and our integrators that are successful are saying, look, I don't I want to protect my rack. I want to protect my lighting. But let's look at the other technology in the house. And how do we protect that to make your lifestyle more valuable? Right. And we always go back to privacy and time. If that's the two things I can say to everybody, ⁓ ⁓ the two things every single one of our clients want. most of, right? And they can't put price tags on it.
Nick And Brian: And that's a very good point. David, what about like, you know, because you guys do custom tailor the solution, right? Because there's 100 amp, 200 amp, there's even three phase solutions. what's the process look like for looking at a, I know this, but let's talk to our partners and let's walk them through the process of what it looks like to. discovery mode through the process of implementing a water system right from the beginning.
David Laikind: So we've a power plan method. It's something we've been working on for about seven years. ⁓ And it a way to ⁓ sit down the property manager, the client, the builder, whoever we're interfacing with, ⁓ and to at the different categories inside the house and ⁓ isolate ⁓ them on importance. ⁓ What are things that they want to protect most? ⁓ bigger the house, there's much more products that you're gonna be covering on there. And so we sit down with the client and we talk about the grid and we start out quite frankly with a very innocent question, which is, Bert, what's your power plan for the project? Right? And when we started asking that question, it's like, well, hopefully FP &L is bringing me electricity. Today, it's we're looking at a generator Tesla, why do you ask? So we get that permission to have this conversation. We talk about the fact and our clients read about it in Wall Street Journal. They've experienced in their existing home, the things that have failed. So we talk about, talk through that and we work through the power plan to decide the items that we want to cover and to protect. If it's a new build construction, we want to look at the one line dines, the panel schedules, and we're going to work off that scope of work from the power plan to really isolate down to those specific items and we'll size it according to that. On an existing home, A lot of times panels are all over the place and relacing panels to get loads specific onto one panel is not effective, cost effective at most. So we can ⁓ put a meter on the or a test meter on the incoming electricity and we do an electrical stress test on the house. We turn everything on as hard as we can. We open up all our appliance stores, we turn all the appliances on, set the heat to 80 degrees, turn on the air conditioning. plug the car chargers in, get everything running as hard as we possibly can and then just see exactly what that house is drawing. A lot of newer homes draw 30 to 50 percent of what their service is rated for. From there we can then say this section has the majority of the things that we want to look at. and let's protect that section. In some cases, we've been able to put one 200 amp unit in and cover the entire house. And we just carved the car chargers off onto their own little island. And that particular house, the product is outside in outdoor enclosure. It's gone through two hurricanes. And the client loves us. We're going into two more homes for him. You know, so on an existing it's easier to nail that down. On new construction, with those drawings, the one lines and panel schedules, we can work with the electrician, we can work with the electrical engineer to isolate the loads that we wanna cover and create a critical load panel. Or for the electrician, we tell them it's a generator panel. They understand what we, and we just wanna put on there specifically what we want. And then from that we can protect that panel and we want to be very rightful shot. ⁓ While we have done Whole Home, ⁓ like in a brand new house, 80 % of the outlets that code requires you put in will probably never be used. So let's not spend any more money on it. A motor is much more robust than the controller, right? So a Jandy pool controller I want to cover, but I don't necessarily need to cover the pool pump motors.
Nick And Brian: Thank
Bert Herrero: Right.
David Laikind: I want to cover the controllers for the garage doors, but not necessarily the garage door motors. Same thing with elevators, right? So by taking that more rifle shot approach, then we're able to really isolate down to one, two panels and be very specific and cover that versus trying to do the whole house and then trying to do load shedding. ⁓ Load shedding doesn't work for my product.
Nick And Brian: Right.
David Laikind: Because I'm feeding that panel from my inverters all the time, I have to size that panel up to exactly what my inverters can put out. Because if all of them are on at same time, I have to be able to support that load. Whereas with a backup system, you can load shut down to only cover what it's doing when it's pulling from battery or the generator. Because off-generator, off-battery, it's got a bus bar. It's just passing all the way power through. And we don't really care about that. For us, it's much more important that we isolate down to specifics and then cover those panels specifically.
Nick And Brian: And do you, does your team provide, you know, design support for that, for the electrical riser diagrams and so forth?
David Laikind: We do. Our goal is to teach our dealers how to do this, because at the end of the day, it's just math. It's kind of like doing lighting control back in the day, right? RPM modules went into a can, it's on a 20 amp breaker, it's 1920 D rated, it's 1780 on a 15 amp breaker, you do all the math to it and it gets wired in there. So for us, it's math, what is the load that we're gonna cover on it? We find that for the most part, we work together hand in hand for the first two or three, and then they go, okay, I got another project, just double check my math and then they're off and running from there. You get into some of the houses that are mad. big houses and then you're doing a lot of design work and we have a design fee for that that we charge and then we try to work with that electrical engineer because they're typically stamped projects for that and then we'll interface with them to make sure everything goes to them appropriately and because they stamp it they can give us demand load which is lower than what the breaker sizes are and so we can be very specific in what we're covering exactly you know and make sure we have head but give them the best performance for as few products as possible. Internally, we don't provide stamped drawings. We can provide generic drawings for that. ⁓ But those big ones where we need design fees, we're typically working with electrical engineer at that point. So that's issue.
Nick And Brian: make sense.
Bert Herrero: Yeah. David, are there any like tips, like trade secrets, things that you would want homeowners and designers to know to be able to future proof their projects, right?
David Laikind: That's a great question. And we've run into projects. And I'll go to you as a franchise and a business owner, right? We work with clients and we know that they want to do this, but sometimes they just have check fatigue. Right? They've been writing checks in that $5 million house is seven. through no fault of their own, but it's more money than they anticipated, right? It never fails, right? And yeah, so what we always recommend is, look, let's plan for this. Let's schedule, get the drawings, let's get the panels all wired for this type of a product. It's kind of like if you're gonna pull two cat six to a location, we pull four, because it's just easier to do it now, right? Because you never know if you might need it down the road.
Bert Herrero: always.
Nick And Brian: everything.
David Laikind: So if we plan for the space and we plan for the panels, then when they're ready for it, the wiring is all done there. And all we got to do is just interface. Right? And then we can provide that protection much more cost effectively. So I recommend whether you're going to do the rosewater or not, let's isolate lifestyle critical panels and create the space to put something there to protect that. And you want something that is going to be a robust device. You don't want something that's a lot of rack mounted pieces stuck into a can and hoping it's going to cover you for the amount of period of time that you want. And from that point then it's just the feed has to get separated so it can go in and out of my product and feed that sub panel. And it's a relatively seamless process at that point in time. I've got a dealer in Memphis, Tennessee and that's his favorite. I understand, let's prep for it because in six months when you're ready for it, we'll be all ready for you.
Bert Herrero: Yeah, makes sense.
Nick And Brian: Right.
Bert Herrero: Hey, just an off topic question. And because Brian tells me I wear the tinfoil hat in this group. ⁓ How does it protect against things like EMPs?
David Laikind: nothing protects against EMP.
Bert Herrero: Yeah, that's what I figured. Glad to hear that answer.
David Laikind: Yeah, nothing does. Yeah. You can put tin foil on all your outlets and stuff, and it's still going to take all that stuff out. It is what it is. Or you can put a Faraday cage around your house. You'll never get any cell service inside there. it's all good, right?
Nick And Brian: Yeah.
Bert Herrero: Faraday cage, right. You'll never forget anything.
David Laikind: You know, the other one I get is, can you protect me from lightning strikes? Well, if lightning hits a chimney, I don't have a dog in that fight, I'm sorry. I have a project I did in Florida and I got a panic phone call on a Sunday afternoon that the whole system's down and everybody's upset and nothing's working. And it turned out that lightning hit the access point that was bolted to a tree. And it came in from the cat gate, and it's our network, and every single network jack in the rack shut it all down. The rose water was still working trying to power it, just nothing could come out. So we've had projects where the transformer got hit, and that power main feed come in, and I stopped it from there. But if it comes in from the outside of it, there's not a lot you can do. Fiber optics is your best friend. have a lot of solutions, right? But so far, we can't get lightning over glass. So that's a good solution right there.
Bert Herrero: Yeah, sure. That's it.
Nick And Brian: There's other solutions. Yeah.
Bert Herrero: Yep. Yep. I agree. I, uh, last year in August, so I live on a four acre property and it's really long and a tree got hit literally off of the roadway, which was on my yard. It wiped out my entire gate system, my DS2, control four, everything went down, everything gone. Right. But then it traveled into the house and then nailed some of the equipment in my house. But somehow My barn, which is 400 yards away from the house, or really I should say 400 yards from the tree, it's about 200 yards from the house, wiped out everything inside my barn. I'm like, how did it go that far? Right? That's lightning. It just goes.
David Laikind: Yes. ⁓ Yeah, I've seen it where it's blown dimmers out of a hallway into the opposite wall and left imprints there under the wall where the dimmer hit the drive wall. Right? It's when God becomes a bully, there's not a lot you can do about it. Yeah, it's why you buy insurance at the end of the day, right? So, but, you know, the fact that I can protect on a transformer hit though, that's a whole different conversation.
Bert Herrero: Wow. Wow. Yeah, sure. Sure.
Nick And Brian: Yeah, you have multiple I mean, you have you have fault tolerance right within your system just by having
David Laikind: Yeah, so that device we were talking about replaces fuses. We're rated for 40, 140,000 volt spikes. It's all non-sacrificial. This is enterprise level protection that we put in. So I cover current and voltage on the incoming power line for that. The other design criteria of ours is that there's no single point of failure. If you look at, I'm gonna pick on Tesla for a second. A Tesla Powerwall has an inverter and has a battery. If that inverter dies, that thing is dead. We have in my smallest unit, eight inverters. If I lose one, I don't lose capacity. So the advantage is that it's not a I have to get a truck out there right this second to get the house back up and running. I can schedule it, go out there, hot swap it without turning power off to the house, and then send it back and not have to worry about interrupting the client and their lifestyle on that. So it can schedule.
Nick And Brian: And you can get that stuff to the dealer quickly too, right? It's, know.
David Laikind: Yeah, so we advanced replace for these products and our warranty is three years nose to tail. So we advanced replace. Since we've been putting product in the field of replaceable product, my failure rate is less than 1%. So again, in a data center, it's expected to be up. The other advantage is once it's installed, Daisy's team can go out there and maintain it. I don't have to bring an electrician back on site.
Bert Herrero: awesome.
Nick And Brian: Yeah, I mean, your involvement in the project too is just, it's paramount because it's really, it's.
David Laikind: Well, and if there is something where it's catastrophic, I mean, we'll get somebody there within 24 hours. I mean, I got field engineers that I can get out on site if I need to get them out. Planes are easy.
Nick And Brian: Which from the integrators point of view, you know, like that's, that's huge, you know, that's, that's an emergency scenario. That's a, it's, you know, putting out a fire for us.
Bert Herrero: I love that. ⁓
David Laikind: Well, exactly. used to be if the TV didn't work, you you got an issue. Now if the power goes down, that's a little bit of an issue at that point.
Bert Herrero: Nothing.
Nick And Brian: We're staring down the barrel of that too. mean, we've got 150 year old infrastructure here in New England and we're just putting more more strain on it with no upgrades to the actual underlying infrastructure. Right. The future shall tell. boy. Thank God we've got rose water. Nope. Nope.
David Laikind: What could possibly go wrong with that? Hahaha
Bert Herrero: We'll find out coming soon.
David Laikind: Right? Right. Well, know, and to that point, data centers are really adding to the strain of our grid. While it may not be in your backyard, it's still on that same grid system, and it's still pulling that strain. And so I was reading a report I was telling Brian about that currently data centers are pulling as much power as New York City during peak usage.
Nick And Brian: Big time. ⁓ yeah. Big time. Think about that. Think about that.
David Laikind: It's the power, right? And so, and they hire companies to scour the grid for open capacity so that they can put a data center there, you know.
Bert Herrero: Wow. Crazy.
Nick And Brian: Well, they'll put them in someone's, know, they'll put it in a backyard, basically, you know, in a sub development. you know, now these people are, it's insanely noisy as well, because some of them are generating their own power, too. It's just
David Laikind: Yeah, they're starting to get to that point because they have to and they're being forced to But I got a call from a guy in Nebraska because we have the worst power in the country But they put a lot of data centers there, right? And so it's just what used to be fine is no longer fine so
Nick And Brian: Right. Well, when you had like three or four farms that were on, you know, that were on and now they've thrown a data center on their on their, you long road. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. These are things that weren't thought about him. was lack of planning for the infrastructure from an
David Laikind: Yeah. Well, you know, in the 60s, we built out the infrastructure and we're going to electrify the United States. you know, after they were done with it, okay, we're done, right? And then they just moved on. We just keep making the slice of the pie smaller. But if you remember the fire in Camp California in 2015, Santa Ana winds, really high winds, it broke a 90 year old bracket on a high tension power line.
Nick And Brian: Yes.
David Laikind: And when that swung down and arced off the base of it, that started that fire. was 90 years old. Nobody's maintaining this stuff. So now we have to maintain it. ⁓ And all the areas that have these beautiful power lines that are up in the air, when the windstorms come through, they just sit there and bang back and forth. then we get the calls the next morning to go fix things. Because nobody blames the utility.
Nick And Brian: Yep. No, no utility just points the finger anyway. Yeah, right. Right. Right. Just like nobody wants to blame Comcast. Or whoever, whoever, right?
David Laikind: Nobody blames utility. that's a challenge. No, can't be counting, it's fault. Right, right.
Nick And Brian: You know, getting the internet in the house and it's, it's, uh, well, let's, let's look there first. Well, it's the blanket term. Yeah. Yeah. My wifi is down because the perception of the client is yeah, that's, that's all they know. Something internal, not external. They love it that we deal with the, uh, you know, the, the, calls to the, to the ISP, know, and, and that white glove approach, but we have also seen a lot of the, uh, the, the lack of support from those companies more than the client does. You know, so I think we see that with the utility, you know,
David Laikind: sorry.
Bert Herrero: Okay.
David Laikind: Fabulous. Fabulous. I'll be there in the next three days between 10 and five. Yeah, love that.
Nick And Brian: Exactly. And so what's what's on the planning books in terms of ⁓ you know where the product you where you see it evolving and potential changes and.
David Laikind: Yeah, that's a great question. We're always evaluating battery technology, for example. We use sealed lead acid batteries. They're the most recycled product on the planet. I don't have restrictions that a lot of times lithium does. Like New York City, the five boroughs, there's no lithium going in there. It is what it is, right? The fire department has put a ban on that. ⁓
Nick And Brian: Mm.
David Laikind: So we're always monitoring that and looking, we're looking at one technology that's really cool. ⁓ As soon as they can build more than one at a time, we're gonna have a little bit deeper conversations with them. We're looking at two different approaches. One, we're looking at something for high rises, apartments, condos, that living has a real good opportunity there. It's placement. If it's hard to place it into a big home, it's even harder into a condo or a high rise. So we're looking for that. And then we're looking for bigger systems. Quite frankly, I could do a 400 amp unit.
Nick And Brian: Good.
David Laikind: be successful with tomorrow. it's all the engineering on that. that's ⁓ what I have Joe working on more. Joe is more on the sales side. That's what he enjoys, but he's working on the engineering side for that. ⁓ So we work closely with our manufacturers, their suppliers. There's some new inverter technology we're looking at that we're looking at implementing potentially. But we take a slower approach to it. ⁓ Entry unit, that's not really entering, hub 20 is nine years old. We haven't really made any changes to it and we have no intention to make any changes. It just works. My hub 30, what's that?
Nick And Brian: There's a of reasons behind that too, Dave? Because it's not just a matter of the technology works and if it's not broken, don't fix it type of, yeah.
David Laikind: Exactly, We don't have to do firmware updates all the time to this. ⁓ It was built to be very robust at that point in time and it's doing everything it needs to do. There'll be some evolutionary changes as our inverter suppliers got a new inverter out and so we're looking at implementing that into it. Our Hub 40 was evolutionary, taking it from 100 amps to 200 amps and giving us more flexibility and being able to go outside. Both of those units can do any two legs of three phase or standard 240, 120, So it's really a flexible product. So we're looking at again high rises and larger systems and keeping them in a way that has a footprint that's going to work in luxury homes. There's companies that make them for, that we compete, that our companies compete with on the data center side that are getting into really large, but they're not really designed to go on somebody's home.
Nick And Brian: Yeah, I wonder the data centers must have some version of this that's different, but. You're that into a luxury home. Yeah, it's such a challenge.
David Laikind: Well, I was... Yeah. So one of the things that when Joe went to our manufacturer, this is that I really like your product. I just need to improve it. And when you tell a company is doing half a billion dollars in sales that I need to improve your product, it's a little off putting and disconcerting. Right. So but what it was, what he really wanted was is the noise filtering. You know, when we stress my unit out to all four corners, we're about less than 1 % THD. So I lowered the noise floor on electronics and technology inside the homes dramatically. So the clients that have really high-end theaters and high-end listening rooms, they notice right off the bat that everything runs cooler. It opens up. It's like it takes a veil of gray scale off of that image.
Nick And Brian: All that noise floor is lowered.
David Laikind: because that noise flows are. And what we found from the amplifier manufacturers is their amplifiers are able to work more dynamically because they're not trying to make up that power difference. So they're working in that narrow range. So they're much more dynamic and efficient. And so they don't overheat a lot, you know, so you don't get that hot where you put your hand on it and it's really screaming hot at that point.
Bert Herrero: it
Nick And Brian: It's funny you say that one of my clients is a very, you know, audio, true audiophile, ⁓ know, a million dollar listening room and all that. And he has an apartment in New York ⁓ and he says he'll get up at one or two in the morning to listen to his system there because audiophiles down there know that at around one or two in the morning stuff just sounds better. Because you're figuring there's less demand on the grid, right? yep.
David Laikind: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we could do it for him so he could enjoy it at five o'clock in the evening then. Yeah. So he got a glass of wine to get his sleep back. ⁓ But that's kind of what we're looking at. We're just looking at expanding it out that way. Joe's got some other things that are on his plate that he's looking at and they've been developing and working out in the background. We're just not ready to chat about yet. So. ⁓
Nick And Brian: Hahaha
Bert Herrero: Hehehehehe
Nick And Brian: Yeah. ⁓ That's sad, isn't it?
David Laikind: But we're, unlike some manufacturers in our industry, where... They bring out products every single year and it's got new buttons or whatever to it. We just don't have that need, you know? The electrical industry is really boring, quite frankly. ⁓ Most electricians put in a lot of mechanical devices. You look at switches and circuit breakers and what have you. We've taken computer and electronics and electrical and combined them into a box. ⁓
Nick And Brian: Hmm.
David Laikind: But again, it's based off that mechanical device, which has been there since Edison brought it out, right? So there's not a lot of need to change things. It's just evolutionary growth.
Nick And Brian: David, the ⁓ product provide any sort of dashboard either via app or web page or otherwise that gives us and the client visibility on what it's doing or may have prevented or?
Bert Herrero: Good question.
David Laikind: Yeah, that's a great question. We do not have an app. We find that we have a web page that our clients can log into and our dealers can. We supply email alerts on various different alarm set points that we put in. Most of them are benign. AC light voltage is high, AC light voltage is low, and it's hit those thresholds. We've not baked AI into it, so whenever it hits it, it sends out an email. ⁓ And we get those to our dealers, and then our dealers have the ability to log into that unit and to see the incoming power and the outgoing power. by the seconds, minutes, hours, and days. So he can see in real time exactly what's coming in and then what's going into the client's home. I mentioned the dealer that I work with in Memphis and we did a project for a client. He had bought into a lighting control system, it was on 16.2 that... Wired his brand new 10,000 square foot house with all 16, two for every single lights fixture. And then they went out of business, right? So, ⁓ little bit of a bad day there. And we put the rose water in and we took some screenshots. There was a storm going through and it lost power in a 60 minute period about 12 times or sag down. But the output going into the house was perfect. and he had no idea that there was that kind of issues going on out there. So by looking at that and taking those screenshots, we shared them with the client and he was like, this is awesome. Glad that it's doing that job. But after a while, they're just like, as long as it's doing everything and I don't need to worry about it, they just don't care.
Nick And Brian: the problems go away or they never have problems to begin with because it's been put in at the beginning. Right.
Bert Herrero: Right. Right.
David Laikind: Exactly. A lot of times no news is good news, right? It's like everything's working, everything's fine. I got an email from a dealer. He goes, we keep getting these alerts. Is everything fine? Yep. It's just saying that you're getting 260 volts in the house instead of 240. Here's your screenshot. And they're like, OK, we'll call the electrician and reach out to the utility and try to fix it.
Nick And Brian: when your output metrics are on another scale because it's so finite, right? I mean, we've seen the output voltages and all that.
David Laikind: Yeah, so we'll just change the scale from like 125 to 0 to like 120.2 to 120.6. ⁓ Because that's the I'm working within that little narrow window there, you know, so it's
Nick And Brian: That's how clean the power is. That's how perfect that sine wave is coming out of the system. It's really incredible.
David Laikind: Yeah, it's really incredible when you see exactly what's coming in and then what's going out. People are pretty amazed on that. And sadly, again, you know, we changed our conversation from the category and the gear and all the technology to the lifestyle portion because the clients that want this, they don't care about the technology and the gear. They just want to know that it's going to do what it's supposed to do. An app for us, we looked at it and we did a lot of studies with clients and like, I'll never use it. We'll spend a lot of money on it, but I'll never use it because I really don't care. My property manager might look at it occasionally, but I'm not going to look.
Nick And Brian: Thank
Bert Herrero: It's pointless.
Nick And Brian: All right.
David Laikind: They'll use the app for the Rivian to start the Rivian when they forgot the key. But that's about it, you know, so.
Nick And Brian: I mean, David, I think you've got stories too. I know you have a in California. I think it was a memorable relationship that you have that stood out for me that you told me about quite a while ago. That the guy wouldn't even build right ⁓ without a rose system going into one of his homes, ⁓
David Laikind: Yeah. Yeah, so one of our dealers, this gentleman came on board with us early on. He's known Joe from back in the day. And called Joe up and said, look, I got a builder. taken over this project. And I know it's a power issue. And can you come out and meet with us and the builder? He's doing this development. He is the guy in the marketplace. just see if we can fix this because there's constant power issues. And the builder, what he told us later on, he goes, I don't want to be their bartender. I don't want to hear their crying when they dropped down me on 4th of July because things stopped working, right? So Joe went out there and met with them. And the builder's sitting in the back like this because he's heard all this BS before. And Joe's like, look, it's power. And this was really early on when we started the company. And the guy goes, What if it isn't? And just so I tell you what, I'll put it in. If it doesn't cure the problem, I'll pull it out at my expense. Builder said, put it in writing? Sure. So we put that in there and all the problems stopped. Builder looked at the deal and said, I got three more houses for you and then wrote it in with his contract. I'm not building a house without the rosewood. Because again, he doesn't want the phone calls like we don't want the phone calls. And what he said was when the control system drops down, the client makes two phone calls. They call me and they call you because they know that I'm going to make you do what your job is, right? Because that's kind of their mentality at that point in time. and see if I hit enough hotspots and hit enough buttons, somebody's gonna fix this for me. And so that's why we're finding builders are a great resource because they deal with the pain all the time. And they're just looking for a solution on it. But that's, ⁓ unfortunately that gentleman's retiring. Unfortunately, but we've enjoyed working with them and the dealer's got another one that is doing the same thing now.
Nick And Brian: It's good. good. It's gonna market that. ⁓
David Laikind: You know, he's a great spokesperson, right? So and then we're also starting to do more with the state managers and construction managers because we're finding that those are the guys, again, they're dealing with the pain on a different level.
Bert Herrero: Well, if anything, it's a good spokesperson.
David Laikind: You know, they've got a client that has five, six, eight, 10 houses. And I just, you know, we had one state manager say, look, I get 48 hours notice where they're going to show up. And I'm scrambling to get people out there to try to make the house work before they show up. So if you can put that in and it makes it so that I don't have to do that. The money right off the bat, just the flight saves us some time. But yeah, it's enjoyable working with this. I've been in the industry for 30 years and it's fun working with a product that you get immediate results once you put it in, you see how it does and how it impacts the project, right? And we find that once you get that first one in, after that it just starts to kind of clicked along. To that end, one of the things that we're doing right now is, We've dusted off of Joe's sales training that he did for Sound Advice back in the day. To work for Sound Advice, you had to go through a sales training process, right? And so we're doing sales training now for our dealers. It's not category, it's not about the gear, it's about building trust in the conversation, helping to have that sales conversation. Then taking that sales conversation and added power as a category into that. And we did it with a large dealer in Arizona and we got immediate results right out of it. We've had really good response on this because as an industry, there's a lot of dealers are out there that are doing business that have never had sales training, right? They've kind of learned the hard way, right? Going out there and being told, you didn't learn not to say that anymore. You know, so this has proven to be real successful for us and allowing us to grow our business even more that way. But we also find for the dealers, other things kind of move along for the client as well. And we're able to get more technology that benefits the client versus just selling things because we can.
Nick And Brian: I'm glad we had this conversation. Yeah, this is no very, very, ⁓ very interesting. I I it to people like, you know, ⁓ I get nerded out it. So David hears from me probably more than he wants to. ⁓
David Laikind: Not at all. I love getting the phone calls. It shows that you're looking and you're interested, right?
Nick And Brian: all the time, right? yeah, I'm, know, because I believe it, it's important. So it's one of those things that's a necessity. And it's why we're having the combo. That's why I want trade partners and I want people in the trades to know about it. And I, you know, know about Rosewater, the solutions there, the daisies, their path to that and that, you know, we're, you know, we want to talk about this stuff. So here we are.
David Laikind: Yeah, and one of that we have that we can implement with Daisy is we have a ⁓ one full CEU for AIA. And it's under health safety and wellness, which is always a challenging credit to get. We'd like to those in person. ⁓ And then we have a presentation that we work with with builders. ⁓ And that one's been well received as well. So we're doing very tailored presentations to these industry partners of ours ⁓ that really kind of speak to the points and the pain points that they see.
