75. Connect Your Boiler Room with Jonathan Sanchez

June 30, 2026

Eric Johnson and Jonathan Sanchez with Miura America explore the evolving landscape of boiler technology, training, and industry challenges. Jonathan shares insights on automation, skill gaps, and the future of HVAC and boiler systems to keep uptime as high as possible.

If you have any questions about Miura Connect, please contact your local Miura America representative.

Episode Transcript

Eric Johnson (00:51)
what have you been up to in the last six months?

Jonathan (00:53)
Gosh, I think lots happened in six months. we've done a few things with Miura Connect. So we're able to run it on a Raspberry Pi now. So trying to get some variability in running our monitoring software on other equipment. we were able to

Get some installations done at some pretty large facilities. One of was a a university in North Carolina. So we're working towards finishing that one up. And there's some there's some stuff happening behind the scenes, but I think you know that we're we're partnering with our

sibling company Cleaver Brooks and some items. So we're hoping to hopefully in the near future come out with something that we're collaborating with them on a on a unified platform. So

Eric Johnson (01:43)
An auto commissioning boiler. That's I all these manufacturers they're like, look at this new cool thing, look at this cool thing. I'm like, until you have auto commission and it sets everything up perfectly, I don't really care. I I wanna plug in my combustion analyzer, the combustion analyzer goes back to it and it will just slowly step through the curve, it'll set up all the settings, it'll be a quick start.

Jonathan (01:46)
That would be great.

Eric Johnson (02:10)
Yeah, and it takes the human element out of it, you just have to monitor it. And until that happens, I think we're severely underestimating what we could do.

Jonathan (02:22)
Do do you think the law would allow for that? Something like that

the auto commissions and

Eric Johnson (02:28)
You know, with all the systems, you know, y you have all these like parallel positioning trainings and everything, and they're like one to two days, maybe three days, but if you don't see the system in the next week to a month, you're gonna forget everything and be lost. And there's four hundred settings for everything.

Yes. Can you train people to really learn these systems really well and set up well? Yes. But it should literally walk you through of like, hey, do this. Hey, do this. These are the twenty five settings you have to set and this is how you want to set and like give you instruction and like a quick start guide and everything. nobody has a system like that. because right now

a lot of the training and I was talking with Fireye about this is a lot of the training is well we just need to train more and people just need to get better. And it's like okay, but like at a certain point you're just gonna have to realize that

Whoever sells the system that the average HVAC technician can understand versus a seasoned boiler person, not everybody works on boilers twenty four seven and there's a lot of resistance towards parallel positioning only because not that it's bad, but

Companies don't sell it because they don't have anybody that can work on it. And if you're an average HVAC tech and you see boilers for six months out of the year, it's gonna be hard to learn any parallel positioning system enough to commission one and to troubleshoot it competently versus a system that

hey, we're gonna make this as easy as possible and we're gonna totally rethink about how we go about instead of a four hundred settings list and menu and this and that

where you know, it'll be just commission the burner guide and you know, you just go through and just answer yes or no questions. Hey, what do you want for this? What do you have for this? And the and you just go through and you know, maybe it's on your phone and you know it beams over to the the controller and like there's so many ways to go about it versus what we're doing now and

It's easy as a product to say, Well, people just need to learn it better. We just need more training. I've learned

that sometimes training isn't the answer. You know, the number one step for safety is you know, instead of saying, well, people just need to be more safe, it's well, can we put in more engineering controls? And if you can put in an engineering control versus that's like step one versus P P E

The engineering control is always the preferred way to go because, instead of saying, Well just wear your fall protection, well we're gonna just make it so that people can't fall, so we're gonna put in a a railing or whatever. Same thing with a burner system or any kind of boiler system is

instead of saying well people just need to get more training, you just say, Well, how do we make this so that the average HVAC technician can understand this and that so average HVAC mechanical companies can sell this and feel comfortable with this versus you just need more training and become more experts because HVAC technicians, they're out of bandwidth. You can't be an expert on everything.

If you're a general mechanical doing general mechanical service, you're trying to learn thirty different platforms of manufacturers from air handlers, chillers, boilers, all this stuff, you'll never learn it all. And you'll have resistance to sales based on what your people can sell. I don't know, do you agree with that?

Jonathan (06:06)
think you're absolutely right.

Absolutely right. Yeah. I'm running into that with the skill sets that that we're asking candidates and employees to bring.

We want you to be water chemistry experts, burner experts, and on top of that, yeah, boiler networking controls, and then slap my portion on it, right, which is monitoring. Now we're asking them to be pretty tech savvy. We're asking them about IP addresses, like, hey, we're setting up modbus, we're setting up BACnet, or, you know, we're trying to set up a cellular signal so that we can get data out to the server. And they're like

Come on, man. I just I just work on boilers. Now I've gotta be a computer scientist to to get these features out and I've walked through like like home automation stuff that seems to be pretty simplified, but it's also not doing as much, right? Light on, light off, color on, blue, red, right? If we can get to a point where, you know, we like you're saying, you can walk them through a

a guide on how to set it up very picture based or video based, then I think we can get a lot more onboarding. A lot a lot of people can can get on on the train and say, Yeah, you know, I can stand behind this 'cause I know I can do it. Whereas we make these systems somewhat complex and, you know, I'm in it every day, but the person who's seeing it for the first time's like trying to learn it at

Sprinter's pace. It's like, hey, it's there, we're installing it, we gotta go now. So yeah, we're running into that that skill set not being at least in the boiler industry, you know, that we're missing some of that and

trying to recruit for that makes it more difficult 'cause you're you're almost leaving candidates behind because they can't pick up the maybe more technical or or computer aspect of it. 'Cause as we move towards that, you know, some of the best technicians that we have are from a previous generation, let's say.

we don't want to lose their skills, but we also need to give them more so that we can we can do the things that we're asking them to do.

Eric Johnson (08:27)
I don't I don't think it's something unique to the boiler industry though. I think a lot of industries want very rounded people,

I feel more is asked of people because if you just think about the boiler, say you just work on boilers and if somebody has a boiler, you'll show up i as a contractor. So you gotta learn everything from nineteen sixties technology to twenty twenty-six and in between.

And when boilers were just we have some mechanical linkage and the flame safeguards are a bunch of mechanical relays and all this stuff. Yes, it's a little bit more complicated. You don't have anybody to call and everything, but like the world was slower and everything, but now it's we have all this

engineering and IT and everything, but it's by the way, you also have to be good mechanically and understand fluid dynamics and you know, understand electrical. So like working on boilers it's difficult because you're trying to be a part time IT, part time electrician, part time you know, fluid person

combustion and I feel like I know nothing and all I do is boilers but the average person in the market is somebody who's a HVAC technician who works on everything. Like if I feel like I know nothing, how are they supposed to know anything? And that's the issue with

Well I like technology and I think technology is great, just 'cause your engineering team can dream it up and they understand it doesn't mean that the average person is gonna be able to understand it because now unless they constantly work with that system

There's gonna be resistance no matter what and you're gonna have issues. And I I think all manufacturers are seeing that on all levels, outside of even boilers you can dream up these amazing air handlers, but you put on all these variable speed fan walls and everything and all these controls

the equipment's only as good as the commissioning. And if it's not basically perfect for what the manufacturer wants, customer's gonna be disappointed in the results. And there's a there's a huge gap. I don't I don't know how to cover it. I mean, you got any suggestions?

Jonathan (11:00)
I think I'm in a in a in a slightly different situation where like you know, I started with Miura back in in two thousand twelve and I have only worked on Miuras So like I I don't have the the vast knowledge of many other

boiler manufacturers, you know, if you were to put plot me in front of someone else's burner, you know, I'd have to I'd be that guy on the phone trying to get get somebody on the other line or go through their manuals and try and figure out, okay, where do I need to poke and prod. On the other hand, having only worked on Miuras I have that benefit of being able to to get down into the weeds and and

really understand like that product, right? And and it's a unique situation in that we don't really have these like specialists in one manufacturer. You have to you have to be that jack of all trades, right? So and you're exactly right with the technology, right? We had a previous monitoring system. I mean it's we actually still have we still maintain it, it's legacy equipment, but it runs it sends data through a a fifty six K modem, right? So that

old

fax modem that you would hear if you were receiving the fax or if you ever connected to AOL, right? They were using that to transmit data back and forth. So not only do you have to be a boiler expert, now you gotta be like a telecom guy. And then we've we've since upgraded. We've got cellular, we've got internet now, but you know, back in the eighties and nineties that was the that was the hurdle. We were trying to get people to to get on board with with

modems, fifty six K modems and dialing in and and hearing that that fact sound, that that screech to to have the handshake. So I think it's it's almost like it's on replay, right? If if you don't learn from history you're doomed to repeat it. But you know, like you say we we are moving significantly faster. and I guess generating interest in these fields in in the younger generations too. Like I came on when I was

twenty two, like right out of school. that's a challenge 'cause what does everyone want to be now?

Eric Johnson (13:21)
YouTuber.

Jonathan (13:22)
YouTuber, yeah, influencer. what else was the other thing? I guess you can't really be an AI, but you can be an AI user. Yeah, and and that's been, you know, kinda flooding the industry as well. It's like how can we use AI tools to

to not only maybe teach but to support like I had to create an agent for for maintenance support that was like, Hey, we're gonna load up a bunch of manuals, yeah, we're gonna train it and we're gonna ask you guys to try and use it to see if we can get usable answers off of this thing. It's been internal mostly, but deploying that to a a platform was something that we were asking, you know, is this is this what people want? Do they wanna talk to a computer or

they want to talk to somebody, I've noticed that it at least when I was doing my support role in maintenance support was a lot of people wanted email. Some people wanted calls. Like, you know, it wasn't it was very skewed towards like everybody liked the email and then

younger generations too, they were really into like texting or or messaging, right? They they didn't really want the whole long format of an email. They just wanted to get a quick answer from somebody. So I think you have to hit it from from a few different angles. But most people did not like chat bots. They were that's not what they wanted, even though that we felt that the industry was like pushing us that way.

Eric Johnson (14:51)
everybody's like AI this, AI that and right now AI is pretty much text response answers and everybody's like, Well, you know, you can get the answer to anything you want and I'm like, Well, yes, but we've had the internet for probably since two thousand fifteen it's been pretty good, as far as

Everybody basically has a smartphone and you know, the internet's come a long way. But since twenty fifteen, you could basically get any answer you wanted, yet you still have people calling tech support or emailing for answers that are really readily available online or even in a manual that is in front of them. this belief that just because people can get the answer

Or you expect them to know how to get the answer that they're gonna get the answer is false. Like just 'cause AI exists doesn't mean people are gonna use it. And also when it prints out a text wall to you, a lot of people just say, like, you know, they just like look at it and go like I am not reading that. Like I don't know what this means. I just want to call somebody and have them tell me the answer.

I believe having the data available if somebody's seeking it, I think that's a positive. But to say that like, you know, human nature is gonna change and that people are going to all of a sudden be more so self sufficient because now this information is being presented in a new format, I think is completely false. you'll have adopters, but

if they didn't go on the internet or go in a manual to search for the answer, they're not gonna go to AI to search for the answer either.

Jonathan (16:37)
No, absolutely. Yeah, I I ran into many similar situations like that where it I was in a I was emailing somebody back. They had asked for something, I forget what. But I sent back the manual. I said, Here's the manual And then very quick soon after they were like, I didn't ask you for the manual.

I asked you for the solution. So I'm like, okay, fair point. Like, yeah, I know I just sent you about two hundred pages worth of something, but so we went down and, you know, I said, okay, on this page and on this paragraph, let's try this. And then we can go from there. But no, you're absolutely right. I think you can have somewhat of like information overload where

You don't know where to begin, I guess. And in that aspect I think it could maybe point you in the right direction, the AIs at least, right? But yeah, they I I think people want guidance, not necessarily just information for information's sake. and with training too, like, we had

different versions of a training program where we would bring people for a week and just plop in a classroom for, four days, throw power points at expect to retain it and then have like a day of hands on. we have switched that around where we're doing

more web based, self paced, you know, slideshows and videos, but when they come to our facility, they actually are hands on most of the time. Like we're if we're there, we're on the equipment. So I think repetition definitely drives efficiency on that. So like actually

s being in front of the thing you're talking about helps as opposed to just seeing it on a on a board or on a PowerPoint or in a video. So we've been slowly migrating towards actual instructor led and hands on training where, you know, you're guided through the the process, not necessarily just shown the process and expecting you to retain it.

Eric Johnson (18:41)
so you graduate college, I think, right?

Jonathan (18:45)
Yeah, so I'm originally I I live in Georgia now, but I'm originally from California. I went to University of California, Irvine, and my background I had I changed my major a few times. I thought I was gonna be a physics major, then aerospace engineering and then I landed with mechanical engineering with

specialization in mechanical design. So coming out of college, I was I was a waiter at a restaurant, so I had done that job throughout, you know, earning earning cash to to help pay for school. I graduated in two thousand ten, so it was right after the two thousand eight stuff. So landing a job was kinda hard. about a year after I found my first job in I would say like a you know

professional sense where I worked in for a company that did home automation hardware and software so we would install keypads, dimmers, switches and remotes, stuff with dual band where it could broadcast not only over the air but on the power line. This this company utilized an interesting communication method.

You know, there's alternating current in your house, right? Just single phase, one twenty, sixty hertz. Well, at the zero crossing, when there was zero volts on the line, it would actually transmit data through your the copper wires in your house. And that's how it communicated to other switches that weren't wireless. So at the zero crossings, they would send little packets of data. And

In order to strengthen the signal, what they would do is like they would echo. So if if one device heard that message, it would echo it and they would they would hop it three times. After the third hop, it wouldn't echo anymore. So it could get to a device on your house, you know, on the other side of your house if you needed to. They also had wireless. We we we had to plug in like little wireless access points if you wanted to hit remotes and stuff, but that was that was my introduction to like wiring.

electrical signal communication. Worked there for about six months and a classmate of mine reached out to me. He's like, hey do you want to come work for Miura? And I was like, sure. I didn't know what it was. I didn't really do much research into it, but I quit my job and then I was like I had to wait about three months to go through the interview process. But finally I was hired in about

my first day was February thirteenth of two thousand twelve. I drove up from Orange County to Hayward, California and it's about four hundred miles. Worked there for about a year doing field engineering, so basically started with like water sampling, checking boiler water chemistry, trying to figure out what all that meant. We would take all the samples and take the measurements and get an understanding of okay, these values are good, these values are not.

That led to learning how to inspect the boiler, doing what we call a basic or an external inspection, which is mostly gas and combustion tuning, testing of safeties, to an internal inspection where we're, you know, the taking apart the pressure vessel, opening the burner. And then eventually that led to like commissioning new boiler rooms and equipment. So

Did that for a while, lived in Utah briefly, moved back to Southern California, did that for a few more years and then in 2017 ish, I took on a a maintenance support role. And that was

primarily to, you know, help develop training. that was one of the primary goals, but also to support our technicians throughout the US as well as our our rep network so that the reps that did service we would provide sort of a point of contact for them so they didn't have to message, you know, their local technicians that were also dispatched. So it kinda took a load off of them. Did that till about last

last year, almost about ten months ago. And while doing that, you know, we're learning how to set up our our networks, right? So our internal networks that the controller speaks to the boilers with, it speaks to the water softeners, our chemical doser,

water monitoring system. And so that got me the basis of understanding how to get like the boiler data to our monitoring point. So each branch had a computer where we could literally dial into computers that had a phone line. We were starting to migrate some to cell phone lines, and then eventually we have stuff that connected over the internet through a VPN, right? So

That kind of naturally led me to when we debuted in Miura Connect, I had a curiosity about that and it sort of landed in my lap in that I had to support it and commission them. But I wasn't in the development of it. And we were reporting kind of bugs back up, you know, up the chain and and getting them resolved and eventually the position became available for

product manager. So I threw my hat in the ring and I've been our our Miura Connect product manager since October of twenty-five. So we've done some some neat things with it, but you know there's a lot a lot more to do. So that's sort of my my arc there.

Eric Johnson (24:17)
So you got a mechanical engineering degree and you know, you get on with this boiler company what was the training like 'cause I think a lot of people in the boiler industry it's it's hard to remember what day one is l like or even year one.

of like there's so much assumed knowledge that you think is basic for somebody that's coming from an outside and even, you know, somebody with a mechanical engineering degree, like, yeah, you're familiar maybe with like what steam in a boiler is, but all the terms and everything, you know, you s at a certain point in time you still have to learn everything. People aren't just born with knowledge. what did that process

look like and what do you think worked and didn't work?

Jonathan (25:07)
it's funny that you say that 'cause I don't even think I had seen a boiler but for maybe one time when we had a a central plant tour of the university p from one of our classes. I couldn't even tell you what it was now it it's been so long, but I actually do remember day one and it was

at a like meat processing plant they make they made sausages. So like literally I got to see how the sausage was made on day one. I was like, what did I get myself into? You know, you have your degree, you think you're gonna be like working on CAD or something. You know you don't really know what the jobs are, but you know, day one they they hand you like the smock, the hair thing and a wrench and they say, Alright, let's get to work. Alright, okay. originally the

The training was very, you know, hands on, you know, OJT on the job training, right? So a lot of it was just me shadowing a technician who had been there just a little bit longer than me and was showing me what he had just learned. So eventually we've you know, we were sent to our headquarters for what we were calling at the time like factory training. We stayed there for

Depending on when you came in, sometimes it was three weeks, sometimes it was like one or two weeks. But it was classroom with, you know, a a culmination of hands on. You would pick a a boiler and you would do an inspection on it, they would sort of grade you on that and there was a a written portion too. Very open ended, short answer. they wanted to see how you retain the knowledge, not necessarily that you could

pick the right, you know, multiple choice. So the that made scoring a bit difficult, but that was a lot of the training was, you know, you're seeing it for the first time. You have someone who had been there a little bit longer than you. the one thing I would say about Miura that they did is because it was, you know, it wasn't technology necessarily created here. We we we imported some of the

controls from Japan, so they would bring advisors from Japan to instruct us. So one of my best teachers actually is Takahiro Kondo, or Chuck, we called him Chuck. But he taught me how to work on boilers with very little English. You know, it was actually interesting, like we didn't speak each other's language yet he was probably one of my greatest teachers. So

Boiler learning transcended our language, I guess, you know. A lot of no's. That's how you found out what not to do. But you know, he would he would demonstrate by doing, even nonverbally, he could transfer that knowledge to me and Yeah, was able to to learn a lot from from him. And we spent probably a f a few years together in Orange County, him and I along with other technicians, and you know, he he imparted a lot of

of his wisdom, his experience on us in the in the region,

Eric Johnson (28:20)
would you say doesn't work or what what should companies avoid when starting somebody off who is brand new?

Jonathan (28:29)
I think they should avoid assuming that people know the jargon right off the bat. I mean there's so many acronyms and words, specialized phrases that maybe like just your boiler uses or or our industry uses. it's one of the things where

I've noticed that the people who've had sort of the most success with it, they have a a mentor or somebody who's there with them shadowing them for ninety days, let's say, or even longer. But what I was would say to try and avoid is like

I personally think that when you hire someone and then put on an island, like if they're a satellite office or if they're just a guy in a truck who dispatches from his house, like that's that's really difficult for that person to feel connected A to the company, but like B, they almost they're always always unaware of some of the resources or all of the resources that are available to them because they are on that island.

just because we need coverage in a certain area. you know, I think it's almost a disservice to just kinda throw someone out there and say, okay, you're covering the entire state of wherever. And you know, we'll send someone down every once in a while to help you cover, but you know, I think you should have a bit more structure before you put somebody out there, in isolation to try and cover an area even though

you know, the need is there. yeah, not not leaving them alone. That's probably one of the biggest things I would say is let them know they've got support, coverage and a whole host of resources behind them before, you know, we're we're sending out and saying, Okay, you're the face of the company in this whole state

Eric Johnson (30:20)
the onboarding process I found is not great. A lot of contractors or I guess companies in general, you're lucky to have two days onboarding, if that of like scheduled. Like, hey, this is what we're doing and it really needs to be like six months, especially if they're brand new. 'Cause it's

There's this belief that, well, it's on the job training. We'll just send this guy out with this other experienced person and they'll just learn from him. But I I've been doing a lot of thinking on this. And while everybody's like, well, these experienced people need to be nicer to these people. They need to be more understanding and all this stuff. It would be like sending somebody out who's never played football with a pro football player. And they're like, hey, practice together. and by the way, you need to win a game together as well.

if you send somebody out that's not experienced, you can't expect the same schedule and timeline as two experienced people working together to get the job done. But it's also if the person is brand new, even if they have a mechanical engineering degree, the gap nowadays with people between like what people are growing up with, like if if people are growing up and not turning a screwdriver or knowing what an adjustable wrench is.

till they're in their twenties. And if you start off in the boiler world, and if you're one of those people of like, I'm gonna get into this, and then and then you work with a guy who's fifty who, you know, was working on his dad's car when he was seven, the gap is so wide and the assumed knowledge is so wide that they're gonna get extremely frustrated pretty quick with the new person because they're like, go grab this tool. And the and the new person won't even know what the basic tool is.

But now the experienced person will easily get frustrated because how do you not know this? And then the new person will also get frustrated because they'll feel dumb of like, well, I'm just supposed to know all this information. But like the gap is just so wide between the two knowledge levels that I I think if you're bringing somebody brand, brand new on and they're they just don't have any experience and you have to understand that.

growing up like that's experience. Like, hey, like, do you have your own set of tools? If they say no, you have to treat it totally different versus, yeah, I work on my four wheeler on the weekends. that may be a whole different hiring process, if you're having to teach somebody the name of tools, you have a a very wide

gap to cover before they even start getting good at like understanding what's going on in a boiler room. And a lot of employers are not set up to cover that gap. And it's a sink or swim gap. And they just expect people to figure it out. And a lot of times they don't and the new person gets frustrated and then they quit.

And they think, well, this isn't for me and whatever. But it could be for you. It's just there's the not right support system. I don't think the trades in general have developed a support system to cover that gap because I don't know what's changed. You know, I don't like to blame like all this like whole industry trends or like, you know, young people don't want to work and stuff. But like it is true that

We went from America that everybody grows up with tools fixing their own stuff to now people sub that all out and people are living very isolated lives. So there's a lot of hands on learning that goes into a childhood that children are not getting anymore that the skilled trades took for granted.

And now they're trying to train people that don't have those skills. And I don't know if employers can overcome that gap. They just have to find people who grew up a certain way, which is a totally different way of interviewing. But to have a onboarding, I w I would agree with you that the having a mentor, having somebody to like, hey, this is your point of contact is not even like hey, this is your boss, but like this is the person that's gonna be like checking in on you or

Like, hey, when you have a question, like who is familiar with your situation and not just, yeah, we have a whole team of people, call whoever you want because now, you know, if you think about it, if you're the new guy and you're calling some engineer with thirty years experience and they pick up the phone and th they don't know what you know and what you don't know, and now they're like, Well, go to this menu, go open that valve and you're like, Well, I don't know, what is a valve? What is a gate valve? What is that? What is feed water and

They're like, wait, you don't know this? Like how how long have you been here? it's easy to get frustrated on that end when when the gap is just so wide in knowledge. And that's I don't know, but companies gotta they have to figure out how to cover that gap 'cause you can't just I see a lot of online about people saying, Well, this is how it should be. Well, I don't care how it should be. this is how it is.

And we either have to adapt to it or we don't. And the companies that win are gonna be the companies that adapt. And like what I was talking about earlier is how do we make our product as easy as it can be versus well, we just need to make smarter consumers. Cause it's you can maybe make ten percent smarter and they will achieve that.

But if like Apple just said, well, you know, in order to use the iPhone, people just need to be smarter. We're not going to make it intuitive. It's not going to be successful. Same thing with any burner control or boiler control. If it's not intuitive, yes, you can learn it, but you're not going to have great success and people are not going to be super comfortable with it.

Jonathan (36:29)
Yeah, absolutely. to your earlier point too, like, growing up, you know, my dad and his brothers they had a

transmission shop in Orange County. So shout out on my show transmissions in Orange County. I would spend my breaks going with my dad to these places and he's be he would literally show me, he's like, Alright, this is a transmission, this is a distributor, this is the engine, this is and then once we got into it he's like, This is the planetary gear, the sun gear, this is first gear, reverse and you know, he's showing you all the all the different things. This is the valve body.

all that was ingrained in me at an early age, maybe influenced me to take the path that I eventually did. I think yeah, growing up with yeah, having someone in the household guiding you too is definitely a plus because it it points you in the right direction. And to your point too on, you know, the guy with thirty years experience,

Being able to identify

teachers and instructors and mentors as opposed to the person with most experience 'cause that's not always the the same guy. You know, the the guy with thirty years experience probably just wants to keep his head down to his job. Maybe not necessarily bring on anybody or he's not the best teacher, but his knowledge has to go to somebody that can teach. I think the ability to teach is is a whole different skill set than being able to to do the job. So

although the information is is there, being able to translate it to somebody, right? I think we talked about it when you were you were at the open house, right? You have the different style learners, the visual, the audio and the the doers. Everybody learns a little differently, but you gotta be able to to have a blend of all three to be able to effectively communicate to

to new hires and things like that 'cause I think also on on the hiring too. managing the expectations of a candidate, right? I mean the need for employees is so high that do we need to be as as restrictive? Like I I feel like we may turn away good candidates just because they don't check check the right box. Like, hey, if someone's willing to to learn, I think we can work with them. but

I could teach people how to boil water and how to how to do this other thing. But if they come in with maybe more experience and aren't willing to learn then that's that's doing yourself a disservice at the hiring stage too. So a little bit of both.

Eric Johnson (39:14)
It's it's hard to quantify those soft skills of are you willing to learn, are you willing to take initiative? And that's it's really what it is, is are you willing to figure out a problem? Because I just posted this on LinkedIn, but like no amount of training classes can

gets you to a point where you know everything and you will always feel like you don't know something, especially when you walk into a boiler room and you will always feel uncomfortable with certain situations of, Well, I don't really know. And if you just say, Well, I need more training or I need to call somebody or somebody else needs to do this, like you're the wrong person for the job. Or you have to change your mindset because no amount of training classes will ever prepare you for every single situation.

unless you literally work in one boiler room and you learn everything top down and spend thirty years doing one thing. But that is not the case typically with most people. And you have to be adaptive. And if you say no to opportunities more than say yes, employers are gonna struggle to find you useful. But on the employer side

It's and it's it's hard. It's a big investment. You need people now, but you really have to give a two to three year runway and have metrics along that way of like, hey, are we making progress? Is this person turning out? And no matter what, if they are not improving, you either have to

do an internal look of say like hey like is this us or is this the person? Like are you know like they could be a great person but they just may not be cut out for the job that you hired for. So you can either pivot or you gotta let go. And I see a lot of companies just hold on to people that are probably not cut out for the job, but an extra body is what they need. And it's easy in the short term, but in the long term there's all kinds of team dynamic issues and stuff that

You know, you invest in these people and well I've I've have five years of ex experience but they barely know what's going on 'cause they weren't onboarded and trained correctly and or they just th they have a very low ceiling and the employer just doesn't want to admit it because they can't get people to come on. But like I I think the whole tr hiring issue is just marketing. Nobody knows about what you do.

if I have never heard of your company and I am actively seeking boiler companies and I am constantly on the internet and on social media and looking at boiler contractors and boiler manufacturers and everything, and I have never heard of your company, how do you expect some mechanical engineering college grad to have heard of your company and apply? So just because

you're not getting good quality applicants doesn't mean they're not out there. You have to be visible and you have to change your approach of, well, you know, people come to us. We don't need to market. Customers call us. We have plenty of work. It's like, right, great. You're not marketing for you. You're marketing for people to work for you. And it's like, well, why would I come to work for you? And that's I think a big shift in

contracting, even HVAC in general, of just there's so many jobs out there that employers really have to think differently of why would somebody come work for us when they're twenty two years old? And are we showing them the the the runway or career? Or even 18 because a lot of people are like, college bad and it's like okay, great. But

To somebody who just graduated high school, do they look at your company and say, Hey, I can make a career out of this? Or is this I'm gonna get stuck in a twenty-two dollar an hour job and this is gonna be a career ender? I think a lot of employers and people underestimate, like college still has this enamor to it because it's

four more years of guided pathway learning. Whereas with an employer, unless it's laid out perfectly on paper, you're basically just trusting your boss of like, hey, I'm gonna get a job and you I'm gonna like learn something, move up the ladder and you guys are gonna teach me stuff, right? And of course every interview they're like, yeah, right, of course. And then day one, they're like, I don't know, go here's your boiler and go figure it out.

You don't know what tools are? Well go figure it out. And yeah, yeah, and that's you know, read the manual and call us if you need anything. And that's you can't do that. That's it's not a not a productive conversation on both sides. So

Jonathan (44:04)
Here's the manual.

Eric Johnson (44:20)
Only been with Miura, so you eventually made it over, you moved east a little bit, and what do you how do you how do you think the the the boiler market is changing from now to fifteen years ago of trends of what is popular, what is not popular? Do you think it's growing, shrinking?

What do you think the market's gonna look like in the next ten to twenty years?

Jonathan (44:46)
Yeah, so from when I started and and coming from California, emissions was like the big thing. Efficiencies, emissions and like the utilization of the resources, right? Fuel, gas, propane or oil not even oil, you can't really burn oil over there, but you know, how much water are you using, how much water are you draining? So that was that was a big driver of of

the industry in California 'cause everybody was looking to reduce their footprint, their emissions and, you know, their the utilization of of water, right? 'Cause I don't know if you know but like in California it almost sounds like every once in a while you hear like, and they're running out of water. Farmers don't have water, they can't irrigate or they're not given the quantities they need.

they're arguing over the Colorado River and who gets how much right now, so you know, being efficient in those areas was was a benefit for us to be able to, you know, enter the market. then that being said, having been in it, right, we've learned how to boil water, we've kinda done it pretty efficiently, small footprint. The thing that I've noticed, at least from my point of view, is like,

Connectivity. So because of the reduced workforce and the ability to get even trained operators, like not just service techs, but people operating the equipment. they've had to do more with less. So I've seen, you know, operators with licenses that, you know, they're over there

Recording things manually, right? Like just walk over to the boiler with a pen and paper and writing down the number that they see on the equipment and then, you know, moving on to the next one, the next one, the next one, then they gotta go work on the compressors and the chillers and conveyors and whatever else. I think the monitoring, which is like what I'm working in, has definitely driven some some adoption. Like every every boiler room that I'm

you know, involved with now. It's like, hey, I've gotta be able to be in my boiler room without actually being there. I need to be able to see it somehow. Whether that is through remote monitoring, like the serv subscription that we provide or the service that we provide or even just locally, like I need to get the data from my equipment to a centralized location 'cause

Most people aren't sitting there watching their pot boil, right? They they they've got other things to do. But they need to be able to have access to to logging that with a computer, not with some dude that you pay, you know, time and a half to two to write it on pen and paper 'cause, you know, he's working the first and part of the second shift, so

like I said, driving not just resource efficiency but like humans as of the resource people, they've gotta be able to do more with less and making them more efficient so that they can

not have to hire as many people. I don't know, that's that's a weird way of putting it, but w having to do more with less, right? Having to having to be able to like make that person almost everywhere at once. because of the the level I have I could see every alarm that comes in. So I get many, many alarms and cautions every day and and

you know, I'm not in those boiler rooms, but I can see them. I know that those things happen and and we can dispatch accordingly, right? We can use the resources that we have locally to get out there. So other than that, not just on the communication side, but greenhouse gas reduction, renewables, those have been some pretty interesting drivers of the industry, right? We've got people kicking the tires around.

biofuels, digester gases and and being able to utilize those in times of low fuel availability. Like if they get curtailed, can they use something like a digester gas that they're making on site? electrification is another using

electricity to boil water. If you're small enough, I think that you can there's there's an a avenue for that. Mainly 'cause it's it's so expensive, but if you can handle peak loads or maybe some trim off the top if you can get some sort of subsidy with it then I would definitely see that being an advantage. And then the last one being

hydrogen. our parent company in Japan has a has a hydrogen boiler. It's pretty complex, right? I think you have to have like a nitrogen purge and the flame i sensors are different, the the the vessel is a little bit more robust, but and then the the fuel trains are are unique 'cause they have to contain hydrogen,

some companies that are producing hydrogen as a byproduct wanna be able to like capture that and utilize it as a fuel as opposed to just burning it or flaring it or, you know, I won't say venting it but they want to get some utilization of their byproduct. So, you know, being more efficient in utilizing something that's a product and using it as as a reactant so that they can get more bang for their bike, so to speak. So

Those those I think are the drivers of of the industry right now and people who can navigate between them, you know, provide a solution for electric or hydrogen, and you know, on top of that being all networked and communicating, those are those are large drivers in the industry. I don't know. What do you see?

Eric Johnson (50:34)
Yes, I agree. I was thinking about this the other day of I'm relatively young and in the last ten years it's amazing how quick we went from electrify the world and if we don't, the oceans are gonna rise and melt the ice caps and the world's gonna end to let's install

three hundred diesel fire generators and turbines for data centers that use ten million gallons a day of water. And so we went from that to in ten years. So it's interesting to see even at like AHR, the conversation between what

electrify the world was three or four years ago versus today. And I've seen a lot of I don't think it makes sense for the whole electrify conversation unless for some reason you get electricity super cheap or you have a super small application. And the ol all you know, the biogas and hydrogen, while I think they're great

Unless it's a byproduct, I don't think anything's replacing natural gas if we invest it and do all this stuff, like as long as the government regulations or if if there's government incentives to

install electric boiler and whatnot, like yeah, companies will do it, but if there's no incentive and it comes down to a pure business basis, natural gas is probably always gonna win. So it's how do we burn natural gas as efficiently as possible? And I think how we do that, like we've already basically, I mean we reached basically the physics limit, but the the actual engineering of it versus

the ongoing maintenance in a yearly time is much different and your boiler in engineering is only as good as the person who commissions it and the person who monitors it. And I think the connectivity in a boiler room, AI in a boiler room is probably the biggest unlock for companies. And it's not as you were saying, like hiring less people, like statistically with the

the current birth rate, there are less people to hire versus 50 years ago. it's not that, we're not able to hire more people. Like companies literally can't hire more people because they can't find them. So how do we still do the same operations with less people? Well, you have a connection connectivity system, but

I don't know what this looks like. And I know this isn't all AI, but

You instead of somebody trending your stack temp and saying like, hey, our stack times are slowly increasing, what causes that? Let me go look into that versus AI saying, Hey, your stack times are increasing, and five years ago it started increasing. I noticed notice this trend. Go check this, go check this. This is what happened five years ago. Because you may have totally different operators. So it's how do we connect everything in the boiler room so that it talks and that we have data.

That's actually useful because data is cheap, data is easy in 2026. Data that tells us something, tells you a story, and you can make business decisions off of is totally different because you have to have somebody that looks at that data. And well, I would love to say people with operator licenses or you know, people with training would know what to do. They don't always know what to do. And

you're relying on, you know, it's kinda like Key Man syndrome. You're relying on one to, you know, fifteen people to operate your boiler plant that spends two million dollars in gas every year. we should probably outsource as much as possible to technology

in order to get that extra five percent efficiency or two percent efficiency. But that ends up being a lot of savings. but you can like

buy a feed water tank from a manufacturer, buy a boiler from another manufacturer, buy a softener and like you can piece together a whole boiler room, but it's the connection between all the equipment and the connection to the rest of the plant or whatever and like making everything integrate, you gotta have a really good integrator. You gotta have somebody that knows controls and understands sequence operation, all that stuff.

Whereas if you get everything from the same manufacturer in your boiler room, it's been tested together, it connects, and that's what you've been working on. And like that there's so many benefits to it and the technology is there right now. Like it's possible, but it's just done so poorly right now. Purely, I think it's just from an education level of just

companies and people are just not educated enough in order to sell the benefits of hey, this is what a fully connected boiler room looks like and this is how it would save you money

if you're a average service company or mechanical contractor, it's like, Well, why would I install this or do this upgrade? And you have to have somebody that can say, like, hey, like this is why and you know, hey, we were gonna prevent scaling your boiler. That could cost you forty thousand dollar repair bill and like all this stuff, but it's having that conversation and having a pathway whereas like with Miura Connect

Like you've spent a lot of time putting it together and I want you to talk more about it what is the benefits of it having the water softener connected to the boiler and everything else of like one central system versus like a ton of different pieces that all connect together via mod bus or back net.

and the employer or the owner just sees like data points and then has to make sense of it. Like what is Miura Connect doing that can help owners? Because it's really you gotta think about like the whole reason is can the owner make sense of it and understand how their boiler room is operating versus you just gotta have an experienced boiler person in there to interpret the data because that's you're lost at that point.

Jonathan (56:59)
Yeah, so

Yeah, you reminded me of of kinda how this whole podcast between you and I got started, right? I think you and I got I I approached you at the ABMA booth at AHR. I'm like, Hey, you're that you're that boiler Boilearn and guy, you know, Boiler Wild. You're like,

Yeah. I'm like, hey, I'm I'm Jonathan, blah blah blah. And then we started talking about open house and then, you know, your experience with that, And you know, we got to swing open the doors and see that and and you got to hear about our w our president's vision and what we call it is

complete solution and life cycle partners. As and that's what we try and do with with our our customers and our reps, right? We don't want to just be the boiler person or the boiler supplier, right? We want to put together a a system for you from the water all the way out to the steam and then eventually eventually pass that, right? So we wanna be able to provide the the complete solution where it's you know, for lack of a better term, turnkey, right? You get

a boiler room from us. And in that aspect I think

You were able to see, yeah, the softener talks to the water hardness monitoring unit and it tells you whether it needs to do a regeneration or not. And if it misses it and there is hardness detected, that sends a signal to the boiler to mitigate that. How does it do that? You know, it opens the surface blow down and starts draining a bunch of the water so that it's it's trying to get rid of that mineralization that could accumulate on the tubes to scale, right? we have a chemical controller that's also

based on usage right so if the boilers are running at 100% the chemical dosing is at 100% if they're you know somewhere in a low fire capacity it's it's lead lagging the chemical pumps to slow down and not pump as much so and the controller itself has several different we call them control patterns but

Patterns that we can use to optimize like a boiler room. So you can have a light load situation, a heavy load. and then we we try and program that at the commissioning stage. Miura Connect ends up being like the the cherry on top, right? The last thing that is commissioned, like in my experience from commissioning boiler rooms,

Yeah, most of the time you have some general contractor telling you that you need steam and then you're kicking back to him and he's like, Well, you want steam, I don't even have the water softener pipe, so we need to get that going first. So, you know, once we bring on the system from softener to tank to chemical dosage and making sure water levels controlled in the tank, then we can get steam. Usually the last thing, even after the controls aspect, is the monitoring, 'cause they want to be able to at least

you know, live fire the boiler, run steam through a plant, and then they'll worry about monitoring sort of after the fact.

For me, yeah, I think that you know, Miura's vision is to provide that complete solution so that at least in that portion of the powerhouse, right, we can say that from here you can have a one centralized point with Miura Connect to access your boilers, your chemical dosage, your controller, your softener, your water monitoring, and then we send that

To either, like I said, this the server or to your building automation side from one point, right? If this were a piecemeal like you were talking about modbus you'd have have a modbus link or adapter or port at each device, right? And previously we've had to do that before Miura Connect we had some options where we would put a Wego Modbus

on each boiler and then we'd duplicate sensors. So we'd have two steam pressure sensors, several thermocouples that are measuring the same thing, one to our boiler, one for the modbus. Now we're able to pull that data off of the CPUs of the device. And

send it out as, you know, through one one channel, one tube essentially to to your site, whether that's the server or local modbus or backnet. So I think it does provide like, yeah, a single point in that you don't have to go and commission every single device as its own its own unit to to communicate. You know, it it's coming in through one one thing. And we're we're actively looking to

increase our product offering with what it's connecting to. So as we bring on new products, we're looking to do reverse osmosis here shortly. we have a new the nickname for it was like the on-site analysis kit. Even though it's not a kit, it's more of an assembly but

what it does is it it monitors the boiler water. So we were talking earlier about workforce, right? This thing actively monitors boiler water. Specifically it measures it's for us because we dose silica, it measures the silica and the pH of each boiler during the day. Right now it's in development. We have a

beta test on it at a customer site. We're gathering data, but that's also one less thing that a person has to do, right? They don't have to go and physically take the sample. We have a machine that that's automating that and making sure that it's sampling that periodically and then we're logging that on Miura Connect.

also looking like I said, constantly expanding product lines, finding ways that we can get

either some sort of communication to it if it's actively, you know, broadcasting or if we're using external signals such as just a duplication of sensors where we can add a dry contact or four to twenty milliamp sensor for s things such as a pressure sensor or flow meter and thermal couples. So, you know, we're actively looking at ways that we can expand even past or outside the boiler room and and extend our our offerings so that

we are putting together more. you know, previously we called it total solutions, now we're calling it complete solutions. So being able to to drive that, I think, has been our our president Paul O'Donnell's vision and he's been communicating that every time, you know, we we're interacting with perhaps customers or at our open houses, we're saying that this is what we're trying to do, this is how we're trying to do it. And

we wanna take you along on this journey. If you would allow us, we'll we'll provide you with as much as we can for for an offering.

Eric Johnson (1:03:45)
On the complete solutions connectivity, so for the owner side of things, so like once again, data is great, but if you don't know what to do with the data, it's basically just noise and you know, you end up with five to ten years of data and people are like, this flow meter broke. Well, we weren't even monitoring anyway, so we're not gonna fix it. So like is there is the is there the ability from an owner side of thing to like

monitor how much water they're using versus how much fuel they're using versus how much steam they're using and and have that data like re readily available where it like on a dashboard where it makes sense.

Jonathan (1:04:29)
Yeah, so we're working towards that. some of the features that you're talking about existed in in one of our previous monitoring systems. We called it SteamNet. it was local only, right? Once it was there, you know, you you had it at that one terminal and you could only really view it from there.

We're we're accessing now more of the CPU in in the boiler and the controllers themselves. So we'll be able to actually pull not just the the live monitoring but some of the archival data such as like running hours, cycle counts, things like that. Like we don't actually have to physically observe them, we can pull them off of the CPU now and we're we're looking to implement that as an update to to Miura Connect

I think that leads to, my next point, which part of CSLP was to instead of being, fix it when it breaks, emergency repairs, dispatch, overnight because it broke during third shift, right? We're looking at more of a predict and prevent method. So by accessing those cycle counts we want we're gonna be able to

Create flags or triggers that once something hits a certain point or criteria in terms of cycle count, we're gonna say, hey, based on the manufacturer's recommendation, half a million cycles for let's say a motor starter, we're gonna send you in it right now, it's a notification, so a text or an email, but it could even be just a a window on the on the

website that says, hey, this thing is past its cycle count. Maybe you should repair it, right? Sort of like the check engine, like you're gonna have a a yellow indication that hey there's something that needs to be done. big picture mode would be like, okay, not only that, that

Part needs to be replaced. Hey, do you want to buy it from us right here? You can click a button and then purchase it. One of the other items that we're doing to engage the customers is on the subscription side. We're looking to make it not just a data platform, but rather like a service platform. So we're engaging them with things like tech checks where our

support teams are making comments on the way that their system is running, they'll make suggestions that for feed water temperature or like, hey, you're misfiring a lot. you know, we think we should probably dispatch. We have a what we call it was a foresight tool or project foresight is what we called it, but the ability to not only see

upcoming service but to put tasks on on the calendar. So like hey I have my monthly visits that's gonna be visible. So you you'll have access to s essentially a service schedule, a PM schedule for your equipment. So typically you know with our service agreements we could have up to

several visits per month, right? A water sampling plus inspections or or as needed for emergency service. th those could be plot on a calendar as a through a task schedule so we could see what in the future we need to be doing for for that customer. So they're able to see that that we're there for them.

Eric Johnson (1:07:59)
With the remote monitoring, that's one that I think is highly underutilized and there's a lot of issues around it as far as just on the company side of misunderstanding of a lot of companies will just say, No, nothing remote, we don't want any of that and lock everything down, everything gets locked down and it's more of a training and systems.

of like, hey, like let's actually look at the business side of things because as labor costs have skyrocketed and the cost of travel and insurance and everything have skyrocketed, not every problem needs to be a service call. And I think a lot of

employers still think, hey, we have a problem in our boiler room. Needs to be a service call. Call the service company. Call the service company. And that's something where remote connectivity of hey, we can see your whole boiler room. Let's log in. And it could be just a fifteen minute login and then a phone call of

Hey, like I just logged in, go check this, we're seeing this issue, and like kind of walking through a couple pre diagnostic troubleshooting steps to avoid that expensive service call. And it also benefits the service provider, such as Miura or any other service company, because when you have remote connectivity.

It's not like all these service companies just have service techs just sitting by of

yeah, we've all these people available and just no work for Like companies are overloaded. So if you can reach out to that customer that's four hours away and get on a half hour, you know, diagnostic visit with them over the phone and be looking at their stuff on your computer, like there's so much benefit to that versus yeah, we gotta we'll g send a service tech out there. We don't have anybody available till next week and then you know, since it's four hours, you know, they'll be there

Wednesday afternoon and you know, it may take a day, may take two, or even, you know, they drive four hours out there and then they go, Yep, we're resetting the low gas pressure switch because it was tripped. That was the problem and you know, your operators couldn't figure that out. Well, here's a two thousand dollar bill.

And instead of, you know, now you can log in and just be like, Yeah, this is what it is. Go check this, go check that. There's a lot of benefits to that for the employer and also for the service companies, 'cause a lot of service companies yes, everybody loves to make money, but a lot of them feel bad for those dumb service calls where there's no easy way to bill.

for like, yeah, you just needed to push the reset, but you know, you were four hours away, so our tech had to drive four hours, push reset, drive four hours back. Like like there's real cost that and it costs employers a lot. So that's that's where I really see like remote connectivity. If you can make that data available to service companies and then to the owner where it makes sense and they understand what is going on in their boiler room

to the average person versus you have to be experienced to look at this data and interpret it. Like that's that's where AI could come in and teach of like, hey, this is how you interpret this data and this is what

we're seeing and all that stuff. Like there's there's just so many possibilities out there. And it's all possible now, but it's people say, well why doesn't it happen now? It's training, education, and it's also I think also think people are slow to change. But if you have a business case for it and the owner

understands that business case versus like just trust us or you know like well what is this connection thing that's you know a fifty thousand dollar line item or you wanna do what? Like yeah we haven't done that before. I don't understand that. Like we're not gonna do that. Like okay like let's understand the life cycle cost of this boiler room and understand like what this will look like over the next ten years versus the immediate cost now. And it just comes down I think to education of

Hey, you can avoid these expensive service calls and the expensive downtime through this connection versus somebody has to physically show up every single time and it's not always a legitimate service call.

Jonathan (1:12:47)
Yeah. We recently had our our rep conference and and we kind of focus grouped some of that with with not only the salespeople but we had service there as well. Sales was arguing about, you know, the the complexity and all the additional line items like you said for the monitoring. Right. And the first thing we had a sales guy and a service guy from our reps on the at the same table and he's like, Hey man, this thing

not only did exactly what you just described, saved them a four hour drive. but knowing, you know, just the service call usually something like, Hey, my boiler's broken, come fix it. I don't know what's wrong. I'm getting alarm seven and not even maybe identifying the the code. But this way he was able to review it, kinda do a a a rewind and look at

history and be okay, I can at least bring the right parts, right? That's another thing, is knowing you could dispatch them and be like, well I don't have it. Now I've gotta either overnight it and or have someone drive it out which is additional cost, right? So we've seen it from both sides where it's being used as a tool for exactly that to reduce some of that overhead.

So we have a we have a service agreement with one of our our contracts that to your point, right, most service companies are kinda like waiting, I think, for you to fail so they could be like, Yes, I get to retube your boiler now and then the chemical company's like, you know in the background going, Yeah, it's yeah, it's terrible that your tubes failed and there's there's really no liability.

from not failing I guess you know except that they're gonna be maybe switched out but our service contracts are sort of a fixed rate per boiler right so we'll cover parts labor travel we'll guarantee your pressure vessel you know with certain qualifiers right we would like our softener our chemical and monitoring

And that two thousand dollar service call now it's on us. It's on us to keep that boiler running. Because it's gonna cost us it's gonna take from our margin to dispatch somebody. So it's our in our best interest to keep that boiler running.

That's through our here maintenance contract, our our highest level one. We have others that are tiered and there's there's some other coverage, but we that's some of the you know, when we wanna say w we stand behind our product, we say, Hey, we'll we'll provide this additional coverage, this service agreement. You pay a fixed

predictable amount every year and we'll come out and it's on us to fix it. So obviously we're gonna try and minimize our our call outs, whereas maybe other companies are saying, Well, you know, that's a that's a two week job or, you know, I gotta

retube your boiler, or upgrade your burner. So like I said, I think there's there's benefit to that to to a company w that's looking at some monitoring where they're like, hey, what's the point? Why why am I gonna pay this much? You're you're barely here or, you know, but the point is that we're actually there to prevent the issue, not to fix it, right? You know, when it breaks. We're trying to get it so that it's always running and and keep that uptime.

And on the on the cybersecurity front, yeah, I see that too where a project will get put out and the scope is, you know, all this connectivity and then when once we get to the weeds of it, then we have IT departments that are like, Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. We've gotta fit you in somehow in our scheme where you're not

breaking our policy. So we try and provide options, right? We could be on their network. the boiler exists in its own sort of local, localized network. But if we want to get the data out, we we provide options. So the best, most secure is a hardwired option. That way they can control the traffic. We let them know what the endpoints are, where the data's supposed to go. But we can also provide

not just wireless through Wi Fi but a cellular option. So if for some reason their equipment needs to or the equipment needs to be air gapped from their network, we can have all that happening and then send it out and then keep keep that connection separate from any sort of

interconnections that they may want to have with their internal network. we wanna make it as flexible as possible when when putting them in so whether they want the control of having it on their network or having a a cellular option that that air gaps them.

Eric Johnson (1:17:18)
Do you have any other examples of how companies could save money through having a connected boiler room? obviously your examples will be with Miura, but a lot of this stuff can also apply to other connected boiler rooms, 'cause I see a lot of equipment is just going in and yeah, they may get some backnet connection to a

the rest of the building, but there's no nobody really enters the boiler room unless there's an alarm going off. So it's like what what other benefits could there be to just connected boiler room with data that companies can put a real business case to versus this feels good to have all this data.

Jonathan (1:18:03)
Yeah, absolutely. So from what I've seen, it's not just the data and and the monitoring that's nice. It's the ability to like we pair it with coverage. So we we say like we're on the line if anything fails, right? Parts wise or even the pressure vessel. And so we're sort of we're we're guaranteeing that uptime.

we're we're a bit unique in that we do provide sort of what we call MI or multiple installation option where if you have

say a specific steam load that you're trying to achieve, we'll get there with what we call n plus one or like one with redundancy. But in the event that you're maybe a single boiler operation, which we have several of even with Miuras

That boiler is a bottleneck in your production. And not only the cost of what it caught you know to get someone out there or the parts, but sort of the the hidden costs, and we end up hearing about this in places that are are those examples, those single boiler rooms or single point of failure, is that when that boiler goes down, it shuts down the whole plant. Right? Nothing can run that was based off of that heat load.

Whether it's their like for example in the laundry their washers don't run. Their their hot water tanks aren't getting warmed. If they use steam tunnels, those aren't getting steam. So you can shut down a facility that's not being necessarily maintained well. do you really want like a couple hundred dollar part shutting down a many thousands dollar

facility no so having that that I'll call it air cover right where you y not just your operators looking but the technicians that service that facility they're getting those notifications our representatives are getting those notifications they know ahead of time what's happening often sometimes before the operators on site do like hey I think we're gonna see something here pretty soon

we want to be able to mitigate the downtime for the customer. Yeah. That's that's unacceptable in many cases. And we have other installations, much larger ones that are you know, about ten boilers where they can they can run at maybe

eight boilers. But if they have seven boilers down, now that's affecting their production, their whole facility production. And you're talking about entire batches of their operation that could potentially go to waste and and dozens of people that are standing around not producing for them. So the hidden costs of of the operation I think are where we can provide the most value by keeping that system up and online.

It's not just the equipment but their processes and their their output. that's where I think you you have the benefit of maintaining a monitored piece of capital equipment is that that thing is making money for you and when it's not, it's costing you more than just the equipment and the service.

Eric Johnson (1:21:13)
Your boiler

room is not a cost to be cut, building owners. It is something to invest in. So many there's you know, there's a whole science to preventative maintenance, but there's this cycle of preventative maintenance where you get some maintenance manager, operations manager in a facility and they go, we're spending two million dollars a year doing whatever

Jonathan (1:21:21)
Absolutely.

Eric Johnson (1:21:39)
Let's cut it by twenty percent. And my bonus, you know, gets better with the less we spend. So they may go with a cheaper water treatment provider. Or even say, hey, we're gonna do water treatment in-house or

we're gonna extend our salt delivery to every other month instead of every month. And, you know, 'cause who needs a water softener? And we're gonna cut our boiler operators and our maintenance people are now gonna be working on the line instead of just solely in the boiler room and do all this stuff. And it there's this like cyclic cycle of you can cut from equipment and cut from what you're doing and you won't see the re repercussions

They are delayed and it may be six months, maybe a year, maybe five years, where I see it online all the time of like, we have this boiler and we're cutting open the Scotch Marine boiler, full retube, full new tube sheets and everything, 'cause they filled it full of scale. And it's like, okay, you know, whatever that costs, fifty thousand plus dollars. It's like, well, how

How much money would it have cost to just maintain your water softener and to check for hard water? Like so yeah, you saved a little bit of money in the short term, but then that huge repair bill comes or hey we melted our boiler 'cause we didn't, you know, do the maintenance properly and now we have a three hundred thousand dollar replacement for a new boiler that was only eight years old.

But you know, the person who cut all the maintenance is now promoted to a different job and they're long gone. So the repercussions are gone. And that that cycle continues at facilities where I think there's a lot of benefits to not saying that that cycle won't stop, but having a dashboard and having a connection of, hey, this is what our boiler room is. This is baseline. And the average person can come in and say, This is baseline. This is what it should be. And when you get outside the baseline,

it's okay, well this is what can happen and what it can cost us. And you can put some numbers to it. It's very easy with a dashboard

I used to work at a lot of corrugator plants and they would have one boiler.

And the boiler would be down. They're like, This is critical, our corrugator's down, this is critical, you know, but nobody's working and all this stuff. And it's like, okay, well, if this is your critical process, why do you only have one boiler? Like, how does this make sense? But anyways, outside of that, it's how do how do we make data

so visible to the average maintenance person or business person where you go, Hey, this is what your boiler room is costing you to run every year, and this is normal. And if you cut beyond this, these are the long term repercussions that could end up in the three year, five year, ten year marks of, you know, you want your boiler to last 20 years. This is what you should be doing, versus how do we just make this year or next quarter look great? Which I understand will happen, but

It's all about visibility of data and when you can make make data turn into simple English, I think you can see a lot of benefits versus well, they should just know that they need to maintain their water softener. Well, that's obviously not true because every day I go on LinkedIn and people are cutting apart boilers full scale. Like in twenty twenty six. Like we're everybody is well educated on what a water softener should be. But when you have a facility to run

And the water softener is not alarming, nobody cares about the boiler room until the boilers aren't making steam. And that's where connectivity and e even with Miura, you know, with the whole connection with the water softener, it's like, hey, we have hard water, hey we have hard water, hey we have hard water and send the alarms before that you know, there's actual critical failures.

Jonathan (1:25:34)
Yeah, that's in it in you said a you hit the nail on the head with putting it in plain English. we've even we want to take it even a step further and and you know, go a picture's worth a thousand words, right? I get this often, but something as simple as just like red, green, yellow, you know, this is the status. That's the light on the boiler itself. And if you're not in the room

see it but it like one thing that bothers me at least on equipment is like when it's operating in yellow when it should be green like that that's a that's a notification to something that something should happen. Now we have like several of those right we have hey air filter blowdown scale caution you know hey you're getting there and then when it's red that's the interlock you're not burning anymore and and we've we've translated those colors even to the the

dashboards that you're like, hey, something's if you're not in green, something should be checked. So yeah, something as simple as that I think is a good good way to communicate issues and items. But one thing I have observed especially on from technicians and reps that maybe service many customers that are connected was notification fatigue. yeah I I recently went to a

hospital and they're doing exactly what we're saying, right? They're networking all their equipment. And during our pitch to them and they'd already bought the equipment, but when we were talking about the subscription they had I had said, and by the way you got a text and email notification and then the service guy he rolled his eyes, Great, another notification. Like he's probably buried under you know, hundreds of texts and emails that something's under caution or alarm.

we have to f find a way to also not be ignored or at least maybe prioritized higher because that guy who's got many pieces of equipment to run is now feeling maybe overloaded with, his systems right at the hospital and our technicians too where it's like, Yeah, I saw that one come in, but then it had about another dozen cautions

come in after that. I think notification fatigue is one thing I've been battling trying to trying to figure out how to best communicate or even prioritize. We've had requests that are like, hey, maybe granular notification alerts where we can go in and say, All right, this is most important, this not so much.

Although we don't want to say a blowdown is not important, right? If if you're high conductivity, you can have carryover, you can have issues with your water chemistry, it's maybe not as critical as like the scale caution. You know, that should be treated maybe at a at a higher prioritization than a blowdown. So maybe throw in o different gradients of orange or something like that.

Eric Johnson (1:28:30)
I think don't quote me on this, but I think notification fatigue was part of the reason for the deep water horizon disaster, the oil spill in the Gulf of America now, I guess. the B P. so if your operator is sitting there and they just get alarm after alarm after alarm after alarm and the alarms are

It's not like something's broken. It's just notifying you of like, hey, your boiler's at a hundred and ten PSI when your set point is supposed to be a hundred PSI. You know, they go, Okay, great, great. You know, and then they just keep and what ends up happening is they silence the alarm.

So then when the boiler sends the alarm of, hey, your boiler's at 150 PSI and not a hundred psi, the alarm is silenced so they never get that alarm or they never see it, and then they can't take action. And that's

What happens is with data is I've seen some of these operations managers emails or I've seen their cell phones and they'll show me and they're like, Yeah, this connection thing is great, but then I turn off my notifications because I would get a hundred and forty emails a day, or I would get a hundred and forty text messages a day. And when you get 140 text messages from your boiler,

It is very hard to care about something when you're trying to do your job and you have to be able to understand of like okay, what is important versus what is a like, hey, we just need to like schedule service for the next month versus like this needs to be taken care of now. And that's what basically notification fatigue is to the people out there who don't know what it is or haven't heard of it before.

Jonathan (1:30:23)
Yeah. One thing we did to mitigate that was to put daily and weekly and monthly summaries. So like yeah, you're not getting one for each individual alarm, but you may get one at the end of the day that says, Hey, you had like twelve notifications. Like that's more than what you're used to in in

It just tells you and then you can go in and and see the the list once you click through. another thing too is is closeness to the customer and I'm I'm gonna circle back to the to the maintenance agreement. if a computer is telling you something, right, like it's just a you know, hello first name, comma last name, you have insert boiler alarm here at the you know, hour, hour, month, month.

Day day, right? So that's that's gonna kinda not carry as much weight as like I said, with our service agreements, you're g you if you're close to the customer, you may have actually someone physically there telling you, Hey, you know those alarms that we just got, we need to like address those, schedule a an additional service call or or address it right now, right? Like, hey, I can go and and

J maybe it's something as simple as like you say, for softeners, like just run the regeneration. It obviously the resin is not removing the hardness anymore or

Hey, let me do that blowdown for you. So closeness to the customer I think actually has more weight than even the monitoring, but I think the monitoring just i it it improves your performance. Like it's not meant to be the standalone. I don't think you can ever replace the human touch. So it it's it's a tool. It's it's a tool for us to help ourselves do better and and and do more with with the resources that we have. So 'cause they're they're very

valuable you know the human resource the humans are the the most precious resource of a company and one thing at at that same AHR event we were able to sit in on a seminar that our chief global group officer David Miyauchi he he hosted a

Harvard business professor, Professor Takeyuchi. And he asked a a very simple question to the group. He goes, who pays your paycheck? And a lot of people were like, Well, you know, our company, Miura, or the rep or or C B, whoever who was there, they're like, they paid the paycheck and he's like, That's actually not true.

the customer's money that pays your paycheck. Miura or your company is just merely the pass through. they're

collecting it and distributing it, but what's paying you is the customers' money. Miura has no money if if they didn't have customer money. So being able to provide solutions to to people that need it and when they're asking for it is I think pretty crucial because,

There there can always be problem finders. You know, those people exist. They're a they're a dime a dozen, but problem solvers, those are the ones that help get things done. And if we can put these tools in their hands then I think, we've multiplied and amplified their their ability to perform. and that will lead towards, you know, things like getting paid more and bonuses and and

higher efficiencies because you're gonna have metrics that measure you against someone else who isn't using those tools and they'll be like, Well, why is this person outperforming this other person? Well, they're you know

We've had simple tools before, right? Like mechanical advantage. Now we need to to leverage our our digital advantage. I think that's that's where I'll put that in in into context is that it's it ultimately we're trying to get money from the customer and obviously maintain the relationship so that we can we can continue growing together. it's gotta be mutually beneficial.

Eric Johnson (1:34:13)
I think a lot of people hear that and they they think, yeah, of course, you know, the manufacturer, the service companies, all they want is money. Well yes. But it's also, hey, we installed this connect system and this extra visibility and it saved you ten percent and it only cost you

a half percent of that ten percent. So you really are saving like nine and a half percent. So while you're paying us more money and it looks like you are spending more in this bucket, in the overall bucket you are spending less money. And that's something even with like steam trap surveys, there are so many companies out there that won't do a steam trap survey.

or won't repair their steam traps even if you mathematically go like hey your payback is like two months on this for these steam traps and they just don't care because the maintenance budget is different than the the bills or the budget for the natural gas and they say we don't have the maintenance budget for that so it's having that understanding for the customer of

this is saving you money, even though it looks like on paper it you are spending more. And then over the long term, you hopefully avoid that cycle of cut preventative maintenance, cut maintenance, huge capital cost. All right, cut maintenance, cut maintenance, cut maintenance, huge capital costs. And then you can get your boiler to last and not be cutting it apart.

every five to ten years because it's full scale or you melted it and all this other stuff that happens when you are not monitoring your boiler room and you have no idea what's going on because you just don't have good data and good up education operations around it. I think we've covered a good bit. Is there is there anything else you wanna say or

how do people find ya?

Jonathan (1:36:19)
how do people find me? I guess you can reach me at

I'm gonna go old school for a minute at at our main line, six seven eight six eight five nine two nine extension one eight. That's my direct line if you want to get a hold of me. another way

Jonathan Sanchez at mira Z dot com. I could spell that out.

Jonathan (1:36:42)
J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N dot S-A-N-C-H-E-Z at M-I-U-R-A-Z dot com. and yeah, I'm not really on the socials, I'm on LinkedIn if you look up Jonathan Sanchez. So that's how you can get in contact with me.

Eric Johnson (1:37:03)
If you have any questions about Miura Boiler, go to Miraboiler dot com. They have a rep locator as well. I'm sure rep would be ha happy to answer any questions you have. But mostly if you listen to this podcast get to this point, I want you to think about connection. whether it's a Miura boiler or not, how do we connect and have data?

that is more visible for a building owner. Don't assume that they understand what you say of like, hey, your water softener isn't softening. They won't necessarily understand what that actually means and what the implications of that. So just writing that on a service report, that's not enough. How do we educate people in a way that the average person will understand? And then how do we get the boiler data in a way that the average person will understand?

in whatever endeavor you do in the boiler room. That is my challenge to you. That is how we make the boiler room and the boiler world a better place. So thank you for coming on and yeah, I'll I'll have you back sometime.

Jonathan (1:38:10)
Thanks for having me, Eric. We'll be in touch.

75. Connect Your Boiler Room with Jonathan Sanchez

Join Our Free Trial