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