- Will you consider this, it's happened to just about all of us, industry too, the hot water heater is leaking.

Coming up, a problem solver in our own backyard.

(upbeat music) We all wanna have that hot water flowing the minute we need it.

Businesses are no different.

Well Intellihot has come to the rescue in an almost circuitous way.

My guest is, and I hope I don't blow this, Sridhar Deivasigamani and a friend, came up with a solution.

Sridhar I will just call you that, and the pronunciation of your last name again?

- Deivasigamani.

- Okay.

Well, I was close.

We'll just stick with that.

All right.

So let's get to you have a... we're gonna be all over the place.

You have a tankless hot water heater that you and a developed what 10, 12 years ago?

- Yeah.

Yes.

This is one of those classic American stories on how things get started.

My friend, who's my co-founder now and I were very passionate about energy and we were building robotic devices, Mark's Motorcycle, sort of a semi-autonomous one at that time.

And I come back home after a long flight I go down to my basement in Peoria and my home is flooded from a leaky water heater and quickly realized how much of water we store.

We have a bathtub in our basement and that's just one home and you can multiply the number of homes and number of businesses in the U.S. We store about one sixth of lake Tahoe, billions of gallons, and keep it hot 24/7, lots of energy waste.

- Yeah.

So you said it's about 40 million gallons a day.

Is that what you estimated?

- I can get you the precise figure.

It's roughly works out to one sixth of lake Tahoe.

That's several billion gallons that are actually kept hot.

- Right.

And not everybody's taking a shower at the same time, so that's just water that's sitting around and not being used and you're very conscious about how precious our resources are.

- Absolutely.

You know, when we think about all the things it takes to keep human beings comfortable and safe, you know, we often think about transportation being a big polluter, but it turns out that building energy consumption accounts for 30% of global energy and 26% of all carbon emissions in fact, higher than the automotive sector.

So unless we can solve the emissions cost by buildings and that energy problem, we can get to meeting our 2030 goals and move the planet to a more sustainable form of energy consumption.

- And that's the buzz word, the whole buzz feeling especially in the United States right now, and with global warming and all that.

And so why are we still using processes from over a hundred years ago?

- That's a very good question.

It's one of those things that is an absolute essential in the day and age we live, but we don't look at it day to day we only think about it the day it stops working.

Same way we don't think about good clean treated water or electric power that comes in our home, hot water is just that it's outta sight out of mind.

And it's just chugging away constantly 24/7.

And it tends to be a very critical piece for both our homes and our businesses and because of that there has not been too much innovation in heating and storing water in the last hundred years.

And so what worked a hundred years ago is similarly deployed.

It's usually storing hundreds to thousands of gallons of water hot lighting a fire underneath, or putting an electric element and keeping that whole gallons of water hot.

- Right.

All right.

So this all started with you having the water in the basement, and then you are already an engineer and your, your friend co-founder and engineer also, and you had made some changes to your motorcycles 'cause you both like going fast and taking those corners pretty slick.

So that's kind of used some of that engineering knowhow to develop Intellihot.

- Yeah.

I've always been very passionate about energy and realized that the current technology we have, we are wasting a lot of energy and we are not getting the benefit.

So it was a quest of can we do something better this weekend and so we took all this controls we had for a motorcycle.

Quite honestly, it was supposed to be a weekend project and it sort of steam rolled from there.

We found how difficult and challenging it was, which is one of the reasons nobody had attempted to do it an entirely different way in the last 100 years.

We sort of kept what worked and it became our life's goal to better our lives and do something for the planet at the same time.

- And you worked with the in Peoria, you worked with the next innovation startup.

What exactly?

How did they direct you or what their assistance?

- Yeah, I couldn't tell chosen a better place on the planet than Peoria because you know, Caterpillar was great.

You know, I worked at Caterpillar and then the drive to work was short and so you had all this free time and you're able to work on other stuff.

We went for my basement, we worked for two years in my basement and then Peoria Next Innovation Center is again a fantastic place.

We took residents there and we moved very rapidly from proof of concept to a full blown production unit.

And you are in an environment where you are surrounded by entrepreneurs and people who believe and want to change the world, and it gave us a lot of energy and momentum.

- And so a lot of feedback too, you would run ideas past them and they would make some suggestions as you went?

- Yeah.

So first we have a place, a home and then you're interacting, not only with the staff at Peoria Next, but with other entrepreneurs.

Bradley was great.

We had several students and professors we interacted with.

And so it's a good community to to start and develop an idea.

- And for right now you are mostly commercial industrial.

What's the size of the units for like the Willis Tower in Chicago?

What kind of a unit would you need to heat the water for there?

- Yeah.

Let me give you an example.

So if you think about your average hotel and maybe a hundred room, we'll put in a unit, that's the size of a fridge and what it would replace is something that's already a full size garage worth of equipment.

And so to power the Wills Tower, we would probably put four to five such units kind of in together and they would re replace maybe couple garages worth of today's equipment.

- So you have different size units for different needs different buildings and things.

So describe that to me.

- Yeah.

So we can power anything from 20 unit condo, all the way to our last Vegas style.

We have done numerous hospitals around the country, numerous stadiums some of the tallest buildings in Chicago, schools and the like.

What we are able to do for our customers is produce good, clean, safe water at almost 40 to 70% lower cost than what they pay.

And the directly translates into the amount of carbon you put into the environment.

If I can use a lot less fuel, I'm automatically putting a lot less carbon into the environment and our equipment when sized appropriately can cost up to 50% less.

So when businesses look at this they say, well, you're producing good, clean, safe water with no bacteria in it, it costs me less to run and it costs less to own.

What's not there to what's not there to like about it.

- Right, perfect business sense.

So who was your first big commercial account?

- Well, believe it or not, we had a couple breaks.

I wanna say I shout out to Jim barracks in Peoria.

Jim Barrack gave us a very first opportunity and he was gracious to say to try something new.

So we went and the unit of gyms worked quite well.

And then the federal prison in Pekin gave us another opportunity.

And yeah, we believe it or not, you need good the systems you put in the prisons have to be very reliable, 'cause it's one of the few creature comforts people have you know, heated water.

And so we did that and it kind of grew from there.

- Interesting.

All right, so you are located in Galesburg now.

So how did you move from Peoria then to Galesburg?

- So we develop the unit at Peoria next and then the next step was to mass produce the unit and we were looking around the country, obviously I have a lot of connection Peoria.

And when Ben Galesburg the city was very forward thinking and they wanted to bring in green innovative businesses like ours, and we started talking to them and it one thing led to another and this city and Intellihot were able to put a small package together and we ended up opening our factories there.

They have a great workforce.

The building we are in used to be a Carhart facility and the family at Carhart had a vision for promoting green sustainable businesses.

And so a lot of things came together the city the Carhart building, obviously our proximity to Galesburg, and so we opened an 80,000 square feet factory there producing the world's most advanced water heater there, which is now being shipped to every corner of the U.S. - Incredible.

What a journey this has been for you.

Did you ever even imagine, well, except when you came home to the flooded basement, did you know that you could possibly be changing so many things in the world?

- No, not at all.

You know, simple thing is we all can make a difference and all you have to do is wildly believe in that concept and to be in the states and have all these opportunities and to have that confidence and hard work, you can go a long way.

- Now, all the parts are also made in the United States for so assembly?

- Not all of the.

We live in a global economy, so everything that goes into our unit is designed by us and then we use a global supply chain.

We get components from the U.S, we get components from Europe, components from Asia, they all come to our factory in Galesburg.

They all put together, they're tested and then we send out a finished completed unit.

- You have a lot of patents already and you have many more pending, now what is that all about?

- Well, the secret really is not many people know.

We are really not a water heating company.

We are a company that thinks about the spaces energy intelligence.

And for example, this is something we launched earlier this year.

This is called a TeleBot-AI.

It's a little small shoebox size unit and we are able to put these units in hundreds of thousands of buildings and help those buildings figure out what they consume and when the current equipment would break down and if they move to better equipment, what does it mean for them and for the environment.

And people are so used to today waiting for a failure to happen and then act in an emergency way.

So that's how we all are.

So yeah, we do things like TeleBot-AI, which has the potential to completely transform how businesses are done.

In a way we are creating the Google maps of the built environment.

If I know what I have, how it's working, when it's gonna break down and what it consumes, I have the opportunity now to move to something better at a time of my choosing rather than acting an emergency.

- Good you planning.

So those are some pretty big shoes, you said shoeboxes, pretty big shoes by the way, but that's okay.

It's not a small size five, and that was just something that evolved because of that's how you market yourselves.

- Yeah.

We have all this intelligence built into our units and today our units are producing hot water tomorrow I'm sure our units will be producing heating and cooling buildings, producing electric power, keeping everybody safe and comfortable at the same time.

And the technology we put into our TeleBot-AI is already built into our units.

And we realized that while we have this, all the other units out there that have been produced and are working 24/7, do not have this.

And so it was our effort to eliminate some business risk and help our customers with whatever they have today.

- Right, get your toe in the door.

So your home grown, you've done commercial industrial when will you come to my house?

- I can tell you, we are working on a whole range of technologies.

You know, human beings live, obviously just sort of living only two places at our home and at our work.

Right now, we are solving the problem at the traditional workplace, which as you've seen in the last two years has changed.

I'm working for my home and we can expect to the future, many more people to work.

So in order to, to transform, we have to be in the residential space and we are working on bringing a completely different way of thinking about our homes.

You'll see that in near future.

- Wow.

You have a lot to think about, and you've already done a lot of thinking.

Now, I believe in one of the videos that I saw your partner described it as a, what were his three words, it's designed like a Ferrari or it works like a Ferrari, built like a Prius.

- Yeah.

Performance like a Ferrari and the fuel economy of a Prius.

- You know, how can you lose?

- You know, it is a tough thing to achieve and usually as as businesses and as people, we are programmed to think if something is better and obviously in a better product, better for the environment, it should cost more and it would take me it'll have a long payback.

What we have been able to achieve is completely break that myth.

Our product is substantially better, it can actually cost less, it occupies less space.

And so that trifecta is really helping businesses transform the way they think about hot water.

- And when you were an engineer with Caterpillar, you never considered any of those kinds of things or did you?

- Well, I think when I was at Caterpillar, a great company by the way, I love, love Caterpillar, many, many things, I think they can gave me the opportunity to do many things.

And I always challenged status quo in whatever department I've worked in.

And so seemingly I seem to get handed the most challenging toughest assignments that somebody else wanted to take, which was interesting, 'cause there was never a adult day and I loved going to work for them.

- Let me ask you this.

So different places around the country have different types of water.

So how do these units work with really hard water compared to soft water?

Or do you have a recommendation for what works best with the systems?

- So if you look at the map of the U.S geological survey, it generally will say most of the water in the U.S is either hard or very hard.

There is very little water classified as soft or super soft.

And this water heater is a critical piece of equipment that has to really work like a Caterpillar truck nonstop 24/7.

By the way, I hope Caterpillar sends me the 20 bucks for this endorsement.

We designed the heaters to really not scale under typical operating conditions and our heat exchanger expand and contracts, we have higher velocities, we physically vibrate our heat exchanger.

The net effect of which is our units are operate in like new condition pretty much throughout their lifespan.

And majority of the heaters or traditional heaters today fail because of calcification, thermal cycles, your heating and cooling and you have a when they install a brand new water heater, it'll go in at, let's say not hours, tanks at five to 600 pounds.

By the time a five years rolls by you'll have a thick, a block of calcium and the water heater has gained weight to about 1500 pounds.

Our units don't do that 'cause all that stuff is continuously sent out.

- So it's just, as the water is flowing, it is heating up and going to serve whomever calls upon it to serve.

- Yeah, we heat on demand and then you can imagine, as the water is flowing through these pipes, we are physically vibrating these pipes and so the none of the particles ever adhere to the surface and so that keeps units operating new condition it always operates at the maximum efficiency possible and you have a good reliable source.

- Do they need to be serviced often or do regular plumbers know how to service them or take care of them, upkeep?

- Yeah.

In terms of service, it's very typical maintenance your spark plugs, filters and we built something very interesting on our units.

On the display we show a bunch of bar graphs, which represent component life and so depending on whether you are a small hotel or a hospital or a stadium, the bar graphs, like an in cartridge will go down and it'll alert you to when service of that particular component is needed.

So it's very intuitive, very easy, but the biggest of all, it gives you a heads up many, many months before anything has to be done.

- Which is nice, problem solving 101, get there before it happens, correct?

- Yes.

Prevention is always better than the cure, unless costly.

- So you started this whole process 2009 is when you got home and found the water in the basement and then it took you what, 18 months to try to develop something or roughly?

- Yes, we went from when I think about it, it's kind of incredible.

We went from a clean sheet of paper to a fully sort of unit that worked in about 18 months.

And we used to run, I think, 30 or 40 different configurations a day trying to test stuff.

And then this journey of going from there to what is now a large company and building hundreds and thousands of units that's another journey.

Getting something to work is part one, getting to ability to produce, sell it and is part two, and the journey is not over yet.

- No, no.

Yeah.

Tell me where you would like this journey to lead you then other than in homes, which would be very nice, but do you have any additional vision for what you'd like to do where you'd like to go?

- Yeah.

We fully expect the company to not only do business in the U.S, but throughout the world, everyone has the same challenges.

It is also clear that we can just solve the water heating problem or the car problem, or the light bulb problem, all these problems have to be solved concurrently and perhaps cohesively in order for us to get to our 2030 goals and to really prevent the ocean from going over 1.5C, which as most scientists say that's sort of the limit.

So a lot of work has to happen in the next next eight, nine years.

- That's for sure.

2030 is much closer than we had imagined or now that you put it into terms like that, Oh!

- Yeah.

I mean, we have you can count the number of months.

- Okay.

So that's the vision for your journey, mostly water but what about electric or what about you mentioned electric or lights, do you think you'd wanna dabble in that or you're just gonna concentrate on Intellihot for right now?

- I think, like I said as a company, we think of this space as how can I transform energy and use it best.

Put simply for example, we think of our refrigerator as cooling our food, but in a sense, what a refrigerator is doing is it's cooling the chamber, and then putting heat outside.

And then you have another device called the water heater, that's energy and putting heat into water.

Why couldn't we take the heat coming out of a fridge and put it in water, be combined?

So I think we gotta think about this whole thing in a holistic way, where everything is dependent on each other and I think we can solve the problem.

So the vision for us is to develop systems work together.

And I can imagine that our units one day will know when you're gonna come home and turn stuff on automatically for you and set the right temperature.

And if I'm cooling something, I'm gonna take the energy and store it and use it somewhere else.

That's the vision we have.

- Well, that's the vision of the future, or it sounds like the Jetsons, 'cause they kind of had all this stuff going, except they were flying around in space rather than driving cars and things, but it sounds like you're kind of on that same wavelength.

- I think so.

You know, if we can send a man to the moon, these things should be possible.

I don't think any of this is... we just have to imagine how things need to be and we can get there.

- Yeah, a smart home, a smart everything, how's that?

- As long as it makes your life better and it's meaningful to you and adds value and it's better for the environment, yes, why not?

- Don't you just love his attitude.

Well, thank you so much Sridhar for visiting with us and explaining what's going on with Intellihot and someday you will be re-powering this planet.

- That is our vision, yes.

- All right, thank you again for being with us and thank you all for watching on Consider This.

I hope you enjoyed this presentation, you learned a lot.

I know I did.

So you have a good time, a good night and stay safe and healthy.