Eliminator Fire Extinguisher Is A Life Saver

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Welcome. The trials of first responders in their families aren't easy Enduring the Badge Podcast is building the community to help them now introducing your host, back by 30 years of experience as a first responder, Jerry Dean Lund.

My very special guest today are Randy and Mike, and we're going to talk about something that's gonna disrupt the fire service with a product that they have. And it's incredible technology that is changing the way we fight fires, right with fire extinguishers. How you guys doing today?

Great. How about you?

I'm doing very well, doing very well. Thank you, Randy. And Mike, tell us a little bit about the company.

Well, it's a interesting new and exciting journey we've been on. And in a nutshell, what we wanted to do is to provide the end user with a product that they would feel comfortable with inspecting, maintaining, and then in the event of a fire, know how to operate, and really put that responsibility in their hands, and give them basically the simpler mousetrap, you know, traditional fire extinguishers, they've been around for a long period of time, stored pressure extinguishers, about 60-65 years, and they've stood the test of time. But with that, they they're also come with a mirage of code and regulations that I'm in the current business now of servicing and maintaining traditional fire extinguishers. And from our experience out in the field, and what we saw out there, speaking to our customers and seeing the results, and sometimes the devastation of the fire, we decided that it was time, and then we would take on this task to basically develop new technology for the end user.

Yeah, it's pretty impressive product, which, if you're watching on YouTube, you can kind of see some of them sitting there in the background behind Randy. Randy who did who discovered this extinguisher like why did they think was important to change the extinguisher design?

As in from traditional fire extinguishers?

Yeah, changes from a traditional to the eliminator that you have behind you, what happened is, it was just our experience of being out in the field, and then the feedback that we were getting, and to be honest with you, just the overwhelming task to maintain the traditional store pressure extinguishers. And that design, which has been around for a very long period of time. It's a steel cylinder, and the dry chemical, what they call map, it's ammonium phosphate that's filled to the top. And then it's pressurized with dry nitrogen. And they're there fittings and valves and O rings and things like that, that we have to maintain to make sure that the product will operate as it was designed and tested in UL. So there's there's a lot of parameters around that. But that very design of the product in that it's under pressure. Because of that they required they wanted to make sure that the product would operate as it was tested into tested, I mean, it's a underwriters Laboratory, which is UL and you'll see it maybe on a TV or a blow dryer that you all mark where it's a circle with the initials UL as an underwriters laboratory. And that's what as US service companies were tasked to maintain and being out in the field, what we would find are situations where if you go to use the extinguisher the majority of the chemical, then sometimes you know there's two or three inches still left in the fire extinguisher, whatever that may be, there was moisture from time to time that was able to get into the unit or and or there was some compaction or packing with unit so it it didn't perform as it was designed to. And then in addition, a traditional fire extinguisher you have the excuse me the valve, the gauge, the pull pin and the O ring and the hose retainer there all on the left side, okay. And the majority of the population are right handed. And whenever we go out and we'll do a fire demo and you if you just start from right there, you know the company is doing their due diligence to train their staff on how to operate an extinguisher and they have trouble just doing that which the fire extinguishers are. Their tagline is the first line of defense and you're required to have them in your business, every 75 feet travel distance. And the end user there is fumbling with operating it and what we found when we were doing live fire demos and we were Do a little different, we would take a wall out temporary wall and actually hang it. So that we would reenact what it would be like for somebody for the layman to come across an emergency and have to use a fire extinguisher. So they grabbed the extinguisher. And what we realized that we didn't know it right away, but some people would just operate it perfectly, you know, and we do that, you know, the pass, and, you know, sweep and all that and occupier now. And then a lot of people, the majority of them would have trouble just trying to reach and operate the pulpit and release it. Well, what happened is, we realized that the gauge and the label and everything was placed in the original design the left side, so you're holding with your left hand, and you have your free right hand that you would eat with or whatever, you may use a fork, or reaching over the top of it and trying to release the pull pin. You hold it, you can't see the gauge, or the instructions on operated and you're fighting with the hose, a left hander freehand comes over holds it with the right breaks, the pull pin can see the gauge the instructions released pose by the fire, like Wow, all the manufacturers kind of duplicate each other. And they've designed all these fire extinguishers for left hand bias. And a fire doubles in size about every eight seconds. So the last thing you want is the end user fumbling with just to get it to operate, put the chemical on the fire. So as we went along on our journey, we just started making notes about issues that we want to do address. And we had many conversations I was actually appointed to the out here in California, it's called Cal safe. I was a southern director. And when we bring these conversations up with those folks, and you got to understand the structure, you have service organizations that are for profit, that are upholding what the code regulators the HA's are enforcing. So it's it's really a complex system of the industry and how it's structured. So the bottom line is, we couldn't really get anywhere with the committee's to address these type of issues. So we find he's just decided, and what Ron really brought that to a head was an apartment fire that had happened. And my brother was called to go over there and follow up with my brother, Rudy, he runs the the server side of the business. And we said, well, we don't serve as that facility. And they said, Well, that's why we want you to come over there. And he showed up it as he as he pulled in the parking lot, there were two body bags that were being brought down the stairs, and two children who died in a fire.

And he starts to look at the extinguishers and take them apart at the time. I don't want to get too technical, but there was an internal tag that we used to fix to the inside of an extinguisher and add our license and the initials of the service technician and the date that it was serviced. And they took that away. Almost a decade ago, we're now we do a verification of color that you see on the outside, it's a ring on the top of an extinguisher that I'm sure you're aware of that demonstrates that the the head has been serviced. Well, these extinguisher didn't have the verification collar on it, and they still had this internal tag on it, which shows that they had not been inspected, and they were just changing the tag from the outside, not doing their job thoroughly. And as he was looking at it, all the extinguishers, there was 18 of them that did they malfunction and didn't perform right, a gentleman pull up in the vehicle. And he was very angry. And he started, you know, cussing out my brother. And he said, Well, we're not the company that didn't come to find out this was the uncle of these children who had passed away. So that was when we decided we've got to do something. And we want to go on this journey. And we found 16 issues with the traditional fire extinguisher that we addressed in the new technology, stemming from left hand bias to gauges, the gauges fail all the time, if they get bumped or fall off the wall until the gauges in the green that just a little wire, it'll break or dislodge and it'll stay in the green. So for the end user or an HJ, they really don't know if it actually has pressure other than to fire it off. So that's a little counterproductive. In addition, the entire design a reason why we're in the business is to keep the chemical and fluid state because it's constantly under pressure. There's no way to tell on a traditional store pressure fire exchanger. What is the condition of the chemical in addition doesn't have pressure other than to fire it off. So that's why our existence in the in the business to maintain portable store pressure fire extinguishers in addition to all the others. So with that, that's why we wanted to see what we can, what we can create and make a more simpler product with a lot of thought originally on the code, the regulations and there's a lot that you have to meet in regards to the UL standard. What we did is we sat down with all these standards. And we kind of want to navigate away to where we made a product that was really user friendly and designed for the user, not specifically designed just to meet the standards at UL and the code, the regulations out there, really produce a device for the end user that they would be comfortable to handle. It's not under pressure. It's it's not metal, like all traditional fire extinguishers. It's made of nylon material, and so on, and so forth. So that that's where it came from. And like I say, 16 issues, or a lot of issues and the left hand biased, the no gauge the no pressure, we eliminated that we eliminated that we eliminated this, and we're talking, we'll call it the Eliminator, obviously, it eliminates fire. And that's that's kind of how the name came to be also. Yeah, 

Randy, I think one thing we talk about innovation. And if you just copy what you have, you're really not innovating, you're doing something different. That's challenges with codes, because codes are about following the rules and guidelines. And so a very simple example with the eliminator is it's the nylon product, and it doesn't rust, but the code says you need to inspect for us.

You don't need, that's a problem.

And I like in it to the Tesla, I took my car in California to get it emissions tested. So we did that in the past. If you have a Tesla, and you brought it in the fall with code to get the emission tested that you can't do it. So innovation many times comes up with better ways to eliminate work, like eliminating checking for rust. But then it changes the code. So but all the basic codes about distances, type of fire extinguisher different type of fires, all those things this meets 100%. But it's simplified the technology to make it easier to service to make it easier to use while still living the intent of the code.

Yeah, so I want to go back a little bit. And, you know, why do you think that fire extinguisher is built to be, you know, with this left hand bias? How did that just that just randomly happen? I mean, they built it?

We've checked with a lot of manufacturers in my career, I became the messenger here with a PR badger and badger had about 1200 distributors at the time, nationwide. And I was like one of 100 that they would consider a massive distributor because of the volume and the business that we were doing. So I had the opportunity to have direct access to the President, Vice President. And I also knew Ned Payne, who created MRX, which is the large commercial manufacturer. And in speaking to all of them, no one could really pinpoint where it came from, I honestly think it was probably a left handed engineer who just thought I have this opportunity, I'm going to design something for me, you know, that would that would work. Kind of like somebody with the scissors, you know, that came out with the left left hand bias scissors where the majority of them are all right handed. I think it's as simple as that we've never been able to identify it. And some of the industry will say, well how it hangs on the wall. And when you pull it off the wall, that's they feel that you're you're picking up the weight with whatever your your strong arm and that's where the right hand came from. But what happens when they're operating it just with anything, whether you shoot a gun, or whatever you're operating, you lead with your strong hand. So you pick it up, yes, with your right hand. But we see them in the process. And if you've gone out and done your fire demos, you'll see them transferred over to their left hand, a predominantly right hand person, and then they start reaching and doing all their activity with their main hand and arm.

Yes, this

No one really stood out for us because it's like, from the get go, the actual design is a little foreign for the majority of the population that you're going to come across.

Right? And you want to people to be able to use this and do it naturally. They don't have time to correct excuse me to fumble things like you're saying fires doubling, you know, rapidly and if they're fumbling with the pen and the different mechanisms and stuff like that, you know, they're gonna find themselves in a in a situation with a much larger fire in front of them, maybe something that they could have put out, you know, in a quicker time then right quicker time than they you know them playing with it now. So, there's that that you've eliminated and you've also eliminated you know, this really important thing you're talking about in this fire where the the map the actual internal product that is sprayed out for those listeners that are probably aren't super tech savvy is getting compacted down into the fire extinguisher. And this has happened in at businesses and especially things that are driven down over the road, right, like things that are in trucks and boats and, you know, SUV are off road type vehicles and things like that this map inside is getting compacted. Is that correct?

That's correct. expecially on vehicles. And we have you have your listeners, anyone have any experience with fire extinguishers? I think if they reflect and look back, and actually think about the weight after the discharge the extinguisher, maybe they didn't have a service company coming out right away. And think about, did it feel completely empty at the time? Was it completely discharged, you know. So that's, that's definitely something that everybody needs to look at, look forward.

And as Randy mentioned earlier, this is a complex fire extinguisher ecosystem, there's a lot of pieces to it. And so, you know, I've learned that there's two kinds of compaction one is packing caused by vibration, and that settles out. And it packs. The other one is by moisture and caking. So if you get moisture in a fire extinguisher, whether it's been because it's rusted, because it's metal, or because you did the six year tear down outside, and you had a high moisture level, and the powder gets discharged, and then captured and brought back in, so it's exposed to a lot of moisture. And you have the phenomenon of caking. And so both of those cause a problem with discharge and make sense, right, if you don't get all the powder out on the fire, you don't have a difficulty putting out the fire. And a lot of people who don't use fire extinguishers, or don't shoot them off, don't really know that or understand it. And this is one of the behavior changes, culture changes that we've got, we're dealing with as we bring this to market. So the fire fighters, many of them get these issues, and they tell us about them. So we had a fire chief in Houston, say, you know, we'd serve as our own fire extinguishers. But we know because of the humidity in Houston, when we service it, we get caking. And we get gloves coming out of fire extinguisher when we use it. And that's a problem. So firefighters don't like to use fire extinguishers, because they're not sure if packing or caking are happening, therefore they don't trust them. But most of the other public don't realize that including many of the fire service companies. And so it's an education process of how do we make people aware of this critical issue? And how do we come up with solution with it. And this is what Randy and the development team did over 16 years, he has come up with a whole list of these things to help deal with the fundamental issues that come in with a product design and also the service challenges as a result of the product design.

So in inside the eliminator is a way that it will say let's say blends up the the the map inside is not the best way to put it, that's probably very, 

I don't know how well you can see, there's actually a wheel here on the bottom. And you just need to physically turn it over. And this is the query just for demonstration purposes to show what's going on in the inside. But you turn that three times in the eternal with this way, although we catch it, but what happens is it just becomes almost like liquid form on the inside. You can see how it's moving around there. So you as an end user, now have the ability to know that your product is ready for any emergency you might come across. So you can see MCL that's moving around in there. Yeah, yeah. And then you can kind of see that the paddles or the blades. And that's it. This right here 123 and turn it back over. And you check for the tamper seal here. And here. Here's the external co2 cartridge, the pressurizes unit, we just did what's equivalent to a six year tear down. That would take you about 15 to 20 minutes to do leave a loaner, take it out to your service vehicle or take it back to the shop. We just did it right here live then contaminate the power.

Right, right, no, no contamination of powder with you know to the outside air to bring it up moisture to you know how that start taking clumping and stuff like that.

Correct. And then the other things we would see because of the stored pressure design and say there's a forklift or they're in a vehicle we have all the time where we called out. When an extinguisher accidentally discharged inside a vehicle, it can impede the driver's vision, they can have an accident that cannot physically happen with this product, we've eliminated it a forklift. And we have videos on our website, they run into extinguishers all the time. It is literally like a bomb explosion going off inside the facility. If it's a food packing processing plant, everything is shut down. For some days, to clean it up. A forklift can puncture this, but you go over with a broom and a dustpan and sweep it up and get a reload kit. And you're back in business within five minutes. A drastic change in the way traditional fire extinguishers are looked at, within a facility environment.

Yeah, that's costly. Just shut down your your business or, or have it go off inside a cab of a truck in crash and things like that. So yeah, this is a it's seems to make it very smart for people to use this easy, it's super easy in all the ways to use the eliminator.

Well, this is interesting from a safety standpoint, and when you talk about certification of someone to be able to service these fire extinguishers. So in California, there's 82 pages of code about how to service a fire extinguisher and maintain it. And it's very serious, because it's 195 pounds of pressure there. And you have to be very careful about how you deal with that. And if you drop it, it could break the top and explode as Randy said. So there's this mindset with people over time that fire extinguishers are dangerous because they're under pressure. And you've got to get lots of training, or you've got to have 10-25 years of experience in order to be able to do this. So the eliminator team went to a cartridge co2 disposable. So that's under pressure only when you need it. So you are met. So suddenly, the maintenance of it is much easier because you're not dealing with high pressure, the pressure is stored in a exchangeable disposable cartridge. You don't have to discharge it, you don't even have to open it up, you just turn the wheel and so all those things suddenly change the service requirements. And it eliminates a lot of specialty equipment in order to do the work. But most people don't understand that. So we have a big education process to help people understand, hey, this technology makes it safer and easier for someone to maintain the extinguisher solo perform as it was under the UL test for the ratings that it got.

Jerry, the other thing you can ask yourself, if you think about it, what would you prefer to have around your business your staff and your customers and or your family at your home? A device that's fully pressurized, or something that's non pressurized only in the event you need it for an emergency? I mean that yeah, answer pretty simple,

Right? I think also one thing about the eliminator two is right, the way it's it's built in it can expel more powder than a traditional fire extinguisher.

Is that correct? The reason why is because if you're doing your maintenance in your preventative maintenance on it, what the the wheel and agitating it and stirring it basically allows all the chemicals to discharge in the unit. And it gives you that last opportunity. Very seldom is a fire right next to where the extinguisher is installed. So you can you can remove the extinguisher and on your way to the fire, give it maybe a few turns. And then that puts you in a position to exhaust all of the agent on the fire. And at the end of the day. That's why the fire extinguisher there it's in its place is to provide that user with a device to help them either get out of the building, attack a small startup fire or whatever they may come across. And that that's really it in a nutshell is to give them the ability to discharge as much chemical as they can. And from our experience and what we there just results at UL when we when you fire off the eliminator there are only fumes that are left just the walls of it or you know there's a little residue left over it's it's an amazing firefighting device.

Yeah. And what do you find in a traditional fire extinguisher when you try to expel everything how much is left in there? 

Yeah, depending on the environment we've seen, you know sometimes half an inch left, which is pretty good, up to sometimes half the chemicals still left in it. In my service business, part of the reason which drove us to redesign an extinguisher, the way California is structured, is there's like 600 service companies that are licensed. They're alphabetically lettered by the type of service that we can perform on portable fire extinguishers in a company can do everything, co2, clean agent will units, ABC, co2, and so on and so forth. And there's only about 50 of those companies in the state of California, their brick and mortar, the state fire marshal is structured in a way that, that a company will provide a reciprocal letter to the other 500 plus companies that are their letter designation is B, C, and so on and so forth. So they're limited on the type of extinguishers that they can maintain. So with that, they have to bring the product to us to provide hydrostatic test and for your listeners, that's where you pressurize the vessel. Because it's constant under pressure, you have to test the integrity of the cylinder. So we had about 35 companies that were coming to us that on a weekly basis, we were doing these pressure tests. And this is early on late 90s, early 2000s, we've been in business over 35 years, when they would come. And I would see well wait a minute, we have all kinds of different brands here. And it's our responsibility to not miss the chemical, even though they're all ABC, they're all specifically tested at UL to get their rating, and how they're specifically flow rates and things like that discharge rates are all specific to where they mill and fill their specific brands. With that chemical, and all the particle size and everything changes us from a service company, we can't tell the difference by looking at it. But it adversely affects the performance, when it's getting you a listing that you have to have in the first place to even have it in place in a required area and business. So with that said, I thought well, wait a minute, we don't want to take the liability and responsibility of keeping this chemical separated. I asked the owners of the other service companies, would you discharge the extinguishers and bring the empty cylinders to us that they would be responsible for separating the chemical to the proper OEM manufacturers. And then they would bring them in we're talking 15 To 30 to 50 to 100, at a time that they're delivering to our facility, times 35 companies or so on, they showed up the cylinders here, in my shop guys will come in and they say look at this, visually, this much chemical, this much chemical, maybe three inches of chemical are still left in the cylinder. So we go in and we call the owner, all example Mike Mike, I asked you to put the fire out these extinguishers and he said we did. That's as much chemical they were come out right then we're like, whoa, whoa, we had to design an apparatus on the end of a hose, pressurized hose to gouge out the hardened chemical in the bottom of these extinguishers to get it cleaned out. That along with the death of the children at the apartment, seeing rusty extinguishers, I literally stopped that business model. And we no longer provide third party hydrostatic testing for any companies. And that's when we started on part of the journey to bring the eliminator to market. Because we My God, if we're experiencing this what is going on out there in the field.

Right, that's, it's pretty, pretty incredible that you had to design a tool to get in there and clean out the extinguishers that are supposed to be being fired off. So yeah, the dependability of a traditional fire extinguisher is just getting less and less over time. And right.

But it shouldn't be a product that should rise and be questionable. You know, right. A fire extinguisher is much like your spare tire in your car. Let's face it. A lot of people don't think about it. It's a compliance issue. A business owner has to have it to meet the requirement. A homeowner might have it if they think about it, and they happen to buy it and they put it under their sink or something. So it's very similar to a spare tire on your car. How often do you check your spare tire? Does that pressure look at it or is it dusted off? Well, then you're in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone signal and you get a flat tire in the middle of the night. All of a sudden, that's the most important thing you can have. I relate those two, they're very similar. That's the very you want the fire extinguisher to be able to operate and why provide a device, that the end user has the ability simply to inspect and maintain it at a much higher level than a traditional fire extinguisher. The way it is structured now, it's almost like if you have a fire, you need to call your service company out to put the fire out, because they're the ones that are constantly handling it, and maintaining it. And I know there's going to be businesses that are still going to want to have that third party provider come in. And by all means, we will embrace that I still own and operate our service company. So if the if the business position is they would still like to have that service organization come in there, what we do would like to see is have them take our certification course that they're knowledgeable about the product. Obviously, yeah, they know exactly what to do, even though it's simple. There are there are some steps that we would like them to have knowledge on how to maintain it properly, to keep it in the ready.

And then and this they eliminators available worldwide.

Right now it's in United States, just in the United States. Okay. On different. Go ahead.

It's interesting that you say that originally, when we started off prior to the manufacturer with now, I have taken a couple of trips overseas, that I had never been there before. And when I go off in the airport, I noticed there were two extinguishers in every location, we're in the United States, we only have one. And I got a tour of a couple of different manufacturers. And not only did they have to this was an Asia, there were these small, built females, they were in the manufacturing plant in over on the wall or not one but 220 pound extinguishers, these gals probably weighed maybe 95 pounds. And automatically I thought to myself, how are they even going to handle that fire extinguisher? And why am I seeing two everywhere? I don't know if you've traveled over there. But I was having on I was speaking to one of the chairmen who are Chairman over there. They call him chairman, but they're the CEO equivalent here. And he was speaking Mandarin, Mandarin. And it was through interpretation. And I started questioning why do you have to extinguish in every location, he literally sat on the edge of his seat and I thought he was yelling at me. And his sons later told me that the government had decided they had a lot of failures with extinguishers, because there's a lot of humidity over there. We'll put two in every location, maybe one will work. In addition, it's like Mike was talking about meeting the COVID regulation in that manufacturing facility, they put this oversize extinguisher where there was no wherever that small young that gal was going to be able to operate and pull that extinguisher off the wall and go fire actually fire it under fire. I mean, there was always been that disconnect of what the cola requirements asking for. But what about the end user and the reality of what's really going on out there? Yeah, but that's where we want to bridge that gap.

Yeah, it sounds like you really have I mean, it's such a cool, cool product from the research I've done with it. And you know, if you're watching on YouTube and stuff, you can see it in the background. And it's just really simple, easy to use, what's the weight difference between this the same is the same.

Yeah, traditional five pounder was run on 11 pounds, and we're right in there, believe it or not, we actually have one pound, additional, normal Vikander. And we did that in a way the design, I can show you in here, grab this one. The design is actually tapered. And it's tapered by design. So it's built up to the top here. And then there's a void here in the top. So when you when you invert it, the chemical actually falls into this void area here. So that that way, when you're turning it over and you're servicing it, all the chemical is an area to move around in. Does that make sense? Yeah, yes. Yeah. So you're in a position to be able to manipulate the chemical. And then with that taper design, it's like gravity bed, if you may, okay, it's in a position to where you're able to constantly design was all about keeping that chemical flowing.

Yeah, so the design of this is there's no accidents, right? It was intentionally all these things are intentionally designed to give a great end product to the end user. Correct, simple and dependable.

Even when it comes to the wall bracket, the wall bracket, it's able to cradle it so when you're doing the inspection, it swivels on the bracket, so you're able to just turn it over and invert and turn the wheel here and then swivel it right back.

Very nice, very nice. And then

real quick, this material here that is the hose retainer, it is actually going to dark material, so it charges and grabs the light. And from that, again, our experiences when we've gone behind fires, one of the first thing that's killed is the power. So there might be a fire on one room, but you go into the other room to grab the extinguisher and there's, it's in the middle of the night, there's no power, you can't locate anything, you're bumping into things. Well, this actually charges and it glows in the dark, so you can identify and find the fire extinguisher.

Wow. Yeah, I did not know that about the, but they eliminated that is pretty cool. They've you've thought about all seems like

we've tried to you know, just just put all the technology in the innovation here. And, and really allow for the first time and the portable extinguisher industry to allow innovation to stand up front?

Yes, yes. What is the cost for an eliminator?

This this size here is a 149. Retail.

Okay, so it's a little bit more expensive than a traditional extinguisher. It is. It is. But there's a reason for that.

Correct. I mean, we're the design, the innovation that's here. And also, if you bring the service in house, you gain some of that ROI or return on your investment in regards to if you're going to take the responsibility to have your own staff maintain it, which would be the same individuals that are doing the monthly inspections now. So that's where you're also gaining your upfront cost Yes, or higher. But over time you you'll gain with that investment.

Right. And plus, you gain dependability, which is the most important thing.

Absolutely. Mike always says you can't put a price on life safety and our mission truly is protecting lives and saving property. Because we go out weekly on calls where a fire extinguisher sub malfunction, or they were misused or the operating properly. And that's really what our mission that we're on here.

Yeah, no, I like it, it's, it's great. I would, I want to see that product being used in all the all the places, you know, manufacture in vehicles, I think it would be, you know, a scene, you have an Instagram where I've seen pictures that on boats and stuff like that, I feel like on boats would probably find a higher rate of failure probably then seems like anywhere. To me far as a traditional extinguisher.

You know, we did a couple of test studies, we mounted it on the boat, you know, especially when you get some of the rough waters. And yeah. And you would be really surprised about rockhard, that chemical gets in there. Even Even with this device, you have to really work at manipulating the wheel and going back and forth with it. And then it's it's a free flowing. But again, we're giving the end user the ability to do that. Who knows what's happening on the store pressure, what I can tell you when we've gone out to some locations, and we go to fire off the extinguisher and we go to take the valve off. There's a siphon tube on the inside. And sometimes I think there was one just put up yesterday on Instagram, where the service technician went on thread and it just busted right off from the pickup to well a lot of times what we'll do is we'll and thread it. And it literally the chemical is holding the pickup tube so tight that it on threads right from the top. And you can't even pull the pickup to that's supposed to draw the chemical out. While we're, we're it's you know, it's almost like semen in there. And I know that there's been several pictures posted on social media of extinguishers that have been cut open. We were at a college tradeshow in Ohio. And we were there with a booth about a year year and a half ago now with with COVID. And one of the fire marshals came up and he says I was inspecting one of the colleges and they had a powder fire. And I felt some weight to him. And they said, Oh, we fired it off. And the less left. They said, Could we take this with us? And they said sure. So he went back and they cut open the extinguisher. And on the inside, they expose that it was almost like concrete on it. Internal of the dry chemical. And then he had sent those pictures over to us and said, Keep doing what you're doing. You're you're on a good path there. Yeah, definitely.

Yes story. I think it's really a great one. And you know, innovation doesn't do anything until people adopt it and change their behavior and do something differently. And so we have all these stories here, but there's a lot of non invented here and people that don't want to change the businesses they've been in for a long time. And most people are not familiar with this things that Randy's talking about. Right people fortunately don't have to use a fire extinguisher just like a spare tire because they haven't had an emergency. So Randy's had all these great stories, but many times the people that be, quote councils and stuff say, well, that's a one off really doesn't happen. So he said, you know, we need to begin to get some data on fire extinguishers and fire extinguisher performance, so that we can combine the stories that Randy had that led to the development of these breakthrough technologies along with a sense for how prevalent is it? Right, right, thank you know that that's what really helped drive the improvements over time the innovation and smoke detectors. So before they were a one year battery, and that's all well, you didn't even have them. So they did a big campaign to get that in place. But then when they got the data on it, they found that people were changing the batteries. And then they did more studies. And they said, you know, it's a certain group of people that are more likely to do that I went to a NFPA conference workshop about this as well. And then it evolved to 10 year batteries. And now it involves the hard wiring it. But because they had the data, they could identify where the issues were and take action to fix it. Same with sprinkler systems, they went through a similar innovation kind of process because they got the data well today, one of the things that we're a big proponent of is, let's as a fire echo system, community, let's gather data on fire extinguishers. So we can use the data to fix the problem. And so fire technology innovations, which is a distributor for Eliminator, we funded a study with dying fire protection labs, and asked, okay, let's look at this challenge of mixing powders. Let's understand how prevalent that is after a tear down. And so we did a study for that. And grant Bob Dell, who's the manager at Dine, just put together a webinar on that you can find that on YouTube. But it was really confirming all the information that Randy's got, by all his years experience that when people do a six year teardown, which is required to inspect for moisture and rust that people discharge the powder, they put it back in, they top it off with a powder that they have. And then they put it back in service. Well, most commercial operations buy their fire extinguishers based on what's recommended or a price or, and they don't worry about whether they mix brands because all fire extinguishers are red and they have a tag

on random chemicals, all yellow chemical. So you get a service company come in to service the fire extinguishers, even if they're well intended, they don't know what they're going to find. So they might get 910 different brands, all of them which were tested at UL with a different powder. And there's no way they can have an operation at the pricing they're supposed to be operating at and not mix powders. Many of them don't know it's bad, it's yellow, it's fine. It's good. We did the study. And we found out of 100 fire extinguishers, these were dry chemical, mostly five pound units, a couple two and a half and a couple 10. That for particle composition for moisture content, and monoammonium phosphate content. All of them failed to demonstrate the use the original powder. So if you extrapolate that there's maybe 300 million fire extinguishers in commercial use across the US today. If you look at a new fire extinguishers, he said they weren't fired off, you got about 10 12 million. So 75 million haven't been touched. You got 225 million fire extinguishers out there. 75% we estimate are in violation of the code because they've mixed the powders. That's a code standard. Right? We haven't measured will they work or not? That's a question that a lot. But the only way to define work is it will it still meet the rating from UL for three a 40 BC or whatever the rating is. But that's a couple $100,000 to test. So we as an industry have a significant issue in this area where we got data so we're encouraging people let's find a solution. Let's work together. Let's gather more data. Because people's lives are at risk and most of the time working when you're fighting a fire trying to escape a burning building. It's just not good enough. Right. Right a journey and looking for people to join us.

And Jerry with that what Mike said an example as of when we were at UL and being from the service industry. It's not the the service industries

provide a device, that the end user has the ability simply to inspect and maintain it at a much higher level than a traditional fire extinguisher. The way it is structured now, it's almost like if you have a fire, you need to call your service company out to put the fire out, because they're the ones that are constantly handling it, and maintaining it. And I know there's going to be businesses that are still going to want to have that third party provider come in. And by all means, we will embrace that I still own and operate our service company. So if the if the business position is they would still like to have that service organization come in there, what we do would like to see is have them take our certification course that they're knowledgeable about the product. Obviously, yeah, they know exactly what to do, even though it's simple. There are there are some steps that we would like them to have knowledge on how to maintain it properly, to keep it in the ready.

And then and this they eliminators available worldwide.

Right now it's in United States,

just in the United States. Okay. On different. Go ahead.

It's interesting that you say that originally, when we started off prior to the manufacturer with now, I have taken a couple of trips overseas, that I had never been there before. And when I go off in the airport, I noticed there were two extinguishers in every location, we're in the United States, we only have one. And I got a tour of a couple of different manufacturers. And not only did they have to this was an Asia, there were these small, built females, they were in the manufacturing plant in over on the wall or not one but 220 pound extinguishers, these gals probably weighed maybe 95 pounds. And automatically I thought to myself, how are they even going to handle that fire extinguisher? And why am I seeing two everywhere? I don't know if you've traveled over there. But I was having on I was speaking to one of the chairmen who are Chairman over there. They call him chairman, but they're the CEO equivalent here. And he was speaking Mandarin, Mandarin. And it was through interpretation. And I started questioning why do you have to extinguish in every location, he literally sat on the edge of his seat and I thought he was yelling at me. And his sons later told me that the government had decided they had a lot of failures with extinguishers, because there's a lot of humidity over there. We'll put two in every location, maybe one will work. In addition, it's like Mike was talking about meeting the COVID regulation in that manufacturing facility, they put this oversize extinguisher where there was no wherever that small young that gal was going to be able to operate and pull that extinguisher off the wall and go fire actually fire it under fire. I mean, there was always been that disconnect of what the cola requirements asking for. But what about the end user and the reality of what's really going on out there? Yeah, but that's where we want to bridge that gap.

Yeah, it sounds like you really have I mean, it's such a cool, cool product from the research I've done with it. And you know, if you're watching on YouTube and stuff, you can see it in the background. And it's just really simple, easy to use, what's the weight difference between this the same is the same.

Yeah, traditional five pounder was run on 11 pounds, and we're right in there, believe it or not, we actually have one pound, additional, normal Vikander. And we did that in a way the design, I can show you in here, grab this one. The design is actually tapered. And it's tapered by design. So it's built up to the top here. And then there's a void here in the top. So when you when you invert it, the chemical actually falls into this void area here. So that that way, when you're turning it over and you're servicing it, all the chemical is an area to move around in. Does that make sense? Yeah, yes. Yeah. So you're in a position to be able to manipulate the chemical. And then with that taper design, it's like gravity bed, if you may, okay, it's in a position to where you're able to constantly design was all about keeping that chemical flowing.

Yeah, so the design of this is there's no accidents, right? It was intentionally all these things are intentionally designed to give a great end product to the end user. Correct, simple and dependable.

Even when it comes to the wall bracket, the wall bracket, it's able to cradle it so when you're doing the inspection, it swivels on the bracket, so you're able to just turn it over and invert and turn the wheel here and then swivel it right back.

Very nice, very nice. And then real quick, this material here that is the hose retainer, it is actually going to dark material, so it charges and grabs the light. And from that, again, our experiences when we've gone behind fires, one of the first thing that's killed is the power. So there might be a fire on one room, but you go into the other room to grab the extinguisher and there's, it's in the middle of the night, there's no power, you can't locate anything, you're bumping into things. Well, this actually charges and it glows in the dark, so you can identify and find the fire extinguisher.

Wow. Yeah, I did not know that about the, but they eliminated that is pretty cool. They've you've thought about all seems like

we've tried to you know, just just put all the technology in the innovation here. And, and really allow for the first time and the portable extinguisher industry to allow innovation to stand up front?

Yes, yes. What is the cost for an eliminator?

This this size here is a 149. Retail.

Okay, so it's a little bit more expensive than a traditional extinguisher. It is. It is. But there's a reason for that.

Correct. I mean, we're the design, the innovation that's here. And also, if you bring the service in house, you gain some of that ROI or return on your investment in regards to if you're going to take the responsibility to have your own staff maintain it, which would be the same individuals that are doing the monthly inspections now. So that's where you're also gaining your upfront cost Yes, or higher. But over time you you'll gain with that investment.

Right. And plus, you gain dependability, which is the most important thing.

Absolutely. Mike always says you can't put a price on life safety and our mission truly is protecting lives and saving property. Because we go out weekly on calls where a fire extinguisher sub malfunction, or they were misused or the operating properly. And that's really what our mission that we're on here.

Yeah, no, I like it, it's, it's great. I would, I want to see that product being used in all the all the places, you know, manufacture in vehicles, I think it would be, you know, a scene, you have an Instagram where I've seen pictures that on boats and stuff like that, I feel like on boats would probably find a higher rate of failure probably then seems like anywhere. To me far as a traditional extinguisher.

You know, we did a couple of test studies, we mounted it on the boat, you know, especially when you get some of the rough waters. And yeah. And you would be really surprised about rockhard, that chemical gets in there. Even Even with this device, you have to really work at manipulating the wheel and going back and forth with it. And then it's it's a free flowing. But again, we're giving the end user the ability to do that. Who knows what's happening on the store pressure, what I can tell you when we've gone out to some locations, and we go to fire off the extinguisher and we go to take the valve off. There's a siphon tube on the inside. And sometimes I think there was one just put up yesterday on Instagram, where the service technician went on thread and it just busted right off from the pickup to well a lot of times what we'll do is we'll and thread it. And it literally the chemical is holding the pickup tube so tight that it on threads right from the top. And you can't even pull the pickup to that's supposed to draw the chemical out. While we're, we're it's you know, it's almost like semen in there. And I know that there's been several pictures posted on social media of extinguishers that have been cut open. We were at a college tradeshow in Ohio. And we were there with a booth about a year year and a half ago now with with COVID. And one of the fire marshals came up and he says I was inspecting one of the colleges and they had a powder fire. And I felt some weight to him. And they said, Oh, we fired it off. And the less left. They said, Could we take this with us? And they said sure. So he went back and they cut open the extinguisher. And on the inside, they expose that it was almost like concrete on it. Internal of the dry chemical. And then he had sent those pictures over to us and said, Keep doing what you're doing. You're you're on a good path there. Yeah, definitely.

Yes story. I think it's really a great one. And you know, innovation doesn't do anything until people adopt it and change their behavior and do something differently. And so we have all these stories here, but there's a lot of non invented here and people that don't want to change the businesses they've been in for a long time. And most people are not familiar with this things that Randy's talking about. Right people fortunately don't have to use a fire extinguisher just like a spare tire because they haven't had an emergency. So Randy's had all these great stories, but many times the people that be, quote councils and stuff say, well, that's a one off really doesn't happen. So he said, you know, we need to begin to get some data on fire extinguishers and fire extinguisher performance, so that we can combine the stories that Randy had that led to the development of these breakthrough technologies along with a sense for how prevalent is it? Right, right, thank you know that that's what really helped drive the improvements over time the innovation and smoke detectors. So before they were a one year battery, and that's all well, you didn't even have them. So they did a big campaign to get that in place. But then when they got the data on it, they found that people were changing the batteries. And then they did more studies. And they said, you know, it's a certain group of people that are more likely to do that I went to a NFPA conference workshop about this as well. And then it evolved to 10 year batteries. And now it involves the hard wiring it. But because they had the data, they could identify where the issues were and take action to fix it. Same with sprinkler systems, they went through a similar innovation kind of process because they got the data well today, one of the things that we're a big proponent of is, let's as a fire echo system, community, let's gather data on fire extinguishers. So we can use the data to fix the problem. And so fire technology innovations, which is a distributor for Eliminator, we funded a study with dying fire protection labs, and asked, okay, let's look at this challenge of mixing powders. Let's understand how prevalent that is after a tear down. And so we did a study for that. And grant Bob Dell, who's the manager at Dine, just put together a webinar on that you can find that on YouTube. But it was really confirming all the information that Randy's got, by all his years experience that when people do a six year teardown, which is required to inspect for moisture and rust that people discharge the powder, they put it back in, they top it off with a powder that they have. And then they put it back in service. Well, most commercial operations buy their fire extinguishers based on what's recommended or a price or, and they don't worry about whether they mix brands because all fire extinguishers are red and they have a tag on random chemicals, all yellow chemical. So you get a service company come in to service the fire extinguishers, even if they're well intended, they don't know what they're going to find. So they might get 910 different brands, all of them which were tested at UL with a different powder. And there's no way they can have an operation at the pricing they're supposed to be operating at and not mix powders. Many of them don't know it's bad, it's yellow, it's fine. It's good. We did the study. And we found out of 100 fire extinguishers, these were dry chemical, mostly five pound units, a couple two and a half and a couple 10. That for particle composition for moisture content, and monoammonium phosphate content. All of them failed to demonstrate the use the original powder. So if you extrapolate that there's maybe 300 million fire extinguishers in commercial use across the US today. If you look at a new fire extinguishers, he said they weren't fired off, you got about 10 12 million. So 75 million haven't been touched. You got 225 million fire extinguishers out there. 75% we estimate are in violation of the code because they've mixed the powders. That's a code standard. Right? We haven't measured will they work or not? That's a question that a lot. But the only way to define work is it will it still meet the rating from UL for three a 40 BC or whatever the rating is. But that's a couple $100,000 to test. So we as an industry have a significant issue in this area where we got data so we're encouraging people let's find a solution. Let's work together. Let's gather more data. Because people's lives are at risk and most of the time working when you're fighting a fire trying to escape a burning building. It's just not good enough. Right. Right a journey and looking for people to join us.

And Jerry with that what Mike said an example as of when we were at UL and being from the service industry. It's not the the service industries