86. Remote Boiler Monitoring with Marshall and Tim of Squawkbox Alarms

September 15, 2026

Marshall Baughman and Tim Pote, the founders of Squawkbox Alarms discuss the evolution of boiler monitoring, the challenges of traditional systems, and how Squawkbox Alarms are transforming boiler maintenance and safety. They share insights from their backgrounds, the importance of remote visibility, and practical advice for boiler operators. The Squawkbox system revolutionizes boiler and rental equipment monitoring, offering real-time data, remote management, and cost-effective solutions for service companies and end users.

Learn more about Squawkbox Alarms here: https://squawkboxalarms.com/#top

Episode Transcript

Eric Johnson (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson. I have a special episode for you. This is the first episode of Boiler Wild with three people. I invited Marshall Baughman and Tim Pote on. These two great individuals have started a company called Squawk Box Alarms, in which it is a remote monitoring system for any boiler.

Eric Johnson (00:24)
of any kind of system. It is an agnostic system. It is just a bolt-on electrical monitoring system where you can receive text messages and emails of what your boiler system is doing and whatever you're monitoring. And we talked about it in depth. And I just want to be clear this is not sponsored. I invite people on the podcast in order

Eric Johnson (00:51)
To talk about things that I find interesting and order to talk about companies that I find interesting and to help other people learn. And this is a solution that I had once needed and that I had once thought about building myself and I didn't have the capabilities.

Eric Johnson (01:07)
So I thought somebody listening to the Boiler Wild podcasts may need this solution. we really drilled down into how this solution can help customers and

Eric Johnson (01:17)
How it can benefit the rental companies and how it can benefit the rental customers and how the rental customers can choose a rental company versus a different rental company. So I really enjoyed my conversation with Tim and Marshall, and I hope you do too. If you have any questions about this episode, please email me at Eric.johnson at boilearn dot com or DM me on LinkedIn.

Eric Johnson (01:43)
I hope you enjoy.

Marshall (01:44)
I'm Marshall Baughman on the squawk box side of things, I'm the the boiler half of the equation. I worked at a boiler shop for about nine years a little more. I was a service tech. later on I started helping teach in the tech school that we had there.

Marshall (01:59)
started getting into electronics and software development and made the first version of a monitoring system while I was there at the boiler shop. got further into software, kinda left the boiler shop to up my software game and then along the way Tim and I became friends and revisited the the monitoring system and now we started squawkbox alarms with it.

Tim Pote (02:23)
Tim Pote I've been doing software development for the past fifteen years, software development and startup world. So worked for a variety of companies, database building companies, malware detection companies, just lots of different things. but when I met Marshall, he had a really good idea for a startup, and so we've been doing that for the past year or so.

Eric Johnson (02:46)
when did Squawk Box

Eric Johnson (02:48)
incorporate?

Marshall (02:50)
last year, twenty twenty well, we're on L L C yeah, so twenty twenty five.

Eric Johnson (02:55)
Marshall, you mentioned that you were in the army, Did did

Marshall (03:00)
I was, yeah, after high school.

Eric Johnson (03:02)
what'd you do in the army and did that play into learning boilers at all or was it just kind of a side quest? Why'd you actually get into the army to start?

Marshall (03:12)
a a number of a number of reasons. I would say I was in a lot of ways the product of a my environment and you know, post nine eleven world and I was good at cracking jokes and shooting guns, so it seemed like the logical choice. So I was infantry,

Marshall (03:30)
As far as how infantry played into boilers, I think it just gave me a high capacity for being uncomfortable for a sustained period of time. So if if if that's if that applies. but yeah, after after doing the army, I got out in twenty thirteen and then came back on to the to the boiler shop.

Eric Johnson (03:53)
So you weren't no mechanic skills in the army, no no fixing, just straight infantry.

Marshall (03:58)
Just straight infantry. I there was there were mechanic skills that came along with it. I I think, you know, whatever y operator level stuff that needed to be done on vehicles, some of the larger weapon systems, definitely like you had to be mechanically inclined to to be proficient with some of the weapon systems. But there I wouldn't say there were any direct parallels between that and boiler work other than just like having zero qualms with

Marshall (04:27)
being in a hot, uncomfortable boiler room, taking stuff apart and you know, getting dirty and getting the job done.

Eric Johnson (04:35)
Did you go over to the Middle East at some point?

Marshall (04:39)
I did. Yeah, I went to Iraq once, two thousand eight, came back in two thousand nine, and then Afghanistan in two thousand ten came back in two thousand eleven.

Eric Johnson (04:47)
My

Eric Johnson (04:48)
cousin went over there and pro probab about the same time you did and his biggest shock was that it gets cold over there. Everybody thinks it's a desert

Tim Pote (04:57)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (04:58)
and a hundred and twenty degrees all the time. He's like, It snowed

Marshall (05:02)
There

Marshall (05:02)
was there was ice on the runway when we were landing in Missoul the first time. And then Afghanistan, of course, we never went below 7,000 feet. It got it got really cold in the wintertime. Yeah.

Eric Johnson (05:11)
Yeah, walking through the mountains and everything. So

Eric Johnson (05:14)
who called who and said, Hey, we need to start a company or was it kinda you just looked at each other one day and said, this is gonna be like we we see something out of this?

Tim Pote (05:26)
so the church that our families go to, we kind of ran in the same circles around the same age. we had we have a bunch of guys that go and hang out a lot, and we were hanging out one evening, and Marshall was talking about potentially wanting to build the company, and I just had seven million questions for him, got super excited. It was like we should definitely keep talking. So it happened that.

Tim Pote (05:50)
At a Chili's restaurant one evening we were just hanging out talking about something else entirely.

Marshall (05:55)
I can't believe I was I was considering like starting this thing by myself. I was like, man, I'm so glad Tim's here.

Eric Johnson (06:03)
I'm very new to business as you guys are as well. Do you have complementary skills 'cause I've always read that if you go into business with somebody you should have complementary skills versus finding somebody exactly like you 'cause now you just have two of the same person.

Marshall (06:20)
Yeah, I would say so. I would say, I mean there's plenty of times that d on on the business side of things, you know, I think Tim I don't think it's unfair to say Tim knows a lot more about just like the business side of stuff in general. and then

Marshall (06:40)
And then with me having been in the boiler industry in one capacity or another, like I mean growing up with the boiler industry as like, you know, the family business, but then directly working in it for almost a decade, right? Like being able to take Tim's business acumen and just kinda like, okay, how does that apply to the boiler world necessarily? And no, I I think definitely complement each other in in that regard.

Tim Pote (07:06)
I mean, I think there's that and and I've spent years building distributed systems, which you may not look at a boiler monitor and think distributed systems, but it actually I mean, you s stop and think about it. Well, you've got hundreds of these things out in the field, they all have to be talking to some set of servers. So it's like having a hundred computers out there interacting with another set of computers that you own in the cloud. and so I'm just really comfortable building those kinds of systems. So I

Tim Pote (07:34)
I think there are is kind of separation of skills, especially on the technical front and then a little bit on the business front, but b both of us are kind of operator mindset, I would say. So the one skill that we're having fun kind of scaling up for both of us is more of a sales and marketing. Like how do you how do you pitch this thing? How do you get it in front of people? How do you get people to to trust that your product is is worth their time and their time is very valuable. So

Tim Pote (08:01)
That has been a learning experience for for both of us.

Eric Johnson (08:05)
What's your elevator pitch? If somebody asks you,

Eric Johnson (08:08)
Hey, what do you do?

Tim Pote (08:10)
if you're talking to somebody who who knows boilers, you say we we sell a boiler monitoring system and they know exactly what that is and exactly how they would use it. So it's not something that needs a ton of explaining. To anybody to like my friends, I tell them I tell them what we do and they always say, wow. I I just it's the kind of thing you just never would think about.

Eric Johnson (08:32)
Yeah,

Marshall (08:32)
Exactly. Just I mean

Marshall (08:34)
you can I'm sure relate to this. Like what do you do? Like I work on boilers and and the reaction is like like steam engines? Like like trains or something? What do you what do you mean you work on we're still using boilers? Like still using boilers. they're actually like everywhere. but yeah as far as elevator pitch, like Tim said it kind of depends on who I'm talking to. It's like I'm you know, we make a a boiler monitoring system and then kind of explain a little bit of the the things it can do or

Marshall (08:59)
Yeah, or you gotta start with, Well there's this thing called boilers, right?

Tim Pote (09:04)
One of the one of the things that resonates the most I found is just telling people that we, you know, we know if their assets are being maintained, right? Having a an immutable log of maintenance is is really, really valuable to most people who own a boiler in any regard. So that's the thing that seems to resonate the most.

Eric Johnson (09:23)
The boiler room, a lot of them are very old and archaic as far as technology and even a new boiler may not be connected in the sense that the controls are connected to the rest of the building and sometimes if they are connected they the building

Eric Johnson (09:43)
engineers are only monitoring couple of points off of the boilers, so maybe that's an alarm and then like a couple of commands, some start stops and maybe some steam pressure. And it all depends, but a lot of boiler plants in my experience don't have they either have a central control room that's only part of the boiler system or they don't have any kind of control room and they only know when

Eric Johnson (10:10)
steam or hot water is not there because somebody complains about steam or hot water not being there. And if you don't have a full time operator or somebody stationary engineer in the boiler room, now it becomes a situation where nobody knows what's going on because there's no real computer log of what is happening. So squawk box alarms,

Eric Johnson (10:36)
Where's the defined problem and may you touch on this, but where's the defined problem that you're trying to solve?

Marshall (10:43)
I think I mean the the short version I I want to give both versions, right? The short version is is the boiler being taken care of. I think is like probably the and and Tim if you've got like another one jump in, but like that's I think the best way I could boil it down is is the boiler being taken care of and by taken care of I'm for the most part talking about I mean the first thing that comes to mind for me is like

Marshall (11:08)
daily checks, right? Our blowdowns being done. It's a primary low water being checked. The positive check of the primary low water cutoff is like the main one that I just want to see done every day. And it's I I don't know I know it's different in different areas, but like in my experience, so rarely is the daily maintenance of the boiler being done. and that means different things to different people. If you're

Marshall (11:30)
A rental company sending your boiler out as an asset, that's your boiler coming back with additional costs that have to be taken care of, additional time out while it's being fixed. If you're a large company with a boiler and you know it's not being taken care of, maybe their logs are being pencil whipped later or or whatever the case may be, or just not being done correctly, then that you know, unplanned downtime, all things that come from that. But I guess, yeah, the short version.

Marshall (11:55)
making sure that the that the boiler's actually being taken care of. The the longer version. That was that was the short version. The the the longer

Tim Pote (12:03)
Mm-hmm.

Marshall (12:04)
version, I think it it depends on it depends on who you're talking to, right? For me it's it it's almost always just gonna come down to safety. I've

Marshall (12:14)
It's a I I have this quip that a a watched boiler is a safer boiler, right? I say when I'm doing training that for the most part, efficiency is a byproduct of safety. If you get the boiler in a safe running condition, it's going to by definition be pretty efficient and then everything past that is optimization. You wanna do extra stuff, then great, optimize, you know, away as long as it stays safe. But like that massive, you know, the the bottom part of that iceberg under the water, like that's just safety and then everything

Marshall (12:44)
past that is fine. having the boiler watched and and maintained for as an operator or as a boiler company being able to respond quickly if one of your customers has their boiler go down you know you just have that's where this came from right was I was a service tech and I was tinkering and as I began to start seeing places in the boiler room where I could apply my tinkering it was like man wouldn't it be cool if

Marshall (13:10)
we just b you know, you get that phone call of like, boiler's not working. Like, well, okay, go on. Like do maybe some more details like what what happened. And it's just like, you know, it no worky. I need you here to make worky. It's like, all right, man. And so you, you know, you go in completely blind. And some of those are the funnest, I think, funnest troubleshooting calls. But as a service tech, you're like

Marshall (13:33)
Man, wouldn't it be cool if I could just know like what state these things are in as I'm walking in? So there's that side of it, but yeah, I I think I've probably touched on most of it as a service tech or as a rental company or as the owner of the facility itself, kind of different versions of that.

Eric Johnson (13:53)
So somebody calls up squawk box alarms and goes, Hey, we have no visibility in our boiler room. The first question I would think or that I've thought of when I've heard about this is how is this different than like a building management system where they just connect a bunch of points to the boiler or they get back net connection to the boiler and connect it to the rest of the building?

Marshall (14:19)
Yeah. One of there there's a few differences. One I would say if you if you are a facility that you already have everything hooked up and by everything I mean like whatever data points you actually care about. You're content with, you know, those data points being hooked up to some kind of backnet system, hooked up onto a mod or a a building management system, and there's somebody there all the time.

Marshall (14:40)
I would say you don't necessarily need a remote monitoring system, right? If you have somebody on premises constantly you know, watching this monitoring system there, then that's that's great. Where this would come into play is I don't know how those systems are set up as far as w how records are kept, if those are, you know, kept over time, what w whatever I guess it would be the particulars of that system. One thing that's very different is that

Marshall (15:10)
We are not the squawk box is not a management system, right? You can't adjust set points, you're not turning anything on with the squawk box.

Marshall (15:19)
It is it is read only. the safety man service tech in me gets really squirrely about the idea of doing anything controls wise outside of the boiler room itself. So you know, by design this is this is read-only, with with one exception and that's a remote shutoff. You can shut the boiler off remotely, but you can't turn it back on from the squawk box dashboard. You've got to go hit a reset on the squawk box itself. So yeah, as far as differentiators, this one

Marshall (15:49)
one it's yeah read only but then also going back to that building management system it may go to a a central hub right it goes to your control room or to somebody's desk somewhere on the site when that person has to get up and make their rounds or or do whatever they're doing depending on the size of facility that person might be you know a half hour walk away on the other side of it and then he gets the call on the radio of hey we lost steam pressure and by then you're already you're already down right you're already having to go start the troubleshooting process figure out what's going on

Marshall (16:19)
bring it back up from zero. whereas something like this, you're gonna get a text message within seconds of the alarm actually happening. And as you're making your way over to the boiler room, already able to be doing some troubleshooting.

Tim Pote (16:31)
That's assuming that the person on premise has some knowledge about boilers. Like one of the value ads we could add to a to a system like that. And like like Marshall said, maybe not everybody needs to needs to necessarily have the squawk box, but a value add we would provide if you have some kind of centralized monitoring system on-prem already would be that we can have a remote enunciation list that you can have your boiler tech add themselves to as part of your service contract. So we can layer on a layer of service that

Tim Pote (17:00)
is much, much nicer than, we lost steam. Can you come out here and start poking around? no, here's access to everything about our boiler. You can see everything going on with it. Anytime that it loses pressure, you get alarmed, you can go to the dashboard, you can see before you get in your truck and then, you know, load your truck with what you need and come on over and fix it.

Eric Johnson (17:22)
Yeah, it's a big positive to remote visibility because a lot of times customer calls up and they say, Hey, boiler's down, boiler three don't run. And then you're like,

Tim Pote (17:34)
That's it. Yeah.

Marshall (17:36)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (17:36)
okay, I've been there. You start mentally troubleshooting, well, what's going on? Well, we're getting this kind of alarm. go, okay. And then you show up and it's actually boiler one that's off, th

Eric Johnson (17:46)
Boiler three is open and like needs gaskets and it's this other alarm and you there's all these issues with communication and also there can be issues with the service company with relaying if the dispatcher is taking down information and putting it into notes in the computer.

Eric Johnson (18:07)
And then the service technician reads the notes and goes, Well, that doesn't make sense. I don't know what to do with that. Drives an hour and a half, shows up, and then the customer gets mad why they showed up unprepared and said, Well, I told your dispatcher that this was the problem, so I don't know why you're not prepared and it becomes a very sticky situation where nobody wins because there's no visibility and the customer is like, well, now I'm not paying for that and when

Eric Johnson (18:36)
labor rates are more expensive than ever. There's a lot of customers that are very price sensitive to labor rates. They think service companies are there to screw over and, you know, we're here to extract every dollar from you. And at the end of the day, boiler rooms are very expensive to operate. And if I was to own and operate a boiler room, how would I make it

Eric Johnson (19:02)
so that it is the least amount of expense to operate but still operating properly. And that would be remote visibility that I could share with a service company and or remote logs that I could then

Eric Johnson (19:21)
prove to myself and to like a maintenance manager that it is being operated correctly because it is twenty twenty six and I still don't understand how people are melting boilers full scale.

Eric Johnson (19:33)
there is so much education out there. It's not like people can't find it, but there's so much education out there about why we fill boilers with scale or why we corrode boilers, why we're retubing boilers yet on the internet every single day I see tube sheets getting cut out, full retubes due to negligence from improper boiler operation and improper water treatment. but

Eric Johnson (19:57)
Maybe maybe that's something that we'll never get rid of. And obviously boiler companies love it because that's a very expensive repair and gives them work to do. But at the same time, it's also like, hey, like, you know, there's better places that we could spend your money rather than just repairing this nineteen seventies boiler every other year because you guys keep filling it full of scale and then you're obviously, you know, scale, you insulate the tubes and now you're

Eric Johnson (20:28)
Blowing a bunch of money up the stack because you have high stack temps and all that stuff. So if I were to have a squawk box alarm system and I had a BMS system as well, but maybe I don't really understand the BMS system. It's kind of a legacy system, it's there, but it it doesn't really work or we don't know how to update it. We got a quote from our controls manufacturer and they said it was

Eric Johnson (20:55)
a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars to update it because all the controls are obsolete.

Eric Johnson (21:00)
if I were to get visibility into my boiler room without spending a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars and three to six months, what would that look like?

Tim Pote (21:13)
you email us, you tell us you want a b squawk box, we ask what you wanna what is it you wanna monitor because you know not everybody's interested in every single data point on the boiler. so you know, we w you wanna tell us in advance, do you wanna mon monitor makeup pressure? Do you wanna monitor gas pr gas pressure? Do you wanna what what is your burner controller that you have? Basic facts about what you want to do. and then

Tim Pote (21:34)
We ship you a a panel and then you have a professional wire the panel into the boiler. That's it. And we we handle the rest. We handle all the configuration remotely. Well, all the setup. So it's we we actually went way out of our I mean, Marshall has experience as a technician. We went way out of our way to make this straightforward for technicians to install on a boiler.

Marshall (21:57)
Yeah, and and for for some people that's gonna look different than others. Like if you're we've sold some to boiler rental companies and this is this is what they do, right? I send them a panel and a wiring diagram and it's he hands it over to one of his own employees and says, Here you go, go put this on the rental and and they're, you know, hooked up and we've gotten good feedback on how easy of a process that is. but then like Tim said, if it's going to say like to an end user,

Marshall (22:21)
It depends on, you know, if we're going through if it's a new install, you know, having it put on the boiler as it's being built is great. But this is perfectly fine to to retrofit onto an existing installation, as long as it's somebody that can read a wiring diagram and is you know, qualified to be if you can install the control panel, that's what this is. You know, just putting this on the the side of the boiler and and running.

Marshall (22:42)
your inputs to it. If you've already got a building management system, like you said, there's a good chance that all your inputs are already being run to some kind of centralized box anyway. So you might not necessarily have to, you know, run a wire from the alarm terminal on your,

Marshall (22:55)
individual sensors if you've already got that, that's great. But if you don't, if it's like nope, never had any kind of management system, never had any kind of monitoring, then like Tim said, either depending on what you want to look at, maybe all you care about is, you know, wire something into the control panel and and hook it up to the

Marshall (23:11)
The burner controller, you know, give me the the readout from that, maybe the alarm circuit or the limit circuit. You know, you can get as as detailed as you want, whether it's like this is the primary low water, this is the secondary low water, this is the high pressure control, or you can just say like now my limit circuit's open, you know, whether that's my on off switch. You wouldn't want an alarm for everything like that, but yeah, it's really up to whatever they want to look at.

Tim Pote (23:34)
In

Tim Pote (23:34)
and in terms of pricing, it's like you buy the you buy the panel, you know, up front and then there's a a few hundred dollars a month of you know, data fees basically. Because we're gonna run your data over our LTE network, over our w you know, we supply the SIM cards and everything you need so you don't have to do any networking on your end. and then we obvio obviously we store your data for all time and we

Tim Pote (24:00)
run the servers required to collect the data. you pay the ongoing fees and and you know a small like I said, a few hundred dollars a month fee monthly.

Eric Johnson (24:11)
So it's air gapped from company networks.

Tim Pote (24:15)
Correct. And like there's

Marshall (24:15)
Yes, yeah. And that

Tim Pote (24:18)
no the last thing I did before we shipped the first one off was put this was actually really, really scary. I put an outbound only firewall on it. So it doesn't allow incoming connections anymore from anything or anywhere. so it reaches out to our servers, not the other way around, and once we have a connection we can talk back and forth, right? but but that was

Tim Pote (24:40)
Kinda scary doing that the first time. It like, did it am I gonna break this thing and never be able to get in again? Like, well, we're gonna find out.

Eric Johnson (24:46)
and I assume you don't have your own server hubs. You're gonna like go through like AWS or Cloudfair or something like that. What happens

Tim Pote (24:53)
All running on AWS.

Eric Johnson (24:55)
what happens when AWS has an outage? Is there an interruption? D is the customer notified of hey, your squawk box is not communicating? What does that look like?

Tim Pote (25:09)
So we currently for AWS goes out from time to time. If people knows this know this, what they may not know is it's always one region that goes out. US East One is always the one that goes out. I think 10 years ago I recall US West Two going out for a short period of time. Might have been one, but I think it was two. but it was that was a very minor outage relative to what US East One does. But we are in US East Two, which is one of the newer

Tim Pote (25:35)
data centers that they have, it has yet to go out. So we already chose one of the more stable data centers. Within a data center, people may not know this, but there are actually multiple data centers, they're called AZs, avail availability zones within the data center. We run across all the AZs within the data center. So it's it's really hard for three different data centers to go down all at the same time. But the absolute worst case is that we lose connectivity to those servers for a long period of time.

Tim Pote (26:05)
you will stop getting alarms, but you won't stop getting your data tracked. So we have a database on board the panel that we ship that continues to track everything happening on that box, including alarms. You just it just can't send alarms, right? this is a future and Marsha and I bat this back and forth all the time. it's just a a matter of getting the getting the business to the point where we can build this. We want to build

Tim Pote (26:33)
a backdoor basically for it to send alarms via a separate SMS that it'll carry a secondary SMS car that it'll carry and we can maybe send text messages direct to that. That's a bit of a feature build out that we don't have time for right now, but we've talked about it a lot. but until then, you just don't get your alarms. We continue to reliably track your data. When we finally get our servers up and running, they'll turn on and then play back all of the missing data.

Tim Pote (27:00)
for however long the servers were down. And this is also true if if you lose connectivity for some reason, your cell tower goes out for three hours, fine. It's not I mean you just lose you lose alarms, but you don't lose your data. We continue to track everything.

Eric Johnson (27:14)
Is the data visible on my phone as far as I can see the boiler is running?

Tim Pote (27:22)
Yeah, as long as you can reach our server as long as the the squawk box can reach our servers, then you talk to our servers on your phone. Yeah. You go on a browser and you can see up to date data.

Eric Johnson (27:31)
Yeah, so

Eric Johnson (27:32)
situation, I don't know if you guys have come across it, but maybe a plant manager, like they don't have three shifts twenty four seven, so the power blips out on a Saturday night and it's probably Christmas Eve.

Eric Johnson (27:46)
And it's like, all right, do I make the forty-five minute journey to the plant? Are we losing steam pressure or are we not? So he could once power comes back on, you know, and it was just power went out at his house. He doesn't know if power went out at the plant. Maybe they don't have emergency backup generation immediately. So he can go on his phone and see that like the boiler plant is running, that he still has steam pressure versus just waiting for an alarm.

Eric Johnson (28:14)
Right. So it's active versus like, hey, it's not texting me. I don't know if it's gonna be sending alarms. I don't know if if it doesn't have power, it's not gonna be sending alarms. And then you would have to make the journey anyway, so just go check on it.

Marshall (28:28)
there's a dashboard and one of the points on that dashboard is literally connection, right? And you just you know whether or not it's actively connected. Also you'll get it if you lose connection, say there's, you know,

Marshall (28:41)
the somebody drives their a dump truck into the cell tower that it's on, right? You lose cell service for whatever a reason. you will get a text message if as long as you're not running off that same cell tower, right? If you're elsewhere, you're at home, you'll get a message that your Squawk box lost connection, right? And then you'll get one again once it regains connection. But for the event that you're talking about a power outage, right? And we've already seen that with some of some of our customers, that exact scenario, right? They had a power outage

Marshall (29:05)
Yeah, you get you can you can just look on your on your phone and see if your boiler is is connected or not.

Eric Johnson (29:12)
Can it is there users? Can I share it with like my whole maintenance staff?

Marshall (29:18)
You can you

Marshall (29:19)
can share it with whomever you want, yeah. Right.

Tim Pote (29:22)
Mother in law.

Eric Johnson (29:24)
Hey, check out these boilers. That's what I do.

Marshall (29:26)
Yeah.

Tim Pote (29:27)
I mean,

Tim Pote (29:27)
it's something to show right?

Eric Johnson (29:29)
A absolutely.

Marshall (29:29)
But

Marshall (29:30)
but to your to your question, right, that's one of the things that it comes back to like who

Marshall (29:35)
The conversation's different depending on who you're talking to. If I'm a rental company and I've got my service techs looking at my asset in the field, like that's one whole set of scenarios and and problems that I'm trying to solve. If I'm an end user and I want to make sure, you know, I want my service company, I have a service agreement with them and I want them I don't I don't know squat about this thing, man. I just need steam going, right? Like I'm when I need something on my boiler, I call my boiler guys. I'm put I had a brewer tell me one time he I was trying to show him, you know, these are

Marshall (30:05)
operator level things, you can take care of yourself. You know, you do these things and he's like, listen, man, I'll do my blowdowns. I'll do I'll do the things I gotta do. No offense. I make better beer than you. You do better boiler stuff than me. Right? When I need boiler stuff done, I'm gonna call my boiler guy. Like put your boiler company on the enunciation list on the dashboard. They're gonna know there's a problem before you even start losing steam. or you can put your mother in law on that list if you so she knows when your boiler goes down. But

Marshall (30:32)
Yeah, you can put

Eric Johnson (30:33)
If I'm a boiler

Eric Johnson (30:34)
service company, what does that look like? say I have ten customers with the squawk box. Am I just getting tons of emails? what is what does that look like

Eric Johnson (30:47)
Because typically what happens if people are connected and maybe you've guys had this is the service company will see that there's issues. boiler's failing, boiler's failing, boiler's failing, but the customer hasn't reached out and it'll be like three days later the customer will reach out typically Friday afternoon and be like, Hey, we've been having some issues with our boiler. Can you send somebody out? And it's like, Yeah, we've been watching the these alarms go go off. why didn't you call us three days ago?

Eric Johnson (31:17)
Well we you know, we've been trying to fix it ourselves and we loaded up the parts canon at it and we can't fix it and now it's the weekend. So can you please send somebody out here Friday night?

Marshall (31:28)
We've I I think it it's gonna be like company specific. I know one of the companies that their customer they've they've got a boiler with a squawk box on it and for them it's when they see it going off, they just go ahead and call the customer and they're like, I unless it's something like, you know, primarily water cutoff. Like, okay, that's that should be you doing your daily checks and then, you know, hopefully there's a a blowdown alarm shortly after that.

Marshall (31:52)
If it's something like you know, pilot flame failure, pilot flame failure, pilot flame failure, then they'll just go ahead and reach out and be like, Hey man, I see what's gonna like what's what's up, you know. You try, you know, anybody working on something, you know, what I think there was somebody had been working on like a heater elsewhere in the facility, so they had the gas shut off or whatever, so they go out looking, but you know, they that boiler company might be like, just we're we're running ragged right now.

Marshall (32:17)
just gonna see if they call me, you know, that's that's just gonna be up to that company what they want to do with it or what their service agreement is. They maybe they've got a service agreement where they're like, if my boiler goes down, I would really like it if you were already on the way, right? If you get a message. So that's just gonna be up to the individual company.

Eric Johnson (32:33)
And

Eric Johnson (32:34)
as a service company, if w I get multiple of these installed, is it like a separate login for each customer or is it I can pull up a dashboard and see my ten squawkbox customers?

Tim Pote (32:48)
ladder. Yeah, you you log into the website and you see the list of all all the companies that you're a part of, and then all of the individual devices within that company kind of in in a indentation, right? So you can see them all at a glance, everything that you're a part of.

Eric Johnson (33:07)
You started a year and a half ago from you made your LLC and everything, you're like, all right, great. what was the process of selling the first box?

Eric Johnson (33:20)
or approaching somebody, do you already know the customer from being in the boiler industry? Or was it just kinda a cold call?

Marshall (33:28)
Yeah, there's a Yeah.

Tim Pote (33:28)
Done a lot of both, basically. Like we we have contacts

Tim Pote (33:32)
in the in the boiler industry as it stands. and we've made a several sales through them. the the harder one has been cold calling, or not just cold calling, but like LinkedIn and everything else you do to try to get in front of people. a lot less success with that for now. But I that's what I was saying earlier. That's one of the things that that Marshall and I, the s the skills that we're trying to skill up on right now is figure out how to

Tim Pote (33:56)
How to do marketing and sales for a new business that not everybody's heard of yet and has have to build up, trust in the eyes of of the community.

Marshall (34:07)
Yeah, we were talking a little bit earlier, right? The the boiler company I worked at was the family business and like there's still, you know, my my dad is still there, right? we're working, you know, closely with them and they've been great and giving us a good a good test bed for, you know, being able to have access to to set up our, you know, initial testing. It's also where the first

Marshall (34:30)
iteration of this came from as I was a a service tech, right? I made a much simpler version of this back then, but it as far as the things we want to look at, how do we integrate with these things? How do we talk to burner controllers? How do we you know, all those things were questions that I figured out the answer to years ago and we've been able to carry a lot of that over into this newer system.

Tim Pote (34:53)
If you go to our website, you'll see a video of Marshall, you know, demoing the the squawk box. And where he's standing is in Allied's training room.

Marshall (35:05)
Training room. Yeah, that's actually their school room.

Tim Pote (35:07)
So they they lent that to us. They they we they let us put a squawk box, bolt that on the side of there. that's one of our testing units that we use quite frequently.

Marshall (35:16)
And so they've got they've got a squawk box on their rental, and and you know, working through some of the contacts through them but yeah, now we're branching out.

Eric Johnson (35:27)
So a

Tim Pote (35:27)
it's funny you brought

Tim Pote (35:28)
up being disconnected and noticing that one of the one of the test one units that we have is sitting here on my desk. and it's it's actually so reliable, you know, telling whenever it's it's not able to talk to the back end that Marshall now knows every time I lose power to my house, it he gets alarmed. He'll text me and be like, Did you just lose power? I'm like, No, but I lost internet.

Marshall (35:52)
Yeah, like yeah.

Eric Johnson (35:55)
So you've had a panel in the field for over a year now, is that correct?

Tim Pote (36:00)
Can't remember when that shipped.

Marshall (36:02)
Yeah, let me it's yeah, close

Eric Johnson (36:02)
About a year.

Marshall (36:05)
probably a

Tim Pote (36:05)
Around a year, yeah.

Marshall (36:06)
close to a year, yeah.

Eric Johnson (36:07)
So

Eric Johnson (36:08)
what is what is the feedback like from the is it permanent or a rental and then w what is what is the feedback like

Eric Johnson (36:17)
'cause I'm always curious because us boiler people like to, you know, we talk boiler and dream up all this stuff. But then when somebody who is like, I don't know, I just need steam pressure, and then you show them like a dashboard and you gotta monitor this and monitor that. And I've seen it where people get three hundred emails a day from their boiler and they're like, What is going on? Like I and they just start ignoring it. Like what is what has been the feedback from somebody who isn't a technical boiler person who is actually using this?

Marshall (36:48)
So for for the the one that's been out there the longest, their interaction with it has just been that it's it's on our rental boiler and it's been that the

Marshall (37:00)
That the rental company has been able to just be super responsive, right? Whenever whenever there's an issue and just being able to like and they're not far away anyway, but being able to just kind of like that was one of the situations talked about earlier, just like being able to call them, be like, Hey, what's what's going on? Right. I see I see something happening and and talk them through it over the phone, which is really the best I mean side side tangent, one of the

Marshall (37:23)
one of the interactions that I've I bring up a lot with this is that as a service tech, and I don't remember the exact numbers, it's like a fish story, right? Like it it was an hour down the road and then the, you tenth time I told the story it was like six hours away uphill both ways or whatever. But like it was far enough away that it was a trek. company called, boilers down, can't get it going back up. We have them walk through all sorts of stuff over the phone. They're like, nah

Marshall (37:46)
We've tried everything, like just get out here as soon as you can. We get out there, it's a drive. somebody had bumped into the fuel selector switch and had knocked it over to oil, and oil wasn't even hooked up to be run on that boiler. And so it was literally just like, you know, four hours in the van to go flip, and then say, like, all right, well, you know, what are we doing here now? Like, am I charging you for four hours of technician time? Like, you're gonna be grumpy. We just had a technician tied up for four hours for the flip of a switch, right? Like that kind of thing. avoiding those calls.

Marshall (38:16)
makes everyone happy. and that's and that's the kind of feedback we've gotten, right? It's just like, hey, what's what's going on? Like here. I know exactly what's going on. Let me pull up the dashboard. was somebody working on the gas line? let me see. Yeah, they had the gas shut off because they're working on a heater over here. Right? All right. Well when that's done, you'll be you'll be good to go, right? From good.

Tim Pote (38:37)
mean, some of the direct quotes we've gotten have been like

Tim Pote (38:39)
outstanding. W one of was, I look at I look at the dashboard every s as soon as we got it hooked up, it was the first time they had live data from their from the boiler, right? And so the the guy it was a rental boiler, it's so that you know, it's off prem. but one of the technicians is like, I look at it every single day. Every morning I wake up and I check on the boiler and see how it's doing. another guy, same company, was like, I'm I'm I'm gonna start trying to sell these things for where I go, because they're

Tim Pote (39:07)
They're awesome. They're incredible. another company when they when they first saw it, they were immediately in love with it. They they made a purchase far faster than I could have even imagined that they even could have made a purchase. But they saw it and they were like, I want four immediately. and then everybody they've talked to, we've gotten word, you know, back around through the grapevine that they are telling everybody they are not gonna buy another boiler without a squawk box on it because they they love it. So

Tim Pote (39:36)
And that's the that's the company in particular that when they saw it, it was the four hour drive. We have a quote on our or we did on our website that was like, never make a four hour drive again. That that was a direct quote from them. Like, I'm not driving four hours to flip a gas pressure switch ever again.

Marshall (39:51)
Right.

Marshall (39:52)
Yeah, they had that was he they had their own version of like the exact same storytell. For them it was like a a gas pressure switch, yeah, not a fuel selector. But yeah, exac I mean, I imagine you've gone on similar service calls, right? Where you show up and it's like, Well, I tried I tried to help you over the phone, man, but you know, here I am mashing this button for ya and what are we doing here? But yeah, and all those have been from for the most part from the you know, you said boiler non technical people and I think most of those are from the

Marshall (40:19)
the boiler technical people

Tim Pote (40:19)
yeah.

Marshall (40:20)
themselves but but the customer as far as, you know, I I haven't interacted directly with the end users a lot. I'm talking to the boiler companies, but as far as I know the the end users are pretty happy with, you know, their boiler company being good and responsive on it.

Eric Johnson (40:37)
'Cause that's that's really what matters and as I'm thinking through this, this may not be happening now, but just long term of a boiler service company or any service company, I guess, HVAC service companies who think that they know boilers can sell a maintenance agreement and while you

Eric Johnson (41:00)
can have air conditioners and stuff stop working, you'll get some temp issues in the building and it can be an annoyance, but if you have a service agreement for a boiler system and the boiler system is for process steam or even if it's heat and you have a like a weekend issue at a school, having no heat

Eric Johnson (41:25)
at a school is a huge deal 'cause now the school district has to call people. Well it's hey, you know, we have no heat, we can't have school and now parents are scrambling 'cause a lot of parents b they both work. They can't get their kids in daycare. It's unplanned. It ends up being this huge catastrophic effect of like, hey, nobody noticed that the boiler chipped out Sunday afternoon on our low pressure steam system. I assume this works the same for hydronic boilers as well, right?

Marshall (41:54)
Yes. Yeah, and I I full equips. One of mine is that we can monitor your toaster if you want, right? It's not specific

Eric Johnson (42:00)
Yeah.

Marshall (42:01)
to any, you know, make or model. It's just if you've got, you know, if you've got a burner control with Mobbus capabilities on it, that's great. If you've got one that is just much simpler and all you got it's an alarm terminal for an output, then that's fine too. but yeah you can hook up to hydronic systems just as easily as as Steam systems.

Tim Pote (42:20)
Or,

Tim Pote (42:21)
you know, anything that you want i if it if there is some kind of measurement system that is, you know, z zero to twenty milliamp, zero to five volts, zero ten volts, we can measure it. We can let you know about it. In many ways, boiler monitoring is just us deciding, you know, this is the market that we want to go after, this is where we have some ties, this is where Marshall's expertise is. But we can mar we can

Tim Pote (42:47)
technically monitor refrigerators or HVAC units or any anything in the world. but we are focusing on boilers right now.

Marshall (42:56)
So it's yeah.

Tim Pote (42:57)
I don't know anything about him yet.

Eric Johnson (43:00)
the only

Eric Johnson (43:01)
ones I've seen are at the medical labs.

Eric Johnson (43:04)
And you know, they're they say like they're negative one hundred Celsius or whatever, but they'll they'll have high temp alarms because in all those lab rooms th they have to keep the fridge within five degrees of a thing and then if it gets outside that range it starts alarming, but it seems to be all local alarms. but very that's only walking past all these fancy fridges that look like they're thirty thousand dollars and they're like, Yeah, well we need thirty of

Eric Johnson (43:34)
them this this almost seems like just from my perspective not knowing much about squawk box this seems like a building management system light because what I'm thinking right now is like a school has no visibility of their boiler system and maybe they don't have air conditioning. A lot of schools in the north don't have air conditioning they only have boilers and

Eric Johnson (44:00)
They get a quote once again from their building management contractor and they're like, Hey, what is it gonna take to monitor our school? And then, you know, they get some astronomical number and here's the full integration, the full build out, and that's all they want is cause a lot of building management contractors, they want the full build outs. They don't wanna do these tiny little projects and they may not know how to do the tiny project without doing the full build out.

Eric Johnson (44:28)
am i correct in thinking that like this would be a very easy way to you're not do you're not doing full building monitoring but you're you're essentially just patching a problem instead of because what i what I kinda think about it is you know if you have a forty year old barn

Eric Johnson (44:49)
A lot of people will go, Well, wh why would I paint the barn? Because the barn is kinda falling down on this one side, so I'm not gonna paint it because I just plan on replacing the whole barn. But then fifteen years goes by and you don't paint it and you don't replace the barn. It's kinda like this, I f I forget what it's called, but you don't want to put money into a project 'cause you think that you're gonna do the full project, so why would you spend a little bit on the project? Just like people I don't wanna f spend money on replacing my little part on my car when I can just

Eric Johnson (45:18)
spend money on a brand new car is is that kind of a sales angle or thinking of like hey instead of this full build out like you can have this electrical panel installed next to your boiler we know what the boiler system looks like this is customized to your boiler it comes with all the inputs outputs everything kind of for your boiler room

Eric Johnson (45:45)
of what you wanted and you can have this done within a couple weeks versus this giant project you finally get it all quoted out and they're like, Well we can't afford this, we gotta go have to bid on this and all this stuff and it ends up never getting done. And then you have the issue of, well, we don't know what's going on in our boiler room. Am I correct on that thinking?

Marshall (46:07)
I I think I think that's definitely an application.

Marshall (46:10)
Yeah, the I mean the scenario you spelled out sounds like a perfectly plausible application. If you've got something like a school system or or someplace that, you know, they're the real thing that they want is like you said, I wanna know when I don't have heat. I wanna know when I when my boiler is down, specifically when my boiler is down. and yeah, they're they're like previously maybe the only way to do that is by getting a fully integrated building management system that does the whole kit and caboodle and it's like and it's gonna cost that much, right? And yeah, this would absolutely be like, No, you you put

Marshall (46:40)
this in your boiler room and and it's it's not necessarily yeah I think I think it you can look at as much or as little as you want with it is what I'm trying to get at. Like if I would I would encourage you to hook up things like your feedwater system, right? Your feedwater level controls, your feed water makeup, right with one of our customers he

Marshall (47:06)
They're a rental company and they constantly have trouble with their installs, they with feed water makeup pressure. Just like it keeps going on on low water's because they they're not they're not getting enough makeup water. It's like, okay, we can monitor the pressure of the feedback. We can monitor the amperage of the pump motor, right? And just like whatever you want to look at, you can look at it. on the other side of that coin, like as little as you want to look at. If you're interested in, you know, one very specific thing, you can monitor that.

Marshall (47:33)
But yeah, no, I I think the scenario you you spelled out is a a perfectly reasonable application of it.

Tim Pote (47:39)
I one thing that comes to

Eric Johnson (47:40)
Thank you.

Tim Pote (47:40)
mind, for example, is the church that we go to has a has a very expensive pipe organ in it. It's very sensitive to to changes in in temperature. so if if the boiler were to go out for an extended period of time, and you know, people aren't there for weeks at a time sometimes, you know, especially during the winter months, then yeah, that would be kind of catastrophic for for the organ, the pipe organ.

Tim Pote (48:05)
That's just another application of kind of in the vein of what you're saying of like, you know, it's really, really worth it not to lose heat in certain applications. And even with a building management system, it's like that may or may not be remote, right? So, you know, I I don't a lot of them aren't. So I think more increasingly they are. But but ours is out of the box, right? You hook it up and then you know if you have heat to your building from day one remotely.

Eric Johnson (48:33)
So I assume you're not making hardware. You have just made software for this and you're buying off the shelf hardware?

Marshall (48:42)
Right. Yeah, the hardware is it's all you know, interface relays, there's an industrial PC in there and there's you know, try to keep to name brand UL listed. Yeah, we're not like building any of these any of these things from scratch or reinventing the wheel here.

Eric Johnson (49:02)
I'm just going back once again to analog boiler rooms that are a Honeywell seventy eight hundred and nobody knows where the wiring diagram is? If they say, Hey, we want to monitor gas pressure, are you providing a transmitter?

Marshall (49:18)
I've recommended transmitters in the past. we we don't provide simply because if you're a boiler company looking to do this or you're you're you're gonna be working through a boiler company either way, I guarantee you're gonna be able to get a better price for that thing than I'm going to be able to get. I've had a boiler company ask me, you know, what would you use on this? And I'm I'm gonna default to ones I'm familiar with. you know, whether that's the I'm

Marshall (49:42)
comfortable with the the Siemens transmitter, the Siemens pressure transducers and and I'll you know not it's not a Siemens commercial. It's just they're available, they're you know what you'll see all over the place. So if you got whatever the stack thermometer or whatever they are asking about, I can offer recommendations, but we're not we're not selling those

Eric Johnson (50:05)
Yeah, but when so when I'm ordering my squawk box basically we just end up listing off everything we wanna monitor and then you would make sure that there are

Eric Johnson (50:16)
analog inputs and digital inputs for everything we want to monitor and then I would as a boiler service contractor be buying any of the things that we're adding because once again a lot of boiler rooms very analog and if we want to actually know what the actual gas pressure is in the main for the boiler room I would buy a pressure transducer and then you would have a analog input for that transducer. Is that correct?

Marshall (50:46)
That's

Marshall (50:46)
it exactly. Yeah. And we'll leave some open terminals just for future stuff, right? You get everything all set up and then somebody goes, man, you know it'd be really nice that we didn't think about or didn't ask about or, you know, didn't care about ahead of time, but now we wanna add

Marshall (51:01)
insert data point here right there'll be there'll be some extra wiggle room then and then all that person has to do is go you know land the wires and and I'll it's already there on the the diagram what the the open terminals are and we can talk through that and then we handle the adding that to the configuration on our end. We'll just you know you you add a stack thermometer or or or whatever it is that you want to look at later then we'll just you run the

Marshall (51:27)
and we'll add that to the configuration. You'll see it as soon as it's all wired up.

Tim Pote (51:31)
And that's no change to your to your cost, by the way. If we don't charge by the by the data point. what the what costs us money is just transferring data at all to add an extra data point is basically effectively free for us. So it's free for you. Like if you buy it and you use half the terminals out of the box, and then over the years you fill up the other half, it's the same monthly price for you as you go.

Eric Johnson (51:54)
So a lot of contractors are very they like to do things everything themselves and they maybe install some building management systems, maybe they have a controls team. Why would somebody not want to do this in-house? 'cause they're looking at your squawk box and going, well, why would we buy this product?

Eric Johnson (52:21)
when we can just use PLCs or whatever that and you know, maybe we can get our controls guy to sit down and figure out how to do this. Like why why would I be buying the squawk box when I have the full capability in my head without thinking through the whole thing of like like how is this beyond of you just threw some hardware in a panel and you're like, Yep, good to go.

Tim Pote (52:48)
I mean, one of the first things that comes to mind is that the controls guys are great at controls. This is a distributed systems problem and you probably want a distributed systems engineer to be the one to to solve this kind of thing. So like I don't I I am not certain how other I I I know how certain other products work, but not all of them. But I think the vast majority of them basically just read take a reading off of a modbus line and put it on the network.

Tim Pote (53:18)
Right. They don't do this thing where, you know, somebody who's thought through this very deeply from a technician's perspective says, you know, sometimes LTE goes out and and so we're gonna track it locally in a local database before we sync that across. so that's that's one tiny example of a of a problem that you just don't don't think about if you haven't had years of industry experience. and and the other is just like running a

Tim Pote (53:45)
running a website, you may or may not have enough familiarity with AWS and you know running servers that that we have. We I mean we have talked to people that wanted to do this on their own and you know more power too. I'm happy to I'm honestly we're in this for for have to have safer boilers in the world, basically that's it. So if you want to ask us for for expertise, you want to ask like, yeah, I I would recommend that you cache

Tim Pote (54:12)
data locally and then sync it in the background to to a server, right? happy to to walk you through our our learnings, but but there are a lot of learnings.

Marshall (54:24)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (54:24)
Yeah,

Eric Johnson (54:25)
I'm just so in the in the age

Marshall (54:25)
I would I would prefer you use I would

Eric Johnson (54:28)
of vibe code and everybody and there is a point to this, I think software companies, SaaS, have gotten

Eric Johnson (54:35)
overly greedy and once you get big and once you pushed out all the competitors, you know, the monthly price keeps going up and up and up and up and they they hit this critical mass of basically users don't cost them anything, but then they lock out things and like it seems like every year I'm paying the same amount for less features unless I upgrade to the next and newer plan because people keep locking me out of features. So a lot of people are like, well we can just vibe code this or like

Eric Johnson (55:04)
let's just put our control team on this. And I think a lot of businesses and or end users need to understand

Eric Johnson (55:13)
at what point is it just better to not spend the time on trying to figure it out when there's already a solution that exists, like squawk box alarms, and just say, Hey, we're gonna buy this, even though we could do this ourselves, but you buy it and all of a sudden, I don't know, what is the turnaround time? I buy a panel, can I have it within a couple of weeks?

Tim Pote (55:33)
Depending on what's going on, but yeah.

Marshall (55:33)
depending yeah.

Eric Johnson (55:35)
Yeah, so I can have the panel within a couple of weeks and it's done. It's not, you know, 'cause I I I imagine a lot of service companies or end users, it would just become this e everlasting project of, we want to connect our boiler room all of a sudden six months later, nothing's been done where with in the course of maybe two months you can have you go from we we don't have a connected boiler room to I can now see my boiler room on my phone and be connected.

Eric Johnson (56:05)
before like if if I were to order a panel now September eleventh, I could see my boiler room on Christmas Day and know that hey my maintenance manager doesn't have to drive an hour and a half or hey our rental boiler fleet and I want to get into the rental boilers but hey our rental boilers we can now sell to our customers of hey you don't have to go check every single day. if it's a steam boiler, obviously we're gonna be doing blowdowns, hopefully, but

Tim Pote (56:34)
Yeah.

Marshall (56:34)
Yeah, yeah.

Eric Johnson (56:35)
Hey, you don't have to go check it and if your rental goes down on Christmas Day and you don't have somebody watching it like we got you covered, you're not making unnecessary trips.

Marshall (56:45)
Yeah. And the going back to like why if you've got the capability, you've got the controls team, you've got, you know, the in house ability to do this. I mean for some people the answer is like, yeah, d b go for it. And like Tim said, like I'm I'm happy to you know, of course I would rather you, you know, come to me and we have a solution and I'd love to sell you our solution. But we've talked to some company a one company comes to mind in particular. They they were like we're

Marshall (57:12)
we're actually like most of the way there. They did just that. They had a controls team. They the controls team whip something up. they went through the headache, they went through the learning curve and and it seems to be working out okay for this group in particular. And, you know, I don't know what their long term is gonna look like as far as maintaining it and applying it to whatever use cases they have, but like that's that's great. it's also not something that many places I think have the the like time, money and patience for. It's

Marshall (57:42)
If you're doing it on a one off that you just want to monitor this one thing and you've got a guru and they can make it happen, like by all means, but you're talking about like making a whole product that they can then, you know, and and not just apply and and take care of and and keep working, but also, you know, keep working indefinitely, right, with updates and future configurations and all the headaches that come along with that and what that's something that you can just

Marshall (58:12)
shoulder off onto Squawkbox alarms if you're, you know, not doing it yourself.

Tim Pote (58:17)
I I think that's one of the biggest things, right? I I've been in the software industry for a long time. I've seen a lot of projects. I've seen a lot of projects succeed. I've seen a lot of projects fail. And one of the big reasons that they fail is people absolutely underestimate I mean, this is systematic. I I have never seen no but anybody that doesn't do this. You see a problem and you're like, this is like five minutes, and all of a sudden, two weeks later, you're like still slogging through it for some reason. Like this is like the software engineer's dilemma.

Tim Pote (58:45)
Right. And that's and this is true at company scales too. It's just really consistent that you just underestimate what it takes to run something when and and and the focus that it steals from the core business is the other half of the thing. Right. It's really hard to quantify. Okay, I mean, yeah, we only paid a thousand dollars in parts for this. Meanwhile, it's six months of of somebody's full-time labor that could have been doing something particularly.

Tim Pote (59:14)
Potentially more productive for the business, depending on you know what they're doing, what their what their role in the company is. So it's like it's it's it's a continual like underestimation. I mean the other thing that we've seen really, really often is the peop these companies get something running and they have a box, they have a panel on the on a boiler and it and it appears to work, and then the one guy that made it work dips, right? Like it and and once he's gone.

Tim Pote (59:44)
You don't sell those anymore. You can't take care of the ones that are in the field. This this whole game is over. Like the the idea of longevity and allowing somebody who's who's committed to the long run to take care of this particular problem for you is is a big reason why we exist. Again, not to say that nobody could do what we do. What we're doing is is not rocket science. Like you said, we're buying off the shelf commodity parts. We're wiring them up and we built software systems to interact with that. but the but the

Tim Pote (01:00:13)
fact that you don't have to still focus, the fact that you don't have to be scared about the one guy that you have hired eventually leaving. these are the kind of the the the things that we're saving you from when you when you comparing the bill versus buy with squawk.

Marshall (01:00:28)
If you have a board controls team sitting around, then you know, maybe throw on that problem, but also maybe ask yourself why you have a board controls team sitting around. Yeah.

Tim Pote (01:00:35)
But even then, like the one guy that we Right, yeah, but the one guy that we know that did

Tim Pote (01:00:40)
this and I think it's s f from all outside appearances going fine, but like he told us that they're running a server in a room and they're just gonna steal usage of that server for this secondary purpose. And I heard that and you know, he doesn't know this. He hasn't run software for years. I hear that and I hear, this is this is these two teams are gonna have a problem over the use of the server at some point, right? They're not going to

Tim Pote (01:01:03)
It's really hard to get a D B to do two different things well, you know. They usually end up being very tuned for a particular purpose. And like that's the kind of thing you just don't know if you're on software for half your life, you know.

Eric Johnson (01:01:16)
Yeah, very dunning Kruger effect. You don't know what you don't know. And then until you're six months down the line you're like, we should have just called up Squawk Box and bought that. It's also

Tim Pote (01:01:25)
We're still

Marshall (01:01:26)
And there's a

Eric Johnson (01:01:28)
if you get something running

Marshall (01:01:28)
a head shaped dent in the wall.

Eric Johnson (01:01:31)
and now you have to support it for its life.

Eric Johnson (01:01:34)
So two years down the line, maybe the person isn't there anymore, maybe they are and something stops working and it's like, Wait, this one off system that we made, like what what was this thing again? And

Eric Johnson (01:01:48)
Product support. All software needs product support. It doesn't you don't just set it up once and then you're done forever. Like something is gonna end up happening, connection issues, something, and somebody needs to go in there and check it out versus I don't know, we just sold it and we don't know what's going on anymore with it. We moved on. I could see Squawk Box like just buy the panel, get the subscription fee, roll it into a service contract.

Eric Johnson (01:02:17)
With the customer.

Eric Johnson (01:02:19)
Get it installed within the next two months. Hey, we got the service contract, it's installed, Squawk Box is installed within the next two months, and now your customer has visibility before winter time or during winter time and they don't have that visibility and it's yeah, it may not be the most perfect system. Like, you know, you may get customers to say, Well, we wanna do this whole thing and we wanna do this, we wanna do this, we wanna do this, but you know, you kind of rein them in and say, Hey, the ninety percent solution is really all you need.

Eric Johnson (01:02:49)
need and once you show them that solution say, hey, like you don't have to monitor all this stuff. You don't need a full build out. Just monitor your boiler room. And this is what's important. Cause at the end of the day, most customers all they care about is do we have heat, do we have steam pressure? And anything else is whatever. 'cause a lot of customers they don't know what they want.

Eric Johnson (01:03:11)
You gotta you gotta show So then you buy

Marshall (01:03:13)
And

Eric Johnson (01:03:13)
it, it's done, it's and it's installed, and you're subbing out the expertise to somebody else. So with rental boilers, which is a perfect application for this. So I'm installing a squawk box on my rental boiler. Say I have a normal rental with let's say it has parallel positioning. We're gonna be a little bit newer on our rental. It has parallel positioning.

Marshall (01:03:37)
Good.

Eric Johnson (01:03:39)
How do we know if I'm let's say we're building the rental and we can do anything we want, how do we know when the primary low water cutoff is tripped? Are we wiring in like parallel?

Eric Johnson (01:03:55)
with everything, like Honeywell Ennunciator where it's kinda going through the squawk box. Say I'm I wanna monitor everything so that as a rental company I wanna know when my customers are blown down the boiler. How does that work?

Marshall (01:04:10)
So we have I mean, you're describing like the exact thing that we we do, right? This a for a rental boiler, this is what some of them want. Some we've had a customer that they don't necessarily want that granularity of when each individual thing is going off, but that's fine. For for the the ones that I like,

Marshall (01:04:29)
Right. I've I've you run a a wire from the terminal, the alarm terminal on the, you know, McDonald Miller one fifty seven, the you got the like two pump con or the two terminals for the pump, two for the primary low water and then the alarm in the middle. You run that one over. whatever your secondary low water system is, if you've got, you know,

Marshall (01:04:50)
I guess they don't do the the watchdogs anymore with dedicated alarm output, but if you've got, you know, the cube relay, then you take the I guess normally open terminal on that one and run that over. So if it well, I guess it'd be yeah, you'd whatever your system is, whi when you have it if you've got a dedicated alarm terminal on it, you just run those over. same thing like say they've got I guess if you've got parallel positioning, you know, you have the say like a Siemens LMV5 you would

Marshall (01:05:19)
take the alarm terminal off of that but then also tie in there's a if you know if run it over to the azl you just take an Ethernet cable from that and run it straight over to the squawk box so we're getting all the registers off of the AZL

Marshall (01:05:33)
and for the you know f I guess if you have the the LMV5 you've got your gas pressure switches are actually probably running to it, so you can get, you know, your gas pressure switches from that. But if they weren't, you would run the terminal straight from those over to the squawk box.

Marshall (01:05:47)
And then yeah, you get individual alarms for each of those things. You would know when your primary low R is going off, secondary, any of the, you know, the high pressure control. for the high pressure control, depending on what it is, if you've got like a honeywell high pressure control, we actually measure power coming in and power coming out, just so you can see, because that one, right, if it doesn't have a dedicated alarm output, you gotta know, well, if power is not going into it, then maybe they just turn the switch off or maybe it's off on the operator or whatever. so you you know, if power is coming into that switch.

Marshall (01:06:17)
switch and not coming out, then you know that that's in an alarm state. for the yeah, anything going through the burner controller, you're just getting those straight off the from the modbus registers.

Eric Johnson (01:06:29)
if I have a LM V five or auto flame system fire eye, you can just pull off the steam pressure from that system and then now say we have a hundred PSI steam pressure and customer wants to know when it dips below ninety five. Is that part of your software of like do you have a low steam pressure alarm?

Marshall (01:06:52)
If if somebody wanted that, we could we could tie that in. so far, you know, if if you're l losing steam pressure, it's gonna be from some other, you know, something in the limit circuit that we're measuring. I guess short of somebody just coming over and turning the boiler off right when they weren't supposed to. everything else is gonna have some kind of alarm that comes off of it. You asked specifically about blowdowns earlier too. we can have the if they don't have one already,

Marshall (01:07:20)
tie in something like an aquastat on the bottom blowdown. so you're you know you're getting your primary low water from the positive check of their primary low water cutoff that every good boiler operator is doing every single day. but then also if they're you know to get to make sure they're doing their bottom blowdowns you would see that that once they do their bottom blowdowns that aquastat would trip on the bottom

Eric Johnson (01:07:40)
So every rental company listening to this knows what I'm gonna talk about is you get the boiler back and the customer's like, it's been great. And typically when you're renting out a boiler, the customer isn't like,

Tim Pote (01:07:52)
Ha.

Eric Johnson (01:07:54)
we scrub our floors of the boiler room, we take meticulous care of our boilers, and we just somehow needed an extra boiler. No, it's you walk into annual service or a service call and you're like, hey, there's a hole in your tube sheet.

Eric Johnson (01:08:10)
And your boilers have full of scale. And then customer signs the PO for a rental. Rental shows up. Company posts online of customer called, and within 48 hours, we had a rental hooked up and installed. Everything's grand. You spend two months with the rental. Now the rental pulls away and it comes back to your shop.

Eric Johnson (01:08:36)
And your service team opens up the bottom of it and customer says, we did everything. And there you know, maybe you have logs in your rental. Everything's checked off. Everything's perfect. And then you open up the bottom and the bottom blowdown valves are frozen because they haven't been moved in two months. The blowdown lines are plugged because they're full of scale and sediment. Customer did zero water treatment. They didn't blow down the primary low water cutoffs at all. How how does

Eric Johnson (01:09:04)
a rental company use squawk box alarm to gather data to show a customer of like, hey, you abused a rental in real time and also after the fact. You know, you mentioned an Aquastat on the blowdown line. Like are we making graphs? Are we making charts? Do we have outputs? What is the at data output of hey, you had this rental for the last month, and we can scientifically show you that

Eric Johnson (01:09:32)
you haven't done the things that we told you that you had to do in order to not get hit with this extra like cleaning fee.

Marshall (01:09:41)
Yeah, I can see that scenario playing out a few different ways.

Marshall (01:09:44)
In my mind, the best case scenario is that everything you said, right? They go down, they need this rental, rental gets dropped off, rental company posts it on their Facebook, hey, we dropped this off, and then and then it's running. A week goes by and the rental company sees nothing's being done, right? No blowdowns, no primary low water checks. They hop on the phone like, Hey man, can you do me a favor? You know, we got this monitoring system on here. Just need to make sure, you know, it it seems like all the inputs are good, but I need to make sure that the the blowdowns are showing up, right? Can you just go

Marshall (01:10:14)
Do the positive check primarily water, do the bottom blowdowns like we showed you when we dropped it off.

Marshall (01:10:18)
They do it, everything shows up fine. They're like, all right, that's great. Just you know, keep up with those checks because those are super important. And remember in that rental agreement that you signed, it said any additional junk that happens on this thing is your responsibility, which is that's the current state, right? That's not a new addition to their rental agreements. Most of the rental agreements, to my knowledge, have something that says, You break my thing, you pay for it. the problem is they hand it back and they s you know put their hand over their heart and say, I promise I did it, and then you don't have a way to go.

Marshall (01:10:48)
Like, no, you didn't. this this immutable log, right? It goes both ways, right? For the rental company, they say, Well, you know, we tried to get you on it. I can call you and blow up your phone. If you don't blow it down, I can't, you know, do anything. I can't help that, right? I'm not going to come blow it down for you necessarily unless that's built into the agreement, too. But at the end of it, they can say, like, you know, we know you weren't, we called you multiple times, we tried to stay on you about it, and now here is the evidence that you didn't do squat The opposite side of that.

Marshall (01:11:19)
Is they're doing their blowdowns every day, right? Sometimes sometimes stuff just you know you can make all the right moves and still lose, right? It's like I had my water treatment going, I was monitoring the the chemical pump and saw that it was coming on, and I don't know, something went wrong. It was just awful water quality, something happened that you know, whatever it was, problems happen, and then and then the the rentee can say, Look, we were doing everything we were supposed to. It's in this log, right? And it's like, okay, it's just at that point, you're like, it's just one of those things, right? Like I don't

Marshall (01:11:49)
the that sort of stuff I would say would be very rare. I think it's far more likely that the first scenario is going to happen, right? The renter is going to see that nobody's touching this thing and they're just running it full steam and not doing any blowdowns and building up scale. And they'll just hopefully get on their customer and the customer will go, crap, they're watching us, you know, and and actually take care of their take care of the boiler.

Eric Johnson (01:12:10)
what does the data look like as far as the visibility? 'Cause is it aggregating into reports as in like if we're a rental company, can I get a weekly report of the outputs or maybe it looks like a log versus just like, hey, here's a chart of numbers and you have to interpret the numbers. How's how's the data

Tim Pote (01:12:34)
Right.

Eric Johnson (01:12:34)
output look?

Tim Pote (01:12:35)
So from a from in this scenario, the boiler renter's perspective, right? Someone's renting out their boiler, they they go into the dashboard and you know the granularity depends on how small the window is by default, but you can basically see every single data point if your window is small enough. So if you're only looking back like the last three hours, we show you every every time we took a measurement. on just this is a small technical detail, but like

Tim Pote (01:13:03)
We measure we measure the mod bus values really, really rapidly on the order of like a hundred milliseconds. basically as low as fast as it it allows us to read we're we're measuring. We only store it once every few seconds. We don't actually store every single read that we do. The reason we do that is so we can get alarms you faster, right? We can shave several seconds off of an alarm if we are are sampling it really, really quickly. so what you'll see is the snapshots every few seconds.

Tim Pote (01:13:32)
That get relayed back to to our servers. And you see this nice chart of, for instance, steam pressure. It'll, you know, show you all the kind of jagged lines from all the measurements, but it'll sit right at, you know, whatever PSI your boiler is supposed to be at when it's running. or when it's off, you'll see it drop off nicely and it's sitting near near atmospheric for, the weekend or whatever. in terms of alarms, you'll see.

Tim Pote (01:13:56)
it's a different chart. So is our dashboards more or less just a bunch of charts with current value gauges near the top. The charts all show historical values and the gauges all show the the current values as of right now. so if you want to see your historical alarms, you can scroll down and see. Okay, there's a chart near the bottom that has it goes up every time this value is in alarm and it goes down when it's no longer in alarm. So you should see if you look back seven days.

Tim Pote (01:14:23)
Seven little boop spikes of primary low water cutoff being sent into alarm because once a day they are doing their blowdown of the water column, right? And the same with the aquastat. If you have a bottom blowdown aquastat, you'll see hopefully seven spikes that line up right around those same times. in addition to those, by default, you're gonna get text messages for for this boiler as well. So you'll see

Tim Pote (01:14:50)
I mean, I get this right now. I I am on the enunciation list for some of our boilers. I'll wake up in the morning and see I have two messages: primary low water on, primary low water off. Right. those are the two kind of ways. you have a feel intuitively for whether or not your blowdowns are being done just over time because you'll get get these texts. And then also you can look back, see the charts, and if you want.

Tim Pote (01:15:15)
Download the historical data and hand it off to to somebody in a CSV format if you need to prove something.

Eric Johnson (01:15:22)
Yeah, 'cause a rental company, the best time to confront your customer is a week into the rental period, not after the rental period. 'Cause typically, you know, they're on thirty day billing and whatever and maybe you have a deposit, but maybe you have a no relationship with this customer and you send the final bill and they're like, Screw you, sue us, we ain't paying that.

Eric Johnson (01:15:47)
I'm sure it happens all the time. And no matter amount of contract that you have, it's you know, sue us in court versus hey, we understand that you're not taking care of this rental. This is your warning. If this doesn't improve in the next seven days, we're coming in picking up our rental and turning it off.

Tim Pote (01:16:07)
This is where

Marshall (01:16:08)
And depending

Marshall (01:16:08)
on your relationship with that company, you can handle it as as friendly or directly as you need to, right? It's like, hey man, like at the scenario I played out earlier, like, hey, just checking and just wanted to see what's going on, buddy, you know, having seen those blowdowns happening versus like start taking care of my boiler or we're gonna come pick it back up as per the rental agreement, you know. whatever whatever salt to taste, right? Whatever fits your particular relationship with that customer.

Tim Pote (01:16:36)
Yeah. Yeah. And this is where I was saying earlier of having an onboard database of that that you don't need constant connectivity actually really starts to matter. because my wife comes from a family of lawyers. I know a lot of lawyers and lawyers love to find any loophole that they can possibly find. So, you know, you can have gaps in the data and they will extrapolate and say,

Tim Pote (01:16:56)
The blowdowns were done during the gaps in the data, basically, like prove that they weren't, right? So this is one of those small things that again, seeing it from the perspective of a rental company and what they want to prove to their customers and potentially in a in a courtroom, in the worst case. We everybody wants to avoid this, but in the worst case it ends up there. you want to be able to say, Hey, we didn't lose any data, right? The data is all there. We we had it stored for a period of time, but then we synced it and now it's the

Tim Pote (01:17:24)
complete the complete data set.

Eric Johnson (01:17:26)
can you track actual GPS location?

Marshall (01:17:30)
Yeah, we we have the ability to. It's not something that we've done yet just because we haven't really needed to or been asked. but I mean the the hardware for that exists and we could certainly tie that in if somebody were interested. If know, if you've got a a really big fleet and you're I don't know what what your cadence is and for some reason you're wondering where boiler A ended up or something, right? Then yeah, you could you could tie something like that in.

Tim Pote (01:17:58)
But

Tim Pote (01:17:58)
you can prove that

Eric Johnson (01:17:58)
Well it's

Tim Pote (01:17:59)
it was at their location at the time that these logs were coming in. That would be

Marshall (01:18:03)
I gotcha.

Tim Pote (01:18:04)
that would be good. I mean, one thing that we actually do have, we've had to learn quite a bit about cell towers and how cell towers work as part of this. And we can know what's what tower you were talking. So we know, you know, to some degree of proximity, you know, where the where the boiler is via triangulation of the sail cell towers nearby.

Eric Johnson (01:18:22)
Yeah, you can triangulate it, but it's it's also

Eric Johnson (01:18:26)
Supposedly as a rental company you know what's going on, but you can look at a dashboard and maybe you're coming to pick up the rental and the customer is supposed to have it unhooked.

Eric Johnson (01:18:39)
And it's like, okay, is this thing hooked up still? Is the power still on? Are we still getting communication from this? And where is this? And then sometimes rentals don't have addresses and and you could show the truck driver like, hey, here's the GPS coordinates of this rental from the actual rental. And it's not always, yeah, somebody in the company may know exactly where the rental is, but does the dispatcher know who's sending the truck truck driver versus hey, here's the GPS coordinates off of the rental?

Eric Johnson (01:19:09)
you know, rental ten that I just pulled from the dashboard. and then you can also prove that it was at the customer site. And also, hey, how many rentals do we have on the customer site? Because sometimes rentals will stay for one, two years. And, you know, yeah, you can go look and what are we billing? But it's let's pull up a dashboard and

Eric Johnson (01:19:29)
yeah, we have four rentals at that site, three at this site, and we have you know, two down here. yeah, okay. And then, you know, it's it's also like, hey, like we need to make sure that we're taking care of these, doing the annuals and all this stuff, and versus wait, we need to go back to our billing logs and see where we're billing for what rentals. Like it's it's just an easier way to pull up a dashboard and see what's going on versus hey, where would we put that rental? And then now you're looking at like billing and

Eric Johnson (01:19:59)
paperwork versus a live dashboard.

Tim Pote (01:20:01)
one way to mitigate that in the current product would be if you are a rental boiler company, you have fifteen boilers, let's say, they're all listed out in the dashboard, and you can give them all unique names. So you can rename them anytime that it goes to, you know, company A. So this is like Acme Co A, ACMICO B, ACMICO C. So now you know that they have the three boilers because of how you named it. That's one way to help keep track of it for yourself.

Tim Pote (01:20:27)
We also have a we have a digital maintenance log that you can use. If you log in to the website, there's a service tab and you click it, and then now you can add service events. So, you know, cleaned up this and this and this, or blew down this, or you know, customer said this and this and this. we can help you keep track of what maintenance you have done recently directly in the dashboard as well. The goal is to have all the information that you need.

Tim Pote (01:20:51)
for this boiler in one place. So you don't have to travel out to seven different places to find out what you need to keep track of things.

Marshall (01:20:58)
And just like real quick on the rental side, something that I hadn't mentioned before is that you mentioned you know rental periods and one of the things that we've heard a good bit from different rental companies we've talked to is it's it's not necessarily I mean, it's a pain. Depending on how extensive the damage is. Like, yeah, this is this is a very expensive, you know, we gotta clean all this scale out, maybe replace some parts, whatever. But like the major pain point for them is this is time that the boiler is tied up and it's time that my technicians are tied up. I've got very expensive

Marshall (01:21:28)
valuable assets both in terms of employees and equipment that are now staying here in excuse me in the shop instead of out making steam for somebody. But on on the note of when they're not out and about

Marshall (01:21:43)
for squawk box, we we only charge when the boiler is actually on site being used. If you've got, you know, a rental fleet of X number of boilers and you put a squawk box on your whole fleet and you've only got, you know, half your fleet out there, you're not like paying a monthly fee or whatever for all those boilers that are just sitting there at your facility, either getting worked on or or just waiting to be rented. that's I'm not sure how all the other companies do it, but I think that differentiates us from some that are out there.

Eric Johnson (01:22:10)
Well, if you were

Eric Johnson (01:22:11)
a private equity that doesn't make good business, you should be charging

Tim Pote (01:22:13)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:22:14)
three hundred and fifty dollars just for the hookup fee and then a data fee on top of that.

Tim Pote (01:22:21)
Well, when they buy us out, they can change the rules, I guess. No, I mean this is yeah. This is defin the whole reason this company exists actually is because Marshall and I we're looking around, we just like we want to see a company run in a particular way. And one of the one of the central core tenants of the company is that we want our customers we want to win because we're the best, right? We want our customers to have a great experience with us. we want them to to tell other people

Tim Pote (01:22:48)
That this product is amazing and you should absolutely use it. That's the only win strategy in this in this company. and another reason why we built it is so that we could help run it, right? So we're gonna be here for for the long haul and and this these these are the rules we play by. I don't care if that it's less profitable or whatever, you know.

Eric Johnson (01:23:08)
Yeah, and going back to the rental, I just got a question in my head and I already know the answer to this. can you input video feed through it?

Tim Pote (01:23:20)
Mm.

Marshall (01:23:21)
We

Marshall (01:23:21)
haven't looked at that. I I like to think that if the answer or if the question starts with, you know, can you hook X, Y, or Z up to it, then the answer would be yes. But but in this case sending video feed, especially through the way we're hooked up to it, I'm I'm not

Marshall (01:23:42)
I would say that if you are interested in having live video of your boiler, there are most likely better ways to go about it than running it through at least right now the current version of the squawk box. But it's something that if that were a very important thing to you, we'd be willing to have that conversation for sure.

Eric Johnson (01:24:01)
just thinking about yeah it's another one of the liability things and also like a lot of customers are responsible for maintaining the rental and sometimes they'll get in there and do stuff and then they you'll be like hey this was changed out and then they'll deny it or hey we didn't touch that

Eric Johnson (01:24:20)
And a lot of rentals are in like semis and whatever and just one camera on the front pointing back like all the way down the trailer and you can monitor go back to when somebody was actually entering the trailer and then it aligns with the actual analog and digital

Eric Johnson (01:24:39)
inputs that you're receiving through squawk box I was just thinking about that and I've thought about that before with rentals. I don't know if anybody does it. It's not that you're videoing the customer's site, but you are, you know, rental trailers cost you know 250, 300 plus thousand dollars to put together. You want to have a little bit of monitoring on your actual equipment to, you know, to know that the maintenance staff isn't just hacking it apart and doing all the stuff.

Eric Johnson (01:25:08)
Like and if they are, it's like all right, hey, what are we doing? Like you've shut down the boiler for a week, nothing's happening, like what what are you guys doing? Why are you replacing all this stuff? And some of it can be like, yeah, we accidentally left the doors open and we froze the trailer and froze all these pipes.

Tim Pote (01:25:28)
Yeah. I mean what I would say offhand is I mean, Marshall, do you think you know you could hook up a a video camera to the power supply if if like there's there's no reason why they couldn't do that, right?

Marshall (01:25:43)
No, that'd be easy. I mean there you could certainly like record video and save it locally,

Tim Pote (01:25:49)
Right.

Marshall (01:25:50)
pretty easily. I'm I'm just thinking about like

Tim Pote (01:25:51)
If somebody

Marshall (01:25:52)
the way that we transmit data, right? The difference between transmitting very light data packets that we

Tim Pote (01:25:56)
No, no, yeah. I like

Marshall (01:25:58)
do right now versus

Tim Pote (01:26:00)
There are there are recording solutions almost certainly. I haven't looked. I haven't looked. This is me guessing, but I'm almost certain there are, you know, over LTE recording solutions out there. that you could basically use their product but power it because you're running power anyways to the squawk box, right? You could power it to our product. and

Marshall (01:26:16)
I gotcha. Yeah.

Tim Pote (01:26:18)
then and then and then we could potentially just at least give you a link in on the webpage to, you know, here's your video feed for this particular boiler. Like that that'd be very easy to work out.

Tim Pote (01:26:29)
Having them piggyback it directly through our system, like this would essentially mean I think building a secondary system if if we're trying to feed video through our our current system is not designed to handle video bandwidth in in any regard. yeah, we're just pulling modbus data points, it's it's quite small.

Eric Johnson (01:26:48)
Well, I it's I'm sure they could buy a ring camera but now they have more equipment, another subscription, another dashboard, and ring is

Marshall (01:26:54)
Right. Yeah.

Tim Pote (01:26:55)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:26:56)
gonna charge them every single month and it end ends up

Tim Pote (01:26:58)
So one thing that we can offer

Tim Pote (01:27:01)
is well, we will soon to be able to offer is Bluetooth proximity. So we can tell you that some bot like two this particular person was near the boiler at the point in time when these alarms started going off. Or after this person left, you know, you started seeing these alarms. So that's that's a feature that's currently in flight. but I think is gonna land here pretty soon in terms of like you

Tim Pote (01:27:26)
You would log in with your phone one time and now we know your phone and anytime you're next to the boiler we're recording how close you are.

Tim Pote (01:27:33)
So like doesn't give you everything, it's not as nice as video, agreed. but it it does give you some information.

Eric Johnson (01:27:41)
it's giving the rental companies more power over their equipment and control of not that they're controlling the customer, but it's control and ability to understand what exactly is happening with their rental versus

Eric Johnson (01:28:03)
We don't know and we gotta go drive four hours to see what's going on because once again a lot of rental companies will send out a rental for six months and they'll be like, All right, there you go. And then six months goes by and they're like, I don't know, we haven't heard from the customer. Like they're paying every month, so everything must be fine. But it's hey, we can log in, we got our squawk box, we know that they're blowing things down, we know that there's no no alarms, and then you could pop up a video.

Eric Johnson (01:28:33)
feed and maybe have motion detection or whatever. You know, it sounds like you just piggyback a ring camera off this if you really wanted to. But it's all right, you know, every morning at 7 30 a.m person comes in, they do some stuff. Yep, that's showing up on our squawk box, that's showing up on the dashboard, everything's good to go. So it's just something I was thinking about, but on the sales side, because all rental companies want to rent out their boilers,

Eric Johnson (01:28:59)
you send the quote to the customer. Sometimes you're the only person they call, sometimes it it's somebody else, sometimes it's an emergency, sometimes it's planned. But there is a huge benefit of hey, you can rent our boiler and

Eric Johnson (01:29:14)
Now you can know what your rental boiler is doing because a lot of times even if the customer does have a BMS system and they know what's going on with their boiler room, they don't know what's going on with the rental. So what is what does the process look like we're the rental company. Yeah, we're maybe slightly more expensive than this other person, but our rentals are nicer. by the way, we also have remote monitoring.

Eric Johnson (01:29:37)
What does that process look like for the rental company? I write the PO, rental shows up, service tech shows up to start it, or somebody else shows up to start it that's not even part of the rental company. How how do we get the customer connected to the rental so that they can see what's going on on their cell phone or computer?

Marshall (01:29:59)
We can just add them in, a as a user through the through our we can add them ourselves, right? It's not something that they necessarily have to actively do anything other than once they get the link in their email, follow the process of, you know, follow the link and and log into their dashboard and see it.

Tim Pote (01:30:17)
I mean the dashboard

Tim Pote (01:30:18)
isn't super complicated. There's a if you wanted to do it yourself, you you know, navigate to your boiler, you say add user and then you type in their email, boom, that's it.

Eric Johnson (01:30:27)
So it's like a five minute process.

Tim Pote (01:30:29)
Yeah,

Tim Pote (01:30:29)
if that

Marshall (01:30:29)
So

Marshall (01:30:30)
if you the rental company, yeah, if you the rental company have dropped this boiler off and you're talking to, you know, the actual two or three guys on the ground or gals that are gonna be operating this thing, then yeah, you say, like, who who is it that's gonna be, you know, on the alarm s and it may be none of right? That that's one of the things that we've seen. they're the rental company, this is a multifaceted thing, right? You you by having this, you're watching your own asset and you're able to say, like, is this being taken care of?

Marshall (01:30:55)
Also, I as the rental company am able to be, I don't want you getting the alarms. It's my it's my boiler. And when it alarms out, I'm responsive and I show up, you know, I'm I'll call you. Hey, I see the boiler's down, you know, we've we've got somebody, depending on what it is, you know, maybe it's a a nuisance lockout or something, and it's like, you know, go handle that. But you can as the rental company with eyes on your own boiler, say, like, I see the problem and I've already got a guy on the way, and you're not even coming down on pressure yet, right? The maybe you don't even have

Marshall (01:31:24)
have the the end user customer actually on the enunciation list. But if you wanted to, you could very easily put as many of the local operators as you want on there, yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:31:35)
Yeah. Make make it easy for people to get connected to the rental. And it's also you're not paying for people or like seats where, you know, private equity would make you pay for every seat and email address you add to the to the rental and it you can easily

Tim Pote (01:31:53)
Per device, yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:31:54)
charge your charge your customer or roll the data fees, the monthly data fees into the rental agreement and it's

Marshall (01:32:02)
Exactly.

Eric Johnson (01:32:03)
You could also, I guess, make it optional, but I would just make it the whole hey, if you're renting our trailer, th this is what we're doing 'cause we're monitoring it and you'll be able to monitor it as well. And that's that's a huge p plus because if you have a rental and you don't have any other boilers going on, maybe your whole boiler room's being repaired

Eric Johnson (01:32:22)
You only know that you don't have steam or that a boiler failed. Maybe you have a boiler like three boilers all set up as rentals. You only know that there's an issue is if somebody goes out and walks it and in the dead of winter people are lazy and they don't want to go walk it. Or production goes, Hey, we don't have steam pressure.

Eric Johnson (01:32:43)
sometimes they come in, you know, maybe you only have two shifts and they come in and you don't have steam pressure. That's like, right, now like you have all these issues. So it's having that notification. And so on the notifications, say a boiler fails, you get a text message or email or both, and how quickly after the failure does that happen?

Tim Pote (01:33:07)
It's your choice. each user has control of your own account. How you get notified is up to you. We offer email, we offer SMS. so when you log in for the first time, we obviously have your email. You can go to your preferences, you could say, I want to get email alerts and I want to get text message alerts, and then you put in your phone number, you verify your cell phone, and then from then on you'll get alerted both ways or just one way or however it is.

Tim Pote (01:33:32)
you you prefer to get your alerts. we don't have an SLA on alarms. It depends on things that are a little out of our control, right? If you lose LTE connectivity, we may be delayed in delivering delivering a message. but our general experience is under three or four seconds. So alarm goes off in under three or four seconds you get an alarm. That's and that's where we try to hold it.

Tim Pote (01:34:00)
To we won't do anything to intentionally come out of that bounds in the in the best cases.

Eric Johnson (01:34:05)
And are the alarms repeating? So I get a boiler failure alarm. Is that is it just gonna send one text or can I set up and say, Hey, if these four things happen, I want a text every twenty minutes?

Tim Pote (01:34:22)
Right now it's only the one. But that's a good idea. I like that idea. But what you do get

Marshall (01:34:23)
Now it's just a yeah. But if Yeah. Well

Tim Pote (01:34:30)
every time is the all clear. So you know it's still an alarm because you have never gotten an all clear for this boiler. So you'll see, hey, we're in an alarm state, it'll list all the alarms that you're in. If it's like a burner controller alarm, it'll list but the particular fault code that that you have. And then and then whenever finally everything is fine, you'll get a

Tim Pote (01:34:49)
All clear message after that. So you should expect at least two for every event. And if you didn't get the second one, you can infer that it's still in the

Eric Johnson (01:34:58)
Yeah, I'm just thinking, you know, may maybe a maintenance manager is out mowing his grass and he doesn't you know, maybe he has his phone, maybe he doesn't, and his wife is inside and all of a sudden his phone is going off and it's repeatedly going off, going off, going off, and then she looks at it and it's like, we have, you know, text messages every twenty minutes of saying, Hey boilers and alarm, low steam pressure, low steam pressure versus we got one text and then maybe it gets buried with other notifications and it pulls up

Eric Johnson (01:35:28)
a more specific that you're not always by your phone and checking it or have your email open of like hey there's an issue hey there's an issue hey there's an issue and you know it's something that would have to be regulated but it's also like hey if there's low steam pressure I want a text message every five minutes and does that text message

Eric Johnson (01:35:50)
that goes out to everybody under the account.

Marshall (01:35:54)
It goes out to anybody that's signed up for text messages on that account. Yeah. So you could have, you know, as many people as you want looking at that boiler and then maybe some of them are like, Man, I never check my email, don't even bother with the email. There's some of them are like, you know, I don't even check my text you know, the opposite. but but yeah, you can s it'll go out to any of them. The repeating messages isn't I I think if somebody yeah, if if a customer were interested in that, it doesn't sound like it'd be too hard to set up some kind of, you know

Marshall (01:36:21)
set repeat the message until it clears for whatever interval they were interested in. But right now, yeah, if just out of the box it's a it's a single it's a single message for each alarm plus the all clear when it's done.

Tim Pote (01:36:34)
you can set it by boiler too. It you can say I get alarms for you know, our company has seven boilers, I get alarms for these three and Bill gets alarms for those four, right? Like

Eric Johnson (01:36:45)
So if I have a rental company with three boilers with three squawk boxes, is it three separate dashboards, three separate reports, three separate text messages from three separate numbers and email addresses? What does that look like?

Marshall (01:37:01)
It'll it'll be text messages from the same number but it tells you which asset it's coming from. So like I get all the text messages from you know, I'll get one that says, you know

Marshall (01:37:10)
Company A boiler, whatever, you know, company B boiler, whatever, and they'll it'll tell you which which thing it is. as far as dashboards, you go you're only looking at one boiler at a time, as far as like when I pull the boiler up, I'm I'm looking at the the gauges for that one boiler, I'm looking at the data for you know the the graphs for that one boiler, but all the other boilers are right there on the the sidebar, right? I can I can click on any one and look at the data for it. It's not like if I've got, you know, three boilers, I don't pull

Marshall (01:37:40)
up the dashboard and then see just like a wall of of data just like that's too much to even kind of interpret at that point. It's like I I can go one boiler at a time and look at each of those but but yeah all all of my company's boilers are available right there at the de at the sidebar.

Tim Pote (01:37:57)
Even more

Tim Pote (01:37:57)
than your companies. So, like, let's say you're a rental company, but you also do technician services for you know five other companies, and they all have squawk boxing too. so you'll see your company and your five boilers, and then you'll see company B and their boiler, and company C and their boiler. So it's not it's it's not just what what boilers does my company have? It's what boilers am I on? You know, what boilers do I have access to?

Marshall (01:38:24)
Responsible for any

Tim Pote (01:38:26)
you'll see them all in the same place. You're not swapping accounts. You're not swapping changing between companies or anything like that. It's all in one place for you.

Eric Johnson (01:38:36)
is there competition? Like is there an out of the box and I don't know it now and you don't have to shout it out if you have competition, but

Marshall (01:38:43)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:38:47)
Is is there off the shelf stuff that does this as right now? Because I being from the Boiler World and having this problem that I didn't know how to solve before, like where were you five years ago? is there

Marshall (01:39:01)
I y good yeah, no it's

Eric Johnson (01:39:04)
is there an off the shelf thing right now or is it kind of just everything's kinda custom?

Tim Pote (01:39:12)
We don't have total visibility.

Marshall (01:39:12)
it is

Tim Pote (01:39:13)
we know of one major ish competitor that was it's hard to call the competitor because they're it seems like they're targeting a different space than we are. Whereas, you know, we are basically hey, you can retro into any boiler of your choosing. it's not it's not clear to me, but they seem to be more fixated on certain applications.

Tim Pote (01:39:38)
we all we know of other competitors that don't offer exact like we offer a a full fledged panel that you just wire in. we've seen other people that offer it looks like a panel component that you put that you are responsible for providing all the relays and signal conditioning and all that stuff. so I mean n the answer is like yes ish, but mostly no, really,

Marshall (01:39:59)
I think what Tim was saying was as far as as far as and I I was I've seen a lot of boilers and and I a handful of monitoring systems

Marshall (01:40:10)
I haven't seen one that is here's the panel wired in, it works out the box, right? The ones that I've seen are much more

Marshall (01:40:17)
involved process to get them up and going, may or may not be retrofitable on to any and every make and model out there. some are just, you know, some are specific. They they will only go on that manufacturer's boiler. some of them may come with it already on there, right? But it's not like a product that you can say like I've got this nineteen eighties, you know, Hurst or Allied or, you know, whatever kind of boiler

Marshall (01:40:42)
That I want to put this thing on, I'm gonna call and order a panel with these specifications and throw it on. Now I I haven't seen one of those yet.

Eric Johnson (01:40:52)
Are are you selling all the data to some company in India?

Marshall (01:40:58)
We we are not. we'll tie that back to we're running this company for for a a number of reasons, but one of the main ones is 'cause we have a particular way we'd like to to see a company run and yes, selling data to foreign entities is is not on our to do list.

Eric Johnson (01:41:16)
Yeah, it's

Tim Pote (01:41:16)
You know, it's funny because

Tim Pote (01:41:16)
this is one of those things that like, you know, we we've been asked about like SOC two compliance and that kind of thing.

Tim Pote (01:41:21)
I'll get asked about that from time to time. The the the data coming across this isn't exactly like it's not your email, it's not your phone number, it's not your social security number, right? This is not like high target, high value targets for for people who want to steal stuff.

Tim Pote (01:41:40)
I assume that it would be valuable to somebody, like potentially boiler manufacturers or something like that, to know which boilers are going down. But but yes, like like Marshall said, we are not we are not now nor will we ever be in the business of selling data. We're in the business of selling a product that people love.

Eric Johnson (01:41:59)
Yeah, I was just watching a YouTube video on a TV product. I'm sure they all do it, but somebody said that the cost of TVs is low because they end up selling your data and this T V manufacturer had since they're public, their public line item, they made more from selling data than they did from actually manufacturing TVs.

Marshall (01:42:25)
I wish I could say that

Tim Pote (01:42:25)
I think I heard that.

Marshall (01:42:26)
I'm shocked, but I am not.

Eric Johnson (01:42:29)
But that's that's the that's the new way of hey we need to make charge subscription fees, charge all this endless stuff, charge all this data, extract, extract, extract, and then you kinda lose. It's like, well, what does the customer actually want? We want to just monitor our boiler in a very simple fashion. And the boiler industry is very, very small, not a lot of money in it.

Eric Johnson (01:42:57)
So there's I don't expect any big players to just come in and start doing all this random stuff, but yeah, as our previous conversation in the beginning, when I say, Hey, I'm in boilers and what do you do? Like I just for my church I just joined this like small group for entrepreneurs and you know, they were like realtors, restaurant owners, you know, all the normal stuff, insurance, whatever. And they're like, What do you do? I'm like I

Eric Johnson (01:43:27)
Do training for boiler systems. Do you know what a boiler is? And they're like, No, that is so interesting. We we nobody ever does that. We we haven't ever heard of that. And I'm like, Yeah, because it's like it's a necessary thing that makes the world go round, but it's not if you open up Instagram and you don't see some influencer flexing a boiler, unless it's me.

Marshall (01:43:48)
Yeah.

Tim Pote (01:43:49)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:43:50)
I'll

Eric Johnson (01:43:50)
I'll be the one that's flexing the boiler. But that's that's not normal, and I don't ever think it's gonna be normal.

Eric Johnson (01:43:56)
normal because the industry is so like there's nothing sexy about the industry to the outsiders and that's when when you have homegrown companies of like Squawk Box Alarms or even Boilearn

Eric Johnson (01:44:08)
It's a problem that has grown from within and you know, you're not industry outsiders that are like, How do we extract from this industry? And we think we can do it by seeing this problem and extracting, extracting. You have seen the problem and then a year and a half ago you incorporated and you're like, Hey, how do we actually solve this problem at the least amount of cost and least amount of headache to the customer and actually make their lives better versus

Eric Johnson (01:44:37)
How do we just profit and buy private islands and extract, extract, extract? And that's why I like the boiler industry actually is well that's pretty much all I've ever known is the industry is a bunch of smaller companies. And by smaller I mean they're not five hundred million dollar companies. And

Eric Johnson (01:45:00)
While the industry is very fragmented, a lot of people know everybody and the fragmentation is what makes us strong is we don't need a roll up where the industry becomes three companies. Three service companies can't service all the boilers in United States. And having a huge roll up would be a terrible, terrible thing. But if we

Eric Johnson (01:45:22)
as an industry go, hey, you know, this squawk box alarms thing, this is really great. And a lot of companies get on board with it. It's hey, how do we solve this problem for a very cheap, relative cheap costs and squawk box alarms is homegrown versus this outside company that comes in and is trying to extract out of the boiler industry and how do we make this as painful as possible for the customers once our equipment is installed and then we start, charging

Eric Johnson (01:45:51)
subscription fees and doing all this stuff and adding and adding and adding more and more and more and all of a sudden five years down the line companies are like, We just sold thirty of these squawk boxes or fifty and all of a sudden now they want to change up the how the pricing model works and how this works, and it doesn't make sense anymore. And now you gotta tell your customers of like, hey, like, you know, cost is going up, cost is going up, cost is going up. And I I think people, I don't know about you guys, but people are tired of

Eric Johnson (01:46:21)
subscriptions and this endless fees and endless this and endless that and they're like what are we paying for?

Tim Pote (01:46:29)
I mean, that's part

Marshall (01:46:29)
Yeah.

Tim Pote (01:46:30)
of why we w wanna make it very clear why you're paying. I mean, so I said earlier, right? We don't charge by the data input that you have. We charge by just the fact that you have a boiler at all, because that's how our that's the cost to us. That's how the cost is structured. And so we structure our pricing around what actually costs us costs us money. To what you're saying earlier, I mean that's exactly also why I like this industry. I mean, I've never been in the boiler industry up to now, but the one of the problems I had in the software industry is

Tim Pote (01:46:59)
Yeah, just the SAS model in general and like how the the kind of skeezy ways that people find to make money and the just just general lack of care for the end user experience. As long as, you know, signups are growing, we don't care that the product is slow. We don't care that, that it it's gotten worse. It got better for this ten million dollar company. So I don't care that this two million dollar company has a worse experience, right? these are the

Tim Pote (01:47:25)
Kinds of things that's always bothered me personally. I I think we should just make a a really great product and this is a very straightforward problem and we should have a straightforward solution to solve it.

Marshall (01:47:37)
think the problem like the the fact that this comes from right I was I was a service tech at at shout out allied boiler right my dad's company and like as I'm rolling around doing the service tech thing and smashing my head against problems and wondering like how can I solve this what if I could see this what like that's those questions are where the idea like where this thing originated this is a

Marshall (01:48:03)
this came from service technicians, right? As I'm rolling around, not just me, but the other service technicians. Like, what if we could do this? Like what wouldn't it be like having we we're gonna give ourselves superpowers if we can see these things before we even show up, right? And so it's like it came from boiler service world.

Marshall (01:48:22)
It wasn't like you know, a a tech company startup some of the things that I've seen in the industry, I feel like they were developed by teams of people that have never actually seen a boiler. It was like, I'm gonna describe a boiler and describe what we would like to see, and then maybe I'll draw you a picture of one and then I'd like you to make me a monitoring system for it. And and it's I don't know, frustrating. And so like the fact that this is the questions that led to the development of this are coming from

Marshall (01:48:51)
technicians' brains, I think, is is kind of apparent in the things that we're looking at and though and just the way that you interact with it as either a a customer or a technician.

Tim Pote (01:49:02)
And

Tim Pote (01:49:02)
Marshall and I have had in terms of like extracting money, Marshall and I have had many, many, many conversations about how it is we plan to drive down the cost further as soon as we can. Like we aren't in a place right now where we can make the cheapest product imaginable just because we don't have the marketing and the sales reach that we need to make that a viable business strategy. But the plan is to eventually go f you know, go get the little

Tim Pote (01:49:30)
Breweries, go get the little laundromats, these places that desperately need more oversight, but really can't afford a full-fledged monitoring system. Like what what can we do to to get into those places is a question that we're constantly batting back and forth.

Eric Johnson (01:49:48)
Yeah, it's the big thing I see here is Squawkbox allows somebody with nineteen seventy-five Cleaver Books boilers with Honeywell seventy eight hundred controls, the same visibility as somebody with a brand new Siemens LMV5 system with brand new boilers and burners. You don't have any

Eric Johnson (01:50:11)
manufacturer alliances where it's well in order to get this monitoring system you have to have this manufacturer's brand of whatever or hey we don't we don't talk to this system or we don't talk to that system. It's agnostic as far as manufacturers and it doesn't matter the age of it. It's not like hey after twenty ten or before twenty ten, well we can't talk to anything like that because

Eric Johnson (01:50:38)
while the amount of data will vary as to what the equipment is, you you have solutions for somebody once again that has a school from the sixties and they don't have air conditioning or anything and they just wanna know that the school is hot and that they're not sending a maintenance person on the weekends twice a day to check that the boilers are still on.

Eric Johnson (01:51:03)
it provides a very quick solution or even if you take care of a school district as a service company, it is hey, we don't have to send somebody to go around and do all this stuff and they didn't go for our full out build out from our controls team.

Eric Johnson (01:51:20)
It's very easy to s sell and implement to the customers versus like the full on build out all or nothing and or hey, you gotta replace your boilers or replace your burners or do a full retrofit

Tim Pote (01:51:31)
Yeah,

Eric Johnson (01:51:32)
So if somebody listened to this and says, All right, squawk box alarms, this sounds interesting, what is the next step? How do they get in contact with you?

Marshall (01:51:40)
you can find me on LinkedIn. You can email us. I'm Marshall at squawkboxalarms dot com. I can yeah, we can we can get in touch, either yeah, probably either through email or LinkedIn and I can hand out my phone number once we've communicated at least once. But

Tim Pote (01:52:01)
Yeah I'm Tim at squawkboxalarms.com And if you go to our website, squawkboxlealarms.com, there at the bottom there's a there's a form you can fill out. That's the probably the easiest way to get in touch with us, you know, if you don't already have us on LinkedIn.

Eric Johnson (01:52:13)
Yep. So go to squawkboxalarms dot com and you service all of the United States. You Yep.

Tim Pote (01:52:19)
Yes, whole United States.

Eric Johnson (01:52:21)
So you can ship a panel anywhere and then you have support.

Eric Johnson (01:52:26)
Obviously if they have questions for that. So anywhere in the United States, if you are looking for remote monitoring for a rental fleet, rental boilers, or for customer sites that don't have a full build out of a BMS with remote monitoring, this is a simple solution that is relatively low cost and it is a company that is homegrown from within the boiler industry that you can trust and be a partner with. So I appreciate you guys coming on and

Eric Johnson (01:52:55)
testing out the first three person podcasts on Boiler Wild and happy to see what you guys do in the next couple years with Squawk Box Alarms.

Marshall (01:53:04)
Thanks a bunch for having us.

Tim Pote (01:53:05)
Yeah, thanks Eric. It's been a absolute pleasure.

86. Remote Boiler Monitoring with Marshall and Tim of Squawkbox Alarms

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