This is a silly idea

ChrisJ

Boon said:

This solution effectively reduces the EDR, right? Doesn't that makes the boilers oversized?

So does a TRV.

You either have an oversized boiler, or tenants opening windows and or being uncomfortable.

DanHolohan

Yeh Cozys talk to the burner.

ChrisJ

DanHolohan said:

Yeh Cozys talk to the burner.

Dan,
Has someone hacked your account?

PMJ

This product is something an unhappy tenant can do on his own without needing to get permission. I can see that being worth a lot to them - a lot more than a TRV and the associated risk of trouble with the landlord. That there could be a big market for it in places like NY doesn't surprise me at all.

As the owner of a house with 24/7 access to everything I'm not interested in adding any more devices that need power and can fail than necessary. The tenant is in a very different situation and I get that.

I would think the building owners should love these. The tenants spending all that money to even things out and helping send steam where it is needed instead of just opening the windows. What is not to like for the owner? The tenant foots the cost and gets a better result. The owner has happier tenants and saves gas.

Question though - on two pipe systems (do any apartments in NY have 2 pipe?) wouldn't these pass even more steam to the dry return if the rad had a bad trap and possibly cause more problems than without it to others in the building?

DanHolohan

Lots of two-pipe apartments. Did you read my Invisible Tenants article (above)? The Cozy knew when the steam trap failed.

MilanD

From reading articles about this, seems like owners install this, get all traps serviced and then there is a remote trap sensor that monitors all the traps too. All this sends info to a centralized monitoring system. Tenants get access to their apt settings only for temp adjusting, owner to all settings.

DanHolohan

Exactly

MilanD

It came a long way from this to the cozy.

1908, 1924, 2017... amazing.

DanHolohan

I showed him those books when he was starting with this.

Sailah

Maybe I should meet with this gentleman, we seem to be working towards the same goal of steam efficiencies but on slightly different paths.

I could retool my steam trap monitor to integrate with his Cozy controller. To do so would make my actual hardware costs very low since I'd be eliminating a whole host of parts including battery, LoRa radio etc. could piggyback on his controller assuming he is using wifi or similar. He must be using 120v at some point to run the fan. The tenant gets to control their heat, but the Super/building management gets to know that they have a trap wasting steam and schedule its replacement. The tenant should get some type of discount for saving therms.

Our steam trap monitor has a great ROI on larger traps but struggles with the ROI on radiators due to radio costs. This might be an interesting collaboration, my monitor on the larger actual traps and the Cozy/with monitor lite on the radiators.

Dan could you make an introduction for me?

Thanks

DanHolohan

I'll invite him into the thread, Peter.

Sailah

Cool, I just sent an inquiry through his website I hope he'll reach out.

DanHolohan

I'm sure he will.

MilanD

Mark Cuban said a few years ago that the future is in sensors: from medical to industrial applications.

DanHolohan

Google Marshall Cox's patents and see what he's done so far. It made my head spin.

RadiatorLabs

Hi Dan and all - thanks for the heads up!

I'd love to connect, Peter. We're putting a lot more effort into the data and analysis side of things these days - and we're always looking to connect with people who care about this! I'll look for your inquiry, but I'll email you directly right now.

Also happy to answer any questions anyone might have here - looks like you've covered quite a bit already.

Thanks!
-Marshall

DanHolohan

Thanks, Marshall. Great to have you here!

MilanD

What language is this?

http://patents.justia.com/inventor/marshall-cox

DanHolohan

This guy doesn't have silly ideas.

MilanD

Btw, I love how misleading the name "cozy" and "oven mitt" are. The one's I have at home, you know, for the oven, have no electronics on them. I feel cheated.

PMJ

> @DanHolohan said:
> Lots of two-pipe apartments. Did you read my Invisible Tenants article (above)? The Cozy knew when the steam trap failed.

I see that Dan. Can you give any more details about that data? As these get installed who is it who first knows a trap has failed and then what.

I see how these save fuel overall. But don't they actually lessen the pressure on owners to do maintenance by masking problems? A cozy can keep the temperature in range in a room where failed components could not.

DanHolohan

Now that Marshall is in the thread I'm sure he can answer much better than I can. Thanks for opening your mind.

PMJ

> @DanHolohan said:
> Now that Marshall is in the thread I'm sure he can answer much better than I can. Thanks for opening your mind.

Sure. I hope he will comment on this. I'd love to learn more about what happens in the big picture downstream. My first reaction is that it lets owners off the maintenance hook big time. I mean the current result is better and the tenant pays the entire bill for the improvement and saves the owner fuel cost on top. Long term does fundamental maintenance improve? Just curious.

DanHolohan

I'm sure he will. He just got married so if his responses aren't instantaneous that's the reason. Thanks.

RadiatorLabs

Hi All,

Re: patents - I come from a very specialized field of electronics - if you're familiar with 'OLED' TVs - that's essentially my specialty. But, then, I lived in an apartment building with a badly misbehaving steam system - and I guess I haven't looked back since

PMJ - that's absolutely right. The Cozy can mask a lot of the problems with steam systems, but as we like to say "it can't do magic". So, while it can 'fix' moderate imbalances in a building, we are putting a lot of effort into diagnosing the precise problem spots in these buildings to inform maintenance on fixing root issues.

Two quick stories on how this plays out:

One of our buildings was experiencing some significant heating problems this year - and our new cozys detected that two of 14 riser lines were not getting sufficient heat - radiators weren't reaching steam temperature on the first firing of every day, but with multiple firings over each morning would finally reach temperature. Clearly, these risers weren't properly vented, so we had a team go to the building and perform the work to address this - and voila; a far better balanced building.

In another one of our buildings we detected one friday that one of the zone valves in the basement didn't close when we stopped calling for heat and, despite the fact that the boiler controller was telling us that all was well (but we saw that half the radiators continued to be piping hot), we alerted the building to the fact that 50% of its tenants (in a 300-apartment building) were about to get very, very overheated. A team came to the building over the weekend and fixed the frozen valve before the building owner started to receive complaints en masse.

In conclusion - while the Cozy can do a lot on its own, we're really digging into the data that we're gathering to inform the work to address issues at their source - and hopefully reduce the cost of that work, since there's no longer as big of a mystery to solve each time.

Gordy

A huge savings in man hours trouble shooting systems. I love it when a seemingly simple idea evolves through properly applied technology. Just two instances nice!

PMJ

> @RadiatorLabs said:
> Hi All,
>
> Re: patents - I come from a very specialized field of electronics - if you're familiar with 'OLED' TVs - that's essentially my specialty. But, then, I lived in an apartment building with a badly misbehaving steam system - and I guess I haven't looked back since
>
> PMJ - that's absolutely right. The Cozy can mask a lot of the problems with steam systems, but as we like to say "it can't do magic". So, while it can 'fix' moderate imbalances in a building, we are putting a lot of effort into diagnosing the precise problem spots in these buildings to inform maintenance on fixing root issues.
>
> Two quick stories on how this plays out:
>
> One of our buildings was experiencing some significant heating problems this year - and our new cozys detected that two of 14 riser lines were not getting sufficient heat - radiators weren't reaching steam temperature on the first firing of every day, but with multiple firings over each morning would finally reach temperature. Clearly, these risers weren't properly vented, so we had a team go to the building and perform the work to address this - and voila; a far better balanced building.
>
> In another one of our buildings we detected one friday that one of the zone valves in the basement didn't close when we stopped calling for heat and, despite the fact that the boiler controller was telling us that all was well (but we saw that half the radiators continued to be piping hot), we alerted the building to the fact that 50% of its tenants (in a 300-apartment building) were about to get very, very overheated. A team came to the building over the weekend and fixed the frozen valve before the building owner started to receive complaints en masse.
>
> In conclusion - while the Cozy can do a lot on its own, we're really digging into the data that we're gathering to inform the work to address issues at their source - and hopefully reduce the cost of that work, since there's no longer as big of a mystery to solve each time.

Sounds really good. You do have a great way to see the whole picture. So you analyze all this data and give this very valuable feedback to the owners just a a service to your customers (the tenants)?

ChrisJ

@RadiatorLabs

How about in addition to the Cozy, developing a system that uses wifi communicating TRVs that will fire a boiler up when several rooms require it, and turn it off when all rooms are within a certain temperature?

For example, when 50% of TRVs show a 0.5F drop, fire the burner up and when they exceed the set point by 0.5F shutting it down. If during this, more TRVs call for heat, keep the burner going etc.

Would need to offer it in both 2 pipe and single pipe setups.

Those TRVs could even be used in combination with the Cozy, or as stand alone units.

Perhaps create a WIFI connected head that goes on a Danfoss TRV valve body.


Besides that,
We're all waiting to see some reasonably priced 50-70" OLED tvs.

RadiatorLabs

PMJ - actually, to date, our customers have been the buildings themselves. We haven't sold a single unit to an individual tenant yet. Value to building owners is fuel savings (our NYSERDA project showed 34% and ~40% savings in our first two buildings, controlling for HDD), and the tenant comfort, alerts, and analytics (harder to put a firm number on) are bonus.

Chris - in many ways, the Cozy does exactly what a TRV does. There are lots of differences, obviously, but with a single-pipe system or a two-pipe (with a functioning steam trap) there aren't any advantages to using a TRV. There are instances, though, where a Cozy cannot be installed but a TRV could be a great help - we don't have the capacity to communicate with any yet, but it's something we're thinking about. Honeywell and Danfoss are already working on these kinds of connected systems.

We are obviously biased here, but we think that our approach has a lot of advantages over TRVs. One of them is that we can store energy inside of our enclosure for distribution when the boiler is off, which let's us keep more or less constant temperatures in apartments. In fact, when we run buildings, we don't run the boiler depending on room temperatures - we run them based on radiator temperature. If a radiator is getting cold, that means that the 'storage' is running low. Since we know how long it takes from heat call to heat arriving at the radiators, we can run the boiler to exactly meet demand.

Lots of detail in our NYSERSDA report if anyone wants to check it out (there's a link to download the report itself at the bottom of this page).

I'm waiting for affordable OLED TVs too

ChrisJ

RadiatorLabs said:

PMJ - actually, to date, our customers have been the buildings themselves. We haven't sold a single unit to an individual tenant yet. Value to building owners is fuel savings (our NYSERDA project showed 34% and ~40% savings in our first two buildings, controlling for HDD), and the tenant comfort, alerts, and analytics (harder to put a firm number on) are bonus.

Chris - in many ways, the Cozy does exactly what a TRV does. There are lots of differences, obviously, but with a single-pipe system or a two-pipe (with a functioning steam trap) there aren't any advantages to using a TRV. There are instances, though, where a Cozy cannot be installed but a TRV could be a great help - we don't have the capacity to communicate with any yet, but it's something we're thinking about. Honeywell and Danfoss are already working on these kinds of connected systems.

We are obviously biased here, but we think that our approach has a lot of advantages over TRVs. One of them is that we can store energy inside of our enclosure for distribution when the boiler is off, which let's us keep more or less constant temperatures in apartments. In fact, when we run buildings, we don't run the boiler depending on room temperatures - we run them based on radiator temperature. If a radiator is getting cold, that means that the 'storage' is running low. Since we know how long it takes from heat call to heat arriving at the radiators, we can run the boiler to exactly meet demand.

Lots of detail in our NYSERSDA report if anyone wants to check it out (there's a link to download the report itself at the bottom of this page).

I'm waiting for affordable OLED TVs too

I have two beef's with your design, at least on my own system.

1: I like the cosmetics of a cast iron radiator. While, I'm probably a rarity here, I know I'm not alone. Obviously this is a personal preference, but it's one of the things that would stop me from personally using it.

2: The main reason I wanted radiators was for the IR output. 60% of the heat is via infrared and the Cozy basically converts it into a forced air system. This is a deal breaker for me.

This is why I mentioned communicating TRVs. That is a product I'd consider buying.

That, and the affordable OLED TVs.

I've hated LCDs since they started becoming popular and held on to my CRT displays as long as I could. Our main tv is a 50" Panasonic plasma from around 2012. It's got decent blacks, but a bit more noise than I like. Before that I was using a Unity Motion UHD-3200 32" 720P CRT display. Sadly, I've seen few displays that produced the blacks and the color that Unity Motion did.

For my PC's I'm using Dell 24" IPS displays which are ok, but the blacks are terrible compared to a good OLED or CRT display. I used to play Half life and other games in the dark, not anymore.

Someone needs to come out with a good 22-24" OLED pc display that runs at 85-100Hz.

MilanD

Gentlemen and ladies: Steam 2.0 has arrived.

What a great system!! And with fuel savings, helping both the earth and the bottom line - just amazing!

RadiatorLabs

Thanks Milan!

Chris - absolutely. One thing we can't do is leave the radiator aesthetic as-is.

A bit off-topic, but LCD systems have gotten a LOT Better over the years. There use to be no competition between them and cathode ray tubes in terms of response time and brightness contrast, but the competition has narrowed significantly. Incidentally, a lot of my patents were for a company I use to work for called QD Vision, which was recently acquired by Samsung. So, if you buy one of the new samsung TVs- I helped develop the tech! Still LCD based, but you can't beat the color gamut

MilanD

@RadiatorLabs

Marshall, for us who do love the radiator look, how about having a few versions with radiator decal on there? Certainly painting them a few rad patterns or using that plastic wrap used on busses for advertising wouldn't add ti much cost and could be an interior design bonanza, plus you may win over people like @ChrisJ

And using the rad as energy storage, in my view, this is something lot of us here talk about being wasted when talking about boiler cycling on steam due to high pressures, oversizing, and various other balancing issues that cause the condition. You solved it by turning the rad into thermal storage device. Brilliant. Man, I wish I thought of it... I guess building my own pcs over the years should have given me a clue....

Cheers to you!

PMJ

> @RadiatorLabs said:
> PMJ - actually, to date, our customers have been the buildings themselves. We haven't sold a single unit to an individual tenant yet. Value to building owners is fuel savings (our NYSERDA project showed 34% and ~40% savings in our first two buildings, controlling for HDD), and the tenant comfort, alerts, and analytics (harder to put a firm number on) are bonus.
>

Oh. I see I was on the wrong page about who the customer is. I do see how this would have a place in apartments given the huge access problem the landlord has. The product both mitigates the losses associated with his existing system component failures and tells him exactly where they are. Very good.

Would you be willing to share how many units are installed out there and what the anticipated average life is?

RadiatorLabs

Hi PMJ - absolutely. Right now we have about 1300 radiators under management (RUM!), and are expanding to about 1500 more this winter.

Average lifespan is limited by the only moving part - the fan - which has a mean lifetime to failure of 8-10 years. And, of course, replacing a fan is easy and inexpensive. The enclosure itself (galvanized steel) is as immortal as any cover, depending on how it's treated.

BobC

@RadiatorLabs Interesting about the fan being the only major point of failure in your product. I spent most of my life in the power supply business and the rest of it maintaining sorting machines at the post office.

One thing became clear, AC fans are much more reliable then DC fans of the same construction. The DC fans are of variable quality and any manufactures MTBF ratings are wishful thinking at best.

I've seen hundreds of DC fans just stop, the semiconductors seemed very susceptible to failure. AC fans would eventually get bearing problems but most just kept of working (a bit noisy). A lot of these fans had been running for decades by the time they died. The DC fans in servers were good for 3-5 years before they bit the dust.

Be wary of any DC fan with a name you don't recognize and if the fan is someplace where it sees a lot of heat decent bearings help a lot.

Bob

RadiatorLabs

Hi Bob,

Absolutely - we use what is essentially the Rolls Royce of computer fans - all from a manufacturer you would recognize, and we only use those with ball bearings (as opposed to the new vapo and other bearings that some fans have to reduce cost). We also place the fan so that it's self-cooling when the fan is on - all to maximize lifetime.
-Marshall

Koan

@RadiatorLabs, very cool stuff. I can see where integrating with @Sailah 's trap monitoring for 2-pipe would be a real win. The tech he uses to detect trap failure is awesome!

VDBLU

@radiatorlabs, Have you thought of using a hinged lid on your cover to turn the radiator into a convector? You might be able to eliminate the fan and make a stand alone device using a wax motor to open and close the lid. You wouldn't get the nifty analytics though.

ChrisJ

VDBLU said:

@radiatorlabs, Have you thought of using a hinged lid on your cover to turn the radiator into a convector? You might be able to eliminate the fan and make a stand alone device using a wax motor to open and close the lid. You wouldn't get the nifty analytics though.

I like the idea though am not sure how a wax motor would be used there.

I pictured a device that lowers and raises the top cover, or, opens and closes vents in the top based on room temperature. It'd still need to be electric.

@RadiatorLabs
Can you tell us what the R value of a Cozy is? Just out of curiosity?