The Fire Protection Podcast : Episode 47 – Digital Tools for Fire Pumps with Travis Montembeault of Peerless Pumps

Drew Slocum
All right, here we go. All right, Travis, thanks for joining me today on the Fire Protection Podcast.

Travis Montembault
Yeah, Drew a pleasure to be here. Really good.

Drew Slocum
Yeah. I almost said Fire Sprinkler podcast. I’m actually doing Chris Logan’s show later today, so I’m on my podcast day, I guess.

Travis Montembault
So there you go. Yeah, well, glad to be here. Looking forward to chatting.

Drew Slocum
Yeah. Yeah. Travis, he’s with Peerless Pump. Is that Peerless part of Grunds still? Or is?

Travis Montembault
Yeah. Yeah, so Peerless is a business unit in a division within the Grunds family. So Grunds bought Peerless in 2007 and then really reinvested in the Peerless brand and name and set them up as basically a division operating within the company.

Drew Slocum
Gotcha. So Grundy does a wide variety of pumps, and then Peerless is like their fire pump specific.

Travis Montembault
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And a lot of people probably know if you’re in the fire pump business because most of the jockey pumps and pressure maintenance pumps are Grus CRS, which is typically what you’ll find in most pump rooms. So whether you’ve got a Peerless fire pump there or not, probably eight out of 10 times, you’re looking at a Gruss CR as well for your jockey.

Drew Slocum
Yeah, I knew a lot of Peerless just being in, that’s where I met you initially in New York City is the number one pump city in America, right?

Travis Montembault
Yeah, it’s massive. It’s massive. And so I covered New York and really the northeast market for the Pellis fire pump team for about seven years as a sales manager. So covering up New England and New York, Philly, that area. And then I’ve since rotated out of that role and into leading our digitalization effort, which is what we’re going to talk a little bit about today. But Peerless Fire it, it’s been a product for many years for Peerless, but they decided to take an investment about a year and a half ago to form it as to some business unit, put it a full team behind it to really lead the digital transformation of Peerless effectively here. And so Connect is the first of, well, hopefully, it’ll be many smart connected solutions that come from Peerless. So somebody half, oh yeah.

Drew Slocum
So they’re doing more than just Fire Connect. They’re looking at some other connected solutions as

Travis Montembault
Well. And so, Peerless is not just a fire pump manufacturer. We also manufacture for water utility vertical turbines for min municipal app applications wastewater, and then there’s the industrial side of the business as well. So process pumps, process water NC equipment, things like that. So the fire portion of the business is what a lot of people know PERS for, but the Muni is also quite large. So when we look to talk about digital efforts, fire is kind of the low-hanging fruit because within the fire pump room, this hasn’t really occurred industry wide at this point here, but in our other market segments, there’s certainly opportunity as well.

Drew Slocum
Yeah, I could definitely see that. And I feel like, well, in this case, fire protection might be as peerless rolling with the fire protection, the fire connect first versus usually, I feel like municipality and just water usage, that usually comes first because there’s a dollar value to that versus fire protection usually lagging on the technology side.

Travis Montembault
Typically. And I think that’s why you see, maybe don’t want to call it a lack of innovation, but maybe slow to move from a market standpoint in general industry-wide with regard to fire. And so when Peerless was assessing opportunities for digital efforts, there was a real gap that we’ve seen market wide. On the fire protection industry side, there are all sorts of condition monitoring and other types of remote applications that come from other industrial uses. I mean, the water utility and municipal have been monitoring their pumps remotely and controlling them remotely for literal decades, similarly for industrial facilities, but specific to fire in our industry has lagged on that. And so when Imperials has taken a look at what opportunities existed, this looked like the best opportunity for immediate growth and immediate impact.

Drew Slocum
Yeah. Yeah. I, I’ve, I think ever since inspect point’s been around, I’ve kind of like, all right, well, I know this is coming, the connected fire pumps and grabbing some of that data because it’s one of the most critical components of a fire protection system. If you need a fire pump, if you don’t have water, if you don’t have a sprinkler system, you don’t have different suppression systems as well. So by getting that connected and grabbing data out of it, it’s, it’s going to make it a lot. Plus, the frequency of inspection on fire pumps and just the nature of making sure that it’s working properly it’s going to affect everything down the line. Right?

Travis Montembault
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the reality of fire pumps is they rarely run unless you truly need them to run or you’re within your inspection times. So there’s all this kind of lag in between inspections effectively where that equipment’s just sitting idle. It’s not like a process pump or a booster system and a high-rise building that’s running day in and day out. So there’s potential for issues to come up and occur without actually knowing it until you get to the next inspection cycle.

Drew Slocum
Right. I feel like that’s what lags the industry is just the, well, sorry, the lagging, the industry, obviously the inspection cycle, talking the code cycle, lagging the industry, that’s a whole nother topic.

Travis Montembault
Oh yeah, for sure.

Drew Slocum
So I guess, all right, fire connects a smart fire protection system. I guess what everybody’s kind of used to some of the internet of things, the IOT technology, what is this in comparison to, I guess, what you have in your house,

Travis Montembault
Right? Yeah, that’s great. And that’s a great opening because usually when I give a presentation on this, I’ll pull my phone out and show it up and say, look, I’m getting a notification right now that there’s motion in front of my front door. I can get a notification that I’ve left my garage door open for an hour or that I’ve left my trunk for my car open. That comes as a push notification from my app. Everything there is connected, and I’m not constantly checking my apps, but they’re bringing issues or concerns or condition changes to the forefront for me when I need to know them. So I’m not constantly looking at the app for my car and saying, oh, okay, I left the trunk open, but instead, it’s telling me that I did it. So it’s getting proactive. What we’re trying to do with Fire Connect, which in essence is remote monitoring of your fire pump and your fire protection system that the basis of it was fire pumps are, in essence, a black box for a lot of people.

What’s trapped in those four walls outside of your core N F P A 72 alarms is an immense amount of data. And most people don’t have access to that data unless they physically go to the pump room, look at the controller, look at the gauges, look at the clipboard that’s hanging on there from the last test. That is the old way of doing things. And so what Fire Connect is trying to do is to take all of that information and let you see it from wherever you are in the world. So I can log onto my app if I’m out of the country and see what’s going on. Or even better yet, that system can tell me if something’s going on. So if I’m 3000 miles away, I can get a text message that says, Hey, your pump’s on, and you can dive in immediately and see what the scenario is. Are you flowing water? Are there other alarms on the controller? What’s driving that issue? And so then it gets even better because, in a post covid world where one, we’ve seen for a couple of years how difficult it is to get building access and two, it’s very difficult to keep employees right now, that becomes your one constant. So then you can still see what’s going on with your system, even if you’re struggling to get access into a building or it takes time to get somebody out there.

Drew Slocum
Right. Well, just the frequency of fire pumps with the weekly and monthly, the churn tests, and no flow. Who’s doing that? I think there are not enough technicians to do those now. So are the internal facility managers or property owners doing them? I think a lot of good ones are, but there are just not enough people to do some of those more frequent activities.

Travis Montembault
For sure. For sure. And I mean this really this remote monitoring concept, even with regard to code and then also with Peerless, and Gruss originally started for fire protection after the National Fire Protection Association’s Research Foundation. They commissioned a study, and I think they found something high number I can’t remember the percentage off the top of my head, sorry. I think it was probably close to somewhere around 40%. We’re struggling to get, or we’re not getting the required inspection testing and maintenance work done across the board. And so we know the good ones really do it. And then there’s plenty that slips through. And I mean, I can give you a quick story. I was with a customer about a month ago, and he was telling me how just a week prior, he had received a phone call that he had a common trouble alarm. The site leader had a common trouble alarm and said, Hey, I don’t know what’s going on here. And he goes, oh, well, there’s a problem with your fire pump. And the guy responds to my customer and says, I don’t have a fire pump in my building. And he goes, well, I, I’m sure you do, but let me come out there, and we’ll take a look. And he gets out there a day later and gets on site, and they’re walking down the site, and they find the fire pump room, and in there is a diesel fire pump that’s 15 years old, and it’s got 1.2 hours on the engine. So they commissioned it, and they never ran it again. Oh

Drew Slocum
My gosh.

Travis Montembault
What triggered that alarm was the chargers, the controller finally died, and the batteries. Wow, what was the voltage? And so that was what triggered that common trouble alarm, which led to the phone call and so on and so forth. So the point is a lot of people just don’t know. They’re not looking at this equipment; they’re not testing it. So it’s there, but is it ready? Probably not. So bringing larger visibility to the forefront of your systems is just going to lead to better protection for all at the end of the day. And then you start thinking on a corporate level and an insurance level; risk mitigation becomes a big thing, and that just in improved data and visibility. Some may look at it as big brother, but the reality is it is going to drive, I think, good change industry-wide.

Drew Slocum
And what if we got to hit these specific frequencies of inspection per the code? Some of ’em are like those weeklies, and yes, if there’s an issue, you need somebody there. And in the new 2023 N F P A 25 put, there’s a whole section for remote monitored automated testing for the fire pump, and how quick can you get somebody there if there’s a condition, right?

Travis Montembault
Yeah, that’s a massive change because it used to be somebody had to be on-site within five minutes, but the new version of the coach says that somebody can address those issues within four hours if you’re monitoring ’em remotely. And so that really opens up the door for this possibility of one remote monitoring is exactly what it is. It’s just a window into the system, but it really opens up the door for things like remote testing all of a sudden Yes, because you’re monitoring, allowing for scheduled automatic tests to your fire pump, for example, and then just knowing that you have to go address ’em if something comes up.

Drew Slocum
Yeah. It’s funny, back to just smart personal systems. My neighbor brought it up. He’s like, you just got a new car, and he has it on his app that in the wintertime, he starts his car 15 minutes before he’s got to leave. So the cars are like, it’s on the app. I didn’t even know you could do that, but it’s, everything’s so connected now that might as well utilize the technology, and it, it’s going to improve everybody’s life and improve the safety as well.

Travis Montembault
Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it’s a narrative change that will transform the industry at the end of the day. And I think the reality is that whether we like it or not, it will come because this is the last frontier, especially on the pump side of the business for IOT and connected solutions. It’s been almost non-existent for fire protection, more or less compared to your industrial pumps, as we talked about, and monitoring those and using an app, you know, can control industrial pumps for fire is a different story. Right now, you’re still just looking, you’re not turning it on, you’re not turning it off, but you’re still gathering that data from a condition standpoint.

Drew Slocum
So are you on an N F P 25 in a no-flow test or no-flow churn test, whatever? There are not many. There are some checks and balances you have to do. There are obviously not as many as an annual. You’re able to grab whatever data almost instantaneously, so you’re going to be able to provide a lot more, you’ll be able to provide pressure data, you’ll be able to provide temperature data, a bunch of other things that normally take maybe take 20, 30 minutes, but for sure you’ll pull that pretty much instantly.

Travis Montembault
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, think that’s always the point is that one, it’s always there from an inspection standpoint, and two, it’s always there in between those inspection times. So all the week or the three or four weeks in between inspections, that data is also available. So then you can start to see condition changes if something goes wrong in between inspections so that you’re getting more proactive as opposed to reactive when issues pop up. So you’ll know right away if something happens to your question. What we’re doing is we’re going from digitization to digitalization and reality. So why it used to be someone walking around with a clipboard and looking at the gauges and checking it off, and then now, it’s moved to online forms and web forms and PDFs. And so that to me is digitization where the paperwork trail is now in the cloud, and so other people can now access it, but that person still has to walk around and say, all right, suction pressure is 75 psi.

Okay, that’s good. The system looks good. Pump room temperature, 72 degrees in here. They still have to write all that down. But moving to digitalization is when that system tells you what its pump room temperature is, and it puts it into that form for you, that system tells you what its suction pressure is, and it puts it into that form for you. If you get a diesel, diesel-driven system, it tells you what the fuel level is so that you can plan ahead and know when you need to order fuel again because in three weeks’ time, when you run for 90 minutes over three weeks, you’re going to drop that tank below the two-thirds required by code.

Drew Slocum
Right.

Travis Montembault
Digitalization means that instead of somebody having to walk around and manually put that information in, they’re able to gather that information automatically without having to physically walk it down. Right now, there are still some discussions on visual indication is important and being able to see those things. But the root data, at the end of the day, is critical. And I think a really good example is one of our original pilot customers that added digital gauge readers onto their risers effectively, and they found that their initial cap cost was fairly high, but their payback time because their self-insured and they’re able to take the decision with their third-party auditor that they no longer had to send somebody around to check those risers each time and walk the entire plant. Instead, those readings were reporting out to them. And so in terms of man hours, were able to redeploy that person to do something else because these people are so busy, there’s not enough time in the day to do all these inspections and run all these challenges, especially if it’s an in-house team as opposed to an external team. So people are so busy with these things that cutting out a few hours a day is immensely important.

Drew Slocum
Well, also, if you’re doing quarterly sprinklers on those gauges or whatever, what happens between those quarters? If there’s an issue, you’re not going to catch that. So I think with that digital digitalization, if it can automate a service technician to come out and fix it, right; obviously, it’s not going to be able to fix itself a lot of times. So if you can automate a service technician to come out before something critical happens, once you hit that degradation point, boom, fire, fire a service ticket out to a tech to make that fix versus letting it get out of control. I could see it on dry systems, and there’s some technology out there to kind of start monitoring dry pipe systems where you know, let that go too long. You’re going to get a false trip and water frozen everywhere. Do you know what I mean?

Travis Montembault
Sure, absolutely. Yeah. And I think it’s an important point to make that you’ll always need to roll a technician, but you’ll know what you’re going to a technician for at that moment because you’ll know exactly what the issue is, and it’s not something that you’re finding on the inspection because you’re off it in between inspections effectively,

Drew Slocum
Right? Yeah. The visual components, I mean, you’re always going to need technicians there. Even on a no-flow, you’re still going to need somebody there, right? Visually it does the automated, or the remote monitoring piece of fire connect, but it doesn’t, doesn’t eliminate that churn test fully, right? Yeah, right

Travis Montembault
Now, so the way code’s written is remote testing needs to be as good as if not better than somebody physically being there, what you’re going to find. So right now, we’re really pulling all the data, but you’re still not gathering the things like the eye and the ear test at the moment. So if that pump is running into that diesel

Drew Slocum
Smell test, right?

Travis Montembault
Exactly. Exactly. But all of that can come and is the roadmap to come. So you’ll start seeing things like cameras and pump rooms for visual indication, and you’ll start looking at, there’s already tech out there that tells you vibration noise and bearing temp, for example. So you throw one of those sensors on your fire pump, and you throw one on your engine, and now all of a sudden, you’ve also replaced that potential required visual indication as well here. So I think in reality, what’s going to happen is somebody will go in, they’ll start that test, and then they can be there if they need to be, or they can go while the data’s collecting and go and do something else in the interim. Yeah, exactly what that would need to accomplish. And then if there’s an issue, they’re there, they can go deal with it, but at the same time, all that data’s already there. So you’ll continue to see this base platform that we have, and you’ll start to iterate and add more sensor technology that leads to a more robust inspection. So the goal at the end of the day is that NFPA 25 checklist for your weekly or monthly that you need to perform specifically on your fire pump system. The goal would be to allow for all of that to be digitalized effectively.

Drew Slocum
Gotcha, gotcha. So component, I guess. So we keep talking about the smart and cloud, and everything’s like invisible in the air, right? That’s why I always describe the cloud. It’s just like,

Travis Montembault
Yeah, you look up, and you

Drew Slocum
Look up, right? Yeah. So I guess everybody knows, you know, have your pump, you have your controller. I guess what are the hardware components too, and then we’ll get into the software after that. What are the hardware components of Fire Connect?

Travis Montembault
For sure, for sure. And so, Fire Connect has two different versions. One is a more basic version that we call Century, and then a more robust version that we call Guardian. Century was really designed to aid the retrofit side of the market, especially with regard to commercial buildings. The root of the data, a vast majority of the data that comes from fire into Fire Connect comes from the fire pump controllers. You have your standard alarms, but behind all those alarms, there are 70 to hundred different points of data that those controllers also have that information you can pull. And so what we’ve done with Fire Connect is we connect to those controllers via mod.

Drew Slocum
Okay.

Travis Montembault
So we get all that data via mod bus from the fire pump controller, and then we add things like so you get system pressure out of that controller for well as well, example, for example, and then you add a suction transducer. So we add that piece of hardware in there, so now you’re able to see your differential pressure. So terms of plotting a pump curve, if you’re running a test making sure that you have suction pressure that somebody didn’t accidentally close a valve upstream, for example, that information’s not coming. And then you can add additional features. So like a pump room temperature monitoring, that’s a great example. Pulling that data in, you can add a flow meter. So what we’ve done is we’ve actually put an ultrasonic flow meter on the suction side of the pump, and what that’s yielded us is both flow data.

If you’re running an annual test, so if you’re running a flow test or a test header, for example, it’s also given us data in the event of a live event. So in a fire, in an incident, if you’re popping sprinkler heads, you’re flowing water, we can tell you how that fire pump’s performing. And we can talk about that a little bit later here with regard we call that incident command. And then there are other components. So if you go to a water supply tank, or a water storage tank, we can tell you the tank level remotely. Similarly, if you’ve got a diesel fuel tank, same deal, we can tell you how much fuel is in that tank, not just a low alarm. So the controller will give you a low fuel level alarm, but why not know how much is in there so that if we talk about getting proactive in a future state and rolling a technician if an issue happens automatically, why not be able to send a PO out for the diesel fuel delivery company that you work for, right? Knowing that you’re going to need fuel in a week or something along those lines. So that those hardware components that I mentioned here, the suction transducer connecting Modbus, and the flow meter, are big ones. All this is combined is wired into what we call the Fire Connect Gateway Controller,

And within that is a cellular gateway board. So it’s an I Oh, it’s

Drew Slocum
Cellular.

Travis Montembault
It’s all cellular. Oh,

Drew Slocum
You didn’t go wifi

Travis Montembault
With the SIM card and we didn’t go wifi, and we didn’t go local network connection because the biggest concern that we’ve found so far, especially with our industrial partners, is connecting hardware behind their firewall.

Drew Slocum
I know. Yeah. And that’s how, I mean, that’s got, target got hacked, what, a five years ago that was through their HVAC IOT system, so they

Travis Montembault
Don’t love that. So what we do is we’re taking, it’s read-only what we’re doing. So we’re taking the Modbus data, it’s read-only, we’re not doing any writing, we’re not doing any controlling of the pump or the controllers or anything like that, and we’re pulling that data through into this gateway controller, and sending it up to the cloud via cellular. Now we’ve; also, you talk about hardware, we’ve iterated on that gateway controller, and what we’ve done is we’ve always found that typically you get a lot of data out of your jockey pumps and your jockey pump controller because that’s the pump that runs all the time. Your fire pump doesn’t run all the time, but you’re looking at system health, watching what your jockey pump does. That’s a leading indicator of things like potential leaks. For example, if it leaks, sure, or if somebody’s washing their truck down at 11:00 PM at night or something like that, which we know happens too.

So what we’ve done is we’ve taken a jockey pump controller, and we’ve actually taken the IOT portion of our hardware and put that in a jock controller. So it’s a simplified installation. Oh, wow. It’s more cost-effective. You don’t have a separate enclosure. And then with that, you get all the jock pump monitoring information there, and then you can still connect that to your mod busen enabled main fire pump controller. But the beauty is if you don’t have a mod main fire pump controller, we can also still give you a smart fire protection system by connecting the jockey to your existing fire pump controller. And what we do there is we take your core remote alarm contacts that you would normally send through your building to your B M s or whatever, so you get electric face failure, phase reversal trouble, et cetera. We land those alarms into the jockey controller, and then we monitor those remotely as well.

Drew Slocum
Wow.

Travis Montembault
So there’s a lot there, right? Yeah. But the point is, we’ve iterated our own solution into a more installer-friendly, cost-friendly opportunity.

Drew Slocum
What are you using? So I know cellular connection’s a tough time in fire pump rooms. Are you putting no repeaters, or do you have mesh networks I guess, how are you getting the data back if you don’t have cellular? Yeah, for

Travis Montembault
Sure, for sure. So we haven’t run into a pump room yet that we haven’t been able to get data out of, but there are a couple of ways, but you have to work around it sometimes. So buried pump room in the basement is a challenge, and that’s very common. So we have an intent, a cellular antenna that’s just a little nub antenna that’s on the board, but then you’ve got the option to run a wired antenna out of that controller, and you can run it gotcha, wherever you need to. So 50 feet, you’ve got 50 feet of length basically on the long cable. And so if you need to run it up one or two floors, that’s usually enough to get where you need to. Sometimes if you run it, just if you’ve got a remote pump house, sometimes if you run it just right outside of the pump house, also great. So that’s really been our solution. There is an opportunity if you need to do repeaters, but we’ve found that typically the path, at least resistance for us and the strongest signal, has been to find where that signal works and then run an antenna to it.

Drew Slocum
Gotcha. Gotcha. I had another question lined up for you. So you have the gateway; oh, this was a question. So obviously, there are a lot of fire pumps that are currently in the market, and that is the idea; obviously, anything new coming out; obviously you should be getting some kind of a connection, so you work with a variety of different controllers as well. It’s not just Peerless, right? Correct.

Travis Montembault
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So Fearless is obviously being the pump manufacturer, and we do have our own jockey controller, but in terms of UL and FM fire pump controllers, we leave that to the experts. So yeah, tar tech, fire troll, Eaton, and Master are the four, mostly the four main ones in the US at this point that you’ll find. Sure. Especially with regard to new business, we’re compatible with all of ’em.

Drew Slocum
Oh,

Travis Montembault
Wow. And as a standard now, so on all their new controllers, they’re all Modbus ready out of

Drew Slocum
The gate. Oh, nice.

Travis Montembault
So the previous iterations, 5, 6, 7, and 10 years ago, did not, you had the option to add Modbus to some of these, but it didn’t come as standard. So on every new installation, now you have the opportunity to pull that data up to do this kind of the older controllers. That’s why we have this differentiation between Century and Guardian, just because there are some controllers out there that may be fine, there’re seven years old, but they’re not mod bus capable, or it’s cost prohibitive to upgrade that controller. We can still give you a lot of data even if you leave that there, but everything new that comes out of the building can be connected at this point.

Drew Slocum,
So I grabbed the question again in my mind. So you have an installation contractor, obviously whatever, five years old that puts the fire pump in. Obviously, they’re selling that to the building right now,

Travis Montembault
Who?

Drew Slocum
Who’s going to do the installation? I mean, is it going to be the building owner that wants to get more connected, or is it the servicing contractor that wants to be more connected? You get where I’m; you kind of know where I’m getting at because you have your building owner, which might not necessarily care about them, or they just want to reduce their cost. For sure. Then on the service contractor side, it’s like, all right, I can provide this value. So what if the service contractor owned the gateway and almost leased it out to the building? I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of a variety of scenarios. I know you have facilities that are currently using this now. Yeah. I’m wondering to see where this service contractor fits in.

Travis Montembault
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think what we’re finding is the sprinkler contractors, so first off, sprinkler contractors are the ones that install the equipment. The end user if the end user wants it, they’ll contract out the contractor, and they’ll have it installed on their behalf. The model that we’ve seen for years here. But now you’ve also got these service contractors that are obviously very engaged and care very much about the performance of that system, both from an inspection and a repair standpoint. So there’s absolutely a market there. An opportunity as well for these service-minded contractors to basically purchase remote monitoring equipment such as Fire Connect and install it, whether it’s on behalf of their end-user or for the service that they’re going to provide their end user because if they are or can become more effective, think about this. So a battery goes bad on a diesel engine, for example, that comes through as a common trouble alarm.

The end user says I’ve got a common trouble alarm. They call the sprinkler, the service contractor of the service agreement, and say, Hey, I’ve got this common trouble alarm. The first thing that the contractor has to do is roll somebody out there to figure out what is causing that common trouble alarm, for example. But if they have already installed it as part of their service package, they’ve decided to install remote monitoring of their system; they actually know that it’s a bad battery that’s driving that problem. So instead of sending somebody out there to figure out what the problem is, go back, get in the truck, go to the shop, get a battery, come back and install it, they can roll the truck to that site with a battery. And typically, a lot of these contracts can be a flat fee, and a performance contract can be a flat fee. So then you’re looking at cost savings from, as a company, as a service company, effectively by having to roll somebody once as opposed to twice.

Drew Slocum
Yeah, I could see it obviously valuable to a high-end facility or a facility manager that has where all the to get into it, but I think the majority of the market and commercial and even industrial and whatever else, using third-party contractors to do that. So I think by utilizing this technology. Obviously, it’s a potential labor-saving, but you’re going to run in I you’re run analytics, and we’re not getting rid of, you’re still going to have to have technicians there definitely for the annual, right? Absolutely. And I think

Travis Montembault
That’s making a

Drew Slocum
Little bit of fear on

Travis Montembault
The part. Yeah, yeah. You’re not replacing jobs at all, right? No. You’re not removing them. You’re making him more efficient for them to do the work At the end of the day, either way, that guy’s got to roll, he’s physically there to replace the battery.

Drew Slocum
Yes,

Travis Montembault
The root of it, but he knows what he’s getting into when he gets there, and then he can plan his day accordingly as well. If he knows that he just has to replace the battery, then he can go on to the next site later that day. Whereas if he doesn’t know what the problem is, a lot of times, that blocks his day out completely.

Drew Slocum
So

Travis Montembault
You’re just making him more effective from that standpoint.

Drew Slocum
How have you seen adoption so far? Where is there have successes been? And I guess where are you still struggling with people getting on top of it?

Travis Montembault
Yeah, for sure. Our strongest market, without a doubt right now, is the retrofit market. And a lot of that’s driven either by talking to service mining contractors or also to end users effectively what we would call key accounts. And when we talk about key accounts, the value proposition for a lot of those places, some are tied to the specific facility manager that’s on-site, but a lot of times, it’s tied to corporations that have a corporate governance model. So they’ve got somebody that’s responsible for fire protection at their portfolio of sites all over the country or all over the world. They care about coding compliance and making sure that their individual site leaders are doing the testing, or they struggle with keeping site leaders on staff. And so that there’s a gap there in terms of information, they’re looking really the first ones to help kick that off, kick fire connect off with us effectively is that corporate governance model.

So that’s been the root of our success up to this point. The sprinkler model service model is a big one. And then the lagger, as I would call it, is the new construction bid inspection model. And that’s just because of the nature of classic bid inspection, right? So you got to work with an end user who can, and an engineer and engineer can justify the little bit of the extra cost that comes from a little bit of additional hardware. And then the monitoring piece, the beauty though is because now most fire pump controllers are all fire pump controllers are Modbus enabled, the additional incremental cost for a new system is just a couple thousand dollars to get you off the ground for

Drew Slocum
Nice for

Travis Montembault
A new install, especially

Drew Slocum
That’s the gate, that’s what the gateway is, couple thousand, and then with

Travis Montembault
The jockey controller. So if you use the jockey controller, that gives you a smart system, and it gives you everything you need right out of the gate. So you connect that to your main fire pump controller, and we’ve built in a lot of functionality. So that suction transducer, you don’t have to wire that in the field that’s already installed in the jockey controller, pump room temperature water storage, tank monitoring, that’s all in one box. So we’ve simplified the installation piece of it as well. So the upfront cap cost is minimal at this point on a new, but admittedly that is the laggard because that’s such a long cycle because you’re talking about bid and spec, getting something into a specification, and then the time from the bid and then construction and so on and so forth. So

Drew Slocum
Yeah, I almost think to mean it’d be interesting if I was a service or inspection contractor. I mean, if you could do it, you could install one of these on obviously a site that is having issues or whatever, you probably can’t move ’em around too much probably once it’s installed. Installed. Is there data, the data and software cost of it, or is it just,

Travis Montembault
Sorry say that again.

Drew Slocum
You’re transmitting a lot of data? Is there a cost to that, or is there a

Travis Montembault
Yeah, so there’s an annual monitoring fee attached to it. A subscription. And so it’s somewhere around 1200 to $1,800 a year, depending upon the complexity of the system and how many installations you have. But that’s an all-in-one fee, so you don’t have to worry about it, I said it’s cellular, so it’s not like you have to go to Verizon and set up a data account or anything like that. That’s all taken care of. And then that gives you access to, we haven’t really talked much yet about the software, the user interface, but that gives you access to the user interface that gives you unlimited user onto that user interface. And then it also gives you all of those notifications we were talking about. So if you want a text message that your pump is on, you can set that up, and all that is included in that see as well.

Drew Slocum
Gotcha. So that’s just one that’s one gateway, though, right?

Travis Montembault
Correct, yes. Yeah. And so the cut and the tie-in right now with the current hardware, it’s similar to a main fire pump controller where you need one controller per fire pump. So you’ve got one gateway per fire pump. And I think it’s probably an important point to note now that 40% of what peerless monitors, and yes, we are Peerless Fire Connect and peerless pumps, but 40% of what we monitor are nonimperialist fire pumps.

Drew Slocum
Oh, wow.

Travis Montembault
So the software itself is what we call pump agnostic.

Drew Slocum
Gotcha. So

Travis Montembault
You can install it on anybody’s fire pump, and if you’re playing with one of those four controller manufacturers, which 95% of the new market is at this point, then you can tie into there as well.

Drew Slocum
Nice. Yeah, it’s pretty slick. I’ve seen the UI, I think, a couple of years ago when Roger was showing me or when I forgot what I was looking at it, but it’s obviously a lot more sophisticated now.

Travis Montembault
Yeah, I mean, it’s never done. So this is a massive change from a hundred-year-old cast iron pump manufacturer does product development. Sales release is a product, and that product is on the market for 30 years. That pattern and whatever for digital, the hardware is ever evolving. We’re constantly adding sensors and opportunities from a hardware standpoint, but the real meat of it is that hardware enables the software, and that software is what is constantly iterating. So perfect example, we had a customer monitoring jockey pump starts, which we found is a critical component to knowing system health. So if you look over time at how often a jockey pump starts, you can tell if it’s pretty consistent or if you’ve popped a valve or you’ve blown an elbow, or you’ve got a leaky check or something, you can tell when that jockey pump starts to start more times over day than it has over the previous seven, for example. And so we had a customer that said, we have what we think is a significant problem at one of our facilities. They’ve got 200-plus starts per day. We’d like to know roughly how much water they’re losing on an annualized basis with that pump running, that jockey running 200 times a day for whatever at a time.

Can you help us with that? We’re, we’re thinking about putting a flow meter on there, and we’re like, oh yeah, you don’t need to put a flow meter on there. We can solve it with software. So in the UI, we updated it where we’re given based on the rating of that jockey pump, we can give you a very accurate estimate in terms of how much water is flowing through that jockey pump each day and then annualize that over a year effectively and say, all right, you’re losing 1.2 million gallons of water per year.

Drew Slocum
Put a dollar value on that and just

Travis Montembault
Put a dollar value on it. So if somebody’s got an environmental goal, that’s obviously an easy low-hanging fruit, but even from a fire protection standpoint. So you get a really leaky system here, it’s time to start looking at some CapEx to fix it. That’s right. So they use that to justify that 1.2 million gallons a year to justify CapEx for it. And they went from 200 starts a day to 10 once they spent the money to update it. The point is that it was a software fix, and we validated it. They put a flow meter on there anyways, and I think we were within 5% of the flow. So from a good enough standpoint, if they’re asking the question, what’s the goal? I guess what are they trying to get to? That’s how we solved it effectively. And so we do that pretty frequently by doing software updates. And the beauty is once you’re already in with the subscription, you’re not necessarily paying for all these additional bolt-on features. If there’s a hardware requirement, then you probably have to pay to add in that hardware, but we’re making all the software changes free to whoever wants to use it. Not everybody has a jockey flow calculator, for example, on all on every site.

Drew Slocum
Yeah. That’s in our ballgame now, where you’re putting out 20 new features every month and having <laugh> just ever-growing. Obviously, your team has to grow. You’re getting Exactly. So more software calls and hardware. I mean, obviously, you’re going to have the hardware calls, but their software calls are a little bit different. No, that’s great. And obviously, looking at it, I would love to grab some of this data to obviously populate some stuff that we’re doing inside our Inspect Point application because obviously it, it’ll optimize that, and then we can roll trucks automatically. So it’s some really good stuff, and I’ve been waiting to have you guys come to market with a lot of stuff. So I think it’s great timing with everything. No,

Travis Montembault
Completely agree. And I mean, you look at the future of where we see smart fire protection going, step one is getting that data and remote monitoring. Step two is what do you actually do with that data? And throwing it into building monitoring services and building management systems and into inspection platforms like Inspect Point, for example, is the next stage, I think, next step. And then how do you use that data to impact activity? So yeah, cutting pos, rolling trucks, knowing what the problem is, getting smart. So knowing that you run your weekly pump test at the churn and being able to see from a data standpoint that you’re now, you’ve now degraded to 7%, for example. So saying, Hey, it’s time to order a rotating element or a repair kit or something along those lines. Letting the pumps, in essence, because they’re being monitored, order their own spare parts, knowing that they need to do something right. So that’s correct. All right. It’s been two years you’ve; you’ve had this many starts time to replace the bearings or replace the packing. Your jockey pumps run 200,000 times. It’s probably time to put one on the shelf because you’re going to want to be replacing that pretty soon.

Drew Slocum
That’s crazy. My H V C system almost does that where it’s an older system, but I I’ve got it connected to a thermostat, and it’ll automatically order air filters off of how much it’s running

Travis Montembault
Kind. Exactly. And so our parent company, Grundy, has a CR booster pump that, in essence, does that you can order a stack kit or a new seal or the booster system itself can order new parts as it, because it’s condition, doing condition monitoring on everything. Yeah. That’s the next stage here for this. These, it’s going to require less individual input, but we’ll still always require somebody to go there and, Oh

Drew Slocum
Yeah, fix it.

Travis Montembault
Yeah, yeah, replace it. Yeah, that’s a constant.

Drew Slocum
No, no, this is great stuff. So I would like, I’m going to tease this now, but we kind of talked, Travis and I were talking before, and I think we’re going to do kind of a joint webinar in December. So any listeners out there, please, we’re probably getting a date set up in the next couple of weeks, but probably by the time this podcast airs too. But just to give some more detailed ins and outs of your user interface and just the basics, maybe we’ll go over an example of an existing fire pump where you would like, whether it’s the facility manager or it’s the installer or the service contractor, and we can go through I guess, what you need to do to get it going.

Travis Montembault
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That’s going to be fun, and looking forward to showing it off. And Drew, let me this one, this went really quick. So let me just give one additional shameless plug to functionality because we spent a lot of time talking about Sure. Remote monitoring and the inspection testing portion of this, which obviously is as critical to your business as well. But Fire Connect was born with this idea in mind that during a live incident, you need to be able to understand what’s going on with your fire pump. Yeah. So we’ve seen in the past couple of years some pretty bad instances of buildings that are sprinkler with fire pumps where one of the first activities that happen during a live event during a fire is that fire pump’s turned off, for example, whether it’s to gain visibility or for whatever litany of reasons NFPA 13 notwithstanding, don’t turn the fire pump off to improve visibility.

What we’ve done with Fire Connect is we can give you that data, and we have a page that we call incident command, and that’s for everybody. And so if there’s an event, if you pop a sprinkler head open, you will see that pump running, you’ll see what that flow rate is, and if you have a water supply tank, you’ll know how much water you have remaining in the tank and based on current performance, how much longer you have of supply for that fire pump. And so the implication of that is, think about this, you open one sprinkler head pump turns on, and you’ve got flow over time. So if you’re looking at the time on a graph, that flow is constantly coming out of that sprinkler head. If you open a second head, that flow rate jumps up, and then over time, it’s constant, again, you’re looking for suppression, you’re looking for no more sprinkler heads to open.

So over time, if you’ve, say, 10, 15 minutes, you’ve got a flat flow curve on that pump curve, you now know that you are no longer opening sprinkler heads. And one of the, it’s still an estimate or an assumption, but you can make a fairly safe assumption that fire at this point is no longer spreading and that it’s contained to that suppression area. That data is available today, and it’s our pilot customers have it as part of their EH hs. So their environmental health and safety requirements are that if there is an event at their facility, whoever is responsible during that time, their job is to take that data to the fire brigade and say, here’s going on with the fire pump. Right now, they have it on the iPad, and they show it and say, this is the live performance, it’s coming out every 20 seconds out of the pump room. Here’s the update, here’s pressure, we’ve got good suction pressure, here’s what the system pressure is, and here’s the flow rate. Right now, for me, the end goal is at some point that data’s available on the trucks as they’re rolling, as the fire department’s on their way. But that’s obviously based on adoption and down the line. But at a minimum, those fire site leaders all have that data available to them. They can say, the pump’s working, leave it alone, don’t turn it off. Let it do its job.

Drew Slocum
And I know there’s a lot of incident command software platforms out there now where the chief or whoever, whoever’s responding to that, the truck rolling up to that fire, they already have that in front of them on an iPad or exactly an iPhone, whatever. So if you could send obviously that data in that there, the more information, the better they can fight that fire, right?

Travis Montembault
A hundred percent. It’s safer for everybody. You can make better choices. It reduces overall risk entirely. The beauty is we can send that data wherever we need to. We’ve already got a score. So whatever platforms needed or want it, that is an opportunity.

Drew Slocum
That’s cool. That’s really cool.

Travis Montembault
That was my plug. Thank you, though.

Drew Slocum
That’s not a plug. That’s a

Travis Montembault
Good one. I think that’s a really important one to think about here moving forward too.

Drew Slocum:
Yeah, that is good. I guess, I guess we can hit more in the webinar that we do, but yeah, I wanted to, I’ve been wanting to get you on here for a while and talk about Fire Connect, and it’s been a kind of the back of my mind for a bunch of years now and how to bring that into just the next wave and getting that data into obviously ITM reporting, but even beyond that and sending service tickets and ordering material ahead of time. So you just show up and make those fixes, and then they’re off to the next thing.

Travis Montembault
Right.

Drew Slocum
So perfect. Cool. Well, stay tuned. We’ll have this webinar in December, and yeah, I guess Travis, where can we find you? Any other plugs? Get ahold of you and anybody at Fire Connect?

Travis Montembault
Yeah, absolutely. So the best thing to do is you go to peerless pump.com, and the first link you’ll see is Fire Connect right there. You can click Fire Connect, and you can find all the information that we have about the system. There’s this pretty slick video that gives you a quick two-minute intro into what Fire Connect is. There’s an ask for more information button, so you can send us an email, and we can reach out to you there. We’re also pretty active, and you’ll find us on LinkedIn, so Peerless Pump or Peerless Fire Connect, connect as well there. But definitely start with the website and happy to field any questions. So feel free to reach out to me, and we can provide contact information as well on the blog tie to the podcast here.

Drew Slocum
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks again for hopping on today, and we’ll see each other soon.

Travis Montembault
Yeah, looking forward to it.

Drew Slocum
All right, thanks.

Travis Montembault
Thanks.