Speaker 1: You've heard me talk about maybe last week about this
Speaker 1: school fire protection system for houses that are in the forest.
Speaker 1: And then I got an email from Randy Lang from Waveguard.
Speaker 1: It was like, Mandy, We've been doing this for years,
Speaker 1: and I said, I had no idea any of this
Speaker 1: stuff existed. So here on the show with me now
Speaker 1: Randy Lang from Waveguard to talk about it.
Speaker 2: Randy, first of all, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Mandy, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Second of all, I mean, I guess it makes sense
Speaker 1: that someone has probably been working on this problem of
Speaker 1: how to keep homes in the forest from burning down
Speaker 1: in a wildfire situation for a while. Now, how did
Speaker 1: you How long has your product been around and who
Speaker 1: sort of got that ball rolling?
Speaker 4: Well, we've been around since twenty twelve, and I got
Speaker 4: the ball rolling. Actually I lived in Castle Rock and
Speaker 4: there is a fire out in Franktown near an equestrian center,
Speaker 4: and I knew there's a lot of people out there
Speaker 4: that had horse properties and couldn't out and didn't have
Speaker 4: ways of getting the horses out, So got a horse
Speaker 4: trailer and helped move some animals out of there, And
Speaker 4: when I was driving through the neighborhood, saw the husband
Speaker 4: on the roof with the water hose and the earth people.
Speaker 4: His wife was trying to get the animals in the trailer.
Speaker 4: And so I've been in the landscape industry most all
Speaker 4: of my life since I got out of college, engineering
Speaker 4: design and irrigation systems. So I thought to myself, you know,
Speaker 4: why can't you put an irrigation system on the house
Speaker 4: that's going to just spray down.
Speaker 3: The house and water at automatically.
Speaker 4: So kind of started the process at that point and
Speaker 4: kind of went from there. Got a couple of people
Speaker 4: involved that I knew that had an irrigation design engineering
Speaker 4: firm and electronics engineer that actually became my partners, and
Speaker 4: we sat down and decided how we wanted the system
Speaker 4: operate and began the research and development of building a system.
Speaker 1: So tell me the you know, ninety second elevator speech
Speaker 1: on how this system works.
Speaker 4: Sure, so basically we all break completely off the grid.
Speaker 4: I don't depend upon domestic water source and I don't
Speaker 4: depend upon utility power.
Speaker 1: That was actually my first question, because that's always the
Speaker 1: first question. After what happened in Los Angeles when everybody
Speaker 1: was hitting the fire hydrants at the same time. It
Speaker 1: just killed the entire water system. So it does not
Speaker 1: rely on either of those, how does it not?
Speaker 4: So I bring my own water storage tanks, so we
Speaker 4: have our own water storage and that's based upon our design.
Speaker 4: We design each home specifically with a series of gear
Speaker 4: driven rotors that are built especially for our system, and
Speaker 4: series of wall sprays that go around the house. So
Speaker 4: we calculate that as a minimum runtime of say an hour,
Speaker 4: we want the system to run non stop. Typically the
Speaker 4: wildfires are going to be there and gone fifteen to
Speaker 4: twenty minutes is going to be through the right through
Speaker 4: the house. So we designed it with an hour water supply,
Speaker 4: and basically we fill that from the domestic water source,
Speaker 4: so we do tie into the domestic water source. It's
Speaker 4: only used to refill the tanks. If the pressure drops
Speaker 4: below us forty PSI, our valve shuts off and we don't.
Speaker 3: Fill the tanks automatically.
Speaker 4: Okay, the power supply, We do use utility power to
Speaker 4: keep our batteries charged. Our pumps do not operate off
Speaker 4: of a a C current or a DC current, so
Speaker 4: we operate off of batteries and so we have enough
Speaker 4: battery supply to run our pumps for a period of
Speaker 4: a couple of hours. We also have solar backups, so
Speaker 4: if power ever goes out, we do have solar backup
Speaker 4: that keeps the batteries charged as well.
Speaker 1: Now, you guys are already this has already been deployed, right,
Speaker 1: I mean you have real Have you had any real
Speaker 1: world examples of when this system kicked in to save
Speaker 1: a home?
Speaker 3: Absolutely?
Speaker 4: Then the Kincaid Fire in California I believe that was
Speaker 4: twenty seventeen in Hillsburg, there's.
Speaker 3: A system that was on a home that was saved.
Speaker 4: There's I think sixty four homes in that development, sixty
Speaker 4: three of them burned down.
Speaker 3: The one was the one that had our system on.
Speaker 4: Recently, in the La fires, there's two homes in there
Speaker 4: that we that were saved with our system as well.
Speaker 4: So overall, you know, we built this system actually to
Speaker 4: deploy here in Colorado, but we never really had a
Speaker 4: real interest in Our first calls came from California. So
Speaker 4: our primary area of where we have installed has been
Speaker 4: the Napa Valley area Sonoma. We've now spread down into
Speaker 4: Carmel in into the La Malibu area. With the recent
Speaker 4: La fires. We do have systems in Arizona, Oregon and Montana.
Speaker 1: You know, Randy, if you'd advertised on the Mandy Connell Show,
Speaker 1: you'd probably have a lot more people in Colorado.
Speaker 2: With these systems.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, I mean, I'm just doing that out there. Well,
Speaker 1: let me ask a couple of practical questions. What does
Speaker 1: it cost? I mean, obviously this is a retrofit, right,
Speaker 1: so it can go over any existing I We have
Speaker 1: friends who are evangelists for inside the house, you know,
Speaker 1: fire suppression systems, because they had a horrible family situation.
Speaker 1: But retrofitting the inside of a house is really hard.
Speaker 1: What is it like to bring in a waveguard system
Speaker 1: for your home?
Speaker 2: What does that look like?
Speaker 4: Well, we do retrofit existing homes and we also do
Speaker 4: new builds. We have a combination of both. The retrofits
Speaker 4: on the existing homes are actually much easier for us
Speaker 4: because we can go in there and do an average
Speaker 4: home and say six days, and it's all copper pipe fitting.
Speaker 4: We hide it either inside the gutters, underneath the gutters,
Speaker 4: or in under the eaves.
Speaker 3: We do not run.
Speaker 4: Any piping over the tops of the roof. All our
Speaker 4: rotors are designed to go on the exterior the roofline
Speaker 4: around the house and are What our rotors do is
Speaker 4: they spray out forty feet so I cover the structure
Speaker 4: and a forty foot perimeter around the structure, spray the wall, spray,
Speaker 4: spray straight down and creates a curtain of water all
Speaker 4: the way around the structure on immediately. So what sets
Speaker 4: us apart from the other systems out on the market
Speaker 4: right now is that we're not a zone system. Everything
Speaker 4: comes on at one time on a single zone system,
Speaker 4: So it doesn't matter how many structures you have, how
Speaker 4: many heads you have on there, everything is going to
Speaker 4: come on at once when it detects a fire.
Speaker 3: And we use an infrared.
Speaker 4: Detection system that detects the fire anywhere from five feet
Speaker 4: away from your house up to you know, two to
Speaker 4: four hundred yards away.
Speaker 1: Can you trigger it yourself if for some reason the
Speaker 1: system doesn't go and can you trigger it.
Speaker 4: No, We solely rely upon the IR detectors. It's been
Speaker 4: proven and we've designed it that way because if you're
Speaker 4: if you're not there, you don't know how far away
Speaker 4: the fire is, so you don't want to deploy it
Speaker 4: too soon, or you don't want to deploy it too late.
Speaker 4: So we set our ir detectors. It has a threatened
Speaker 4: sixty degree view around the house and so we can
Speaker 4: see fires coming from any direction.
Speaker 2: I got a lot of questions. Let me start with
Speaker 2: this one though.
Speaker 1: What's the like if I have a three thousand square
Speaker 1: foot house, what is it going to cause me to
Speaker 1: retrofit with Waveguard.
Speaker 3: It's it's going to be expensive.
Speaker 4: Our system is probably probably the most expensive kids on
Speaker 4: the block, but you're you're looking at starting anywhere from
Speaker 4: one hundred and forty thousand dollars up. But the technology
Speaker 4: behind it is just something that we've set the bar
Speaker 4: in the industry. And we're not We're we're not the
Speaker 4: cheapest on the market by any change. But yeah, we
Speaker 4: definitely have the best technology out there to protect a
Speaker 4: home all at one time.
Speaker 1: And I'm guessing that you have at that price point,
Speaker 1: you have a pretty exclusive plyingtele and they're protecting homes
Speaker 1: that are million dollar homes or higher, well higher than
Speaker 1: a million dollars.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I mean, we we do multimillion dollar homes, biggest
Speaker 4: state projects, so it's a it's a wide range of homes.
Speaker 4: Now we do and we we understand that price point
Speaker 4: isn't going to work for everybody. We do manual applications
Speaker 4: of our of our retardant, so when our system is activated,
Speaker 4: we automatically inject the fire retardant into our our water
Speaker 4: source as well. And what that does is it's a
Speaker 4: true long term retardant. It absorbs into the services that
Speaker 4: like the woods, the composite shingles, and it keeps it
Speaker 4: from igniting. It's a great product. It's all one hundred
Speaker 4: percent plant vegetable base. We don't we bring it in Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: it's not manufacturing in the United States. The the products
Speaker 4: that are here in the US all have chemical based and.
Speaker 3: Just really not good for the environment.
Speaker 4: So we found this product and we're actually the only
Speaker 4: provider of it right now in the US.
Speaker 1: So that's a secondary option for someone who may not
Speaker 1: be ready to do the full retrofit.
Speaker 2: Or is that in addition to.
Speaker 3: No, it's it's an option to it. Some people do both.
Speaker 4: I'll do a manual application on their in their homes
Speaker 4: and then also have the system on as well. But
Speaker 4: as I said, you know, the cost of it sometimes
Speaker 4: isn't isn't fit everybody's budget, right, You.
Speaker 2: Know what I mean? If you can you can right?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the way I feel about it is
Speaker 1: I never apologize for I price point. You get what
Speaker 1: you pay for, and some things maybe out of reach
Speaker 1: for me, but they're not for somebody else, and I
Speaker 1: have no issue with that. A lot of people are
Speaker 1: asking this question, does this drop your insurance rates?
Speaker 3: It depends on the carrier.
Speaker 4: In most cases they have they're able to get insurance,
Speaker 4: and it largely depends on the underwriter. We've had the
Speaker 4: the one in Malibu that happened just to be saved
Speaker 4: in the LA fires.
Speaker 3: They were insured.
Speaker 4: Actually, they wouldn't get insurance unless they specifically put our
Speaker 4: system on the house because we were mandated by the
Speaker 4: insurance company to put them on. But they are able
Speaker 4: to acquire the insurance for their home. Sourance companies are
Speaker 4: getting on board more and more as we go along,
Speaker 4: just because, you know, early on when we started this
Speaker 4: in twenty twelve, and I think our first system we
Speaker 4: installed was in twenty sixteen, there's not a lot of
Speaker 4: historical data. We kind of created an industry that never existed,
Speaker 4: so people were really unfamiliar with it, pretty skeptical about it.
Speaker 4: Insurance companies didn't know how it was going to work,
Speaker 4: whether it was going to work or not. But as
Speaker 4: time has gone on, you know, we've had a good
Speaker 4: track record with homes and the systems that.
Speaker 3: We had out there that was in wildfire situations.
Speaker 1: Well, I think as you can build a body of
Speaker 1: evidence that says to your point, you know, every other
Speaker 1: house in the neighborhood burned down, but this one, it
Speaker 1: gets a lot easier for. And then insurance, I mean
Speaker 1: insurance companies ultimately just don't want to pay claims, right,
Speaker 1: that's their goal.
Speaker 2: How can we not pay claims?
Speaker 1: And I don't think we do a great job in
Speaker 1: Colorado talking about other ways to mitigate wildfire danger, wildfire
Speaker 1: danger other than making sure you don't have any brush
Speaker 1: near your house, things of that nature, so they feel
Speaker 1: plant based, where in reality, there are other things you
Speaker 1: can do to harden your home. And this sounds like
Speaker 1: a great one. This is fascinating, Randy. I love that
Speaker 1: you saw a problem and decided to try and solve it.
Speaker 1: And and you know, we've had just these devastating fires
Speaker 1: here in Colorado. And I keep saying in the woods,
Speaker 1: but like the fire retardant spray, why wouldn't you have
Speaker 1: that in a neighborhood that all burned down, and you
Speaker 1: know in northern Colorado, it's like, I don't know, I
Speaker 1: think it's cool.
Speaker 2: I think what you're doing is very cool.
Speaker 1: Somebody did ask this, what about cleanup after being dispensed?
Speaker 2: So what about the cleanup after that?
Speaker 4: There's no cleanup. So our our product is not a
Speaker 4: foam or a jail. It's a clear product. It goes on,
Speaker 4: there's no cleanup to it, just gonna have to wash
Speaker 4: the windows.
Speaker 1: And somebody else asked, do you have to winterize this?
Speaker 1: Does it work in the winter?
Speaker 4: We we do it. We do keep it active during
Speaker 4: the winter. We have a couple of systems in Boulder.
Speaker 4: What we do is we put recirculation valves and keep
Speaker 4: our water running through.
Speaker 3: We heat tape our pipe.
Speaker 4: We put heater in our cabinet, so our pumping system
Speaker 4: and our electronics are all enclosed in a cabinet that
Speaker 4: especially built for our system as well, that we've designed,
Speaker 4: so a heater goes inside there. The water tanks keep
Speaker 4: water circulating, and we heat tape everything. We blow out
Speaker 4: the systems on the house itself, just as you would
Speaker 4: your irrigation system. But it does remain active through the
Speaker 4: winter months.
Speaker 1: All right, Randy Lang with Waveguard, fascinating conversation, really fascinating.
Speaker 1: Thank you for reaching out and I learned something new.
Speaker 1: So there's all these different options now to keep your
Speaker 1: home safer from wildfire.
Speaker 4: Thanks a lot, Randy, Thank you, Mandy, appreciate it all right.
Speaker 2: That is just I love cool stuff that people have invented.