Cutting Carbon: Intellihot’s Innovative Approach to Sustainability

Sri Deivasigamani, Founder & CEO of Intellihot, reveals how the company’s innovative and cost-effective approach is transforming the water heating industry with sustainability at the forefront.

Transcript

Welcome to the Tomorrow's World Today podcast. We sit down with experts, world-changing

innovators, creators, and makers to explore how they're taking action to make tomorrow's world a better place for technology, science, innovation, sustainability, the arts, and more. In this episode, George Davison, who is also the host of Tomorrow's World Today on the Science Channel, talks with the founder and CEO of Intellihot, Sri Deivasigamani, about how his company is revolutionizing water heating in a smart, sustainable way.

Sri discusses how the company's on-demand water heating technology learns your habits, reduces wait times, and cuts costs. Welcome everybody to another edition of Tomorrow's World Today. And to my pleasure, we get to speak with, and I'm going to say, you know, it's sometimes hard to get everybody's names pronounced correctly.

So Sri, if you could introduce yourself and, you know, give us your full name and the name of the company that you're with. Sure. Nice to meet you, George.

My name is pronounced Sri Der Deivasigamani, and I just go by Sri. And interestingly, where I come from, you would adopt your dad's first name as your last name. So Deivasigamani is actually my dad's first name.

Ah, that's great. All right. And you're with what company? So I work at Intellihot, a company I founded and started.

There's a big backstory to how it got started, but that's what I am. We are very anxious to hear, you know, that background of how this company got started. I'm a little already in the loop on how this got started, but this is like a, like one of those things that happens to an innovator, inventor is something just goes absolutely wrong.

And then why is it like that? Why can't we make that better? And so, yeah, could you run us up to speed? I mean, how did this organization, this company come to be? I think the story goes back long ways. I can't give you an abbreviated version. Ever since I was a child, I was very attuned to energy.

And part of it, I think, comes from, you know, I had sort of two lives molded into one. Part of my grandparents, you know, they were farmers. So I grew up in a very rural environment and then my dad worked for a big company.

And so it was very developed. And then I could see the dichotomy of both of these. And so I was very aware of, you know, how important energy is, water is, how we are all interconnected.

So that drive was always there. You know, for example, when my dad would drive his

motorcycle, when he would go downhill, I would say, hey, why don't you shift it to neutral

because, you know, you don't need to waste gas. Or I would ask him, hey, where does this stuff come from? You know, petroleum.

And you know, he said, yeah, it comes from the ground. And then I, you know, the word petroleum literally translates to rock oil, right? So I knew from a very young age, this stuff's going to run out. I mean, how much stuff can be there, right? It's finite.

And so, you know, I pursued a degree in engineering, which was my, you know, passion. And I tried a bunch of stuff in life. You know, I worked for a really nice company, Caterpillar, you know, doing all kinds of new products and innovations.

But I always had a side gig. My first company had to do with LED lights. I'm a mechanical engineer, but I had developed an LED light that was super efficient, you know, 25 years ago, because I couldn't stand incandescent light.

So while I was trying to figure out what my true calling in life is, right, a water heater broke and flooded my house. And this was my first house. And I had just come back after a very long flight from India, go down to the basement, it's flooded.

And so I was quite shocked because when I bought the house, I just saw this big cylinder and I saw two pipes, one going in, one coming out. I thought, yeah, it must just come on when I open the faucet. Only when it leaked in front of my house did I realize how, you know, we keep it on 24 7, there's a lot of waste.

And so I just couldn't stand wasting that energy. And at that time, I was building a smart motorcycle. And my weekend project was I wanted to smartify my own water heater, make it come on demand, make it more intelligent.

So that's where the journey started. I see. There's a whole host of issues around the issue of when your hot water heater goes down.

So, you know, I don't think Sri's the first guy to come home and find out that the water heater's gone broken and leaked everywhere. And so you were working on, you're naturally a problem solver. I think that's fair to say because of your prior work that you were inventing and creating things at Caterpillar and you were working on LED and LED technology to make a better product in fluorescent lights.

So, you know, as a creator, innovator, it just seems to come natural to you. Is that, do you consider yourself as an inventor? Is that your job now at the company as a founder? But are you also the inventor, you know, engineer behind the scenes making it happen? You know, I don't think of myself as an inventor, although I, you know, I develop and I come up with a lot of stuff. Growing up, I think my mom used to call me that, a tinkerer and inventor.

So I think the accolade should go to her for, you know, raising a child was, you know, super confident. But certainly I like solving problems. I like to work with a group of people who are

driven to a common mission, solve really tough problems.

Yeah, I think being curious and having that nature, that curious nature to look into things is, it's a very compelling life that you have the opportunity to spend some time of your life in that area. It can be quite fun. It is.

Yeah, I think the real trick is to really find out what is meaningful in life. And everybody on the planet has a talent. You know, everyone is, everyone can do, you know, what the, you know, what the greatest person does.

It is just finding that and then really going full steam towards that. I think we all get saddled, you know, we've got to put a roof over our head and we've got to make a little bit of money, you know, feed our kids, all this stuff. But, you know, it would be great if everyone found their calling in life and worked on it because the world would be so much better.

I couldn't agree more. That's very well said. Let's talk a little bit about your company.

Let's call it like the research process. Let's say that an idea is developed. Do you have a, do you go in, what kind of a role does research play before you commit lots of resources to the development of something? You know, at a very basic level, you have to identify a problem.

And it has to be a problem that is very meaningful to somebody. You know, in the case of Hot Water, for example, you know, we serve the commercial industry, so that's hotels, hospitals, restaurants, schools, stadiums, senior living. If these businesses don't have Hot Water, they immediately have to shut their business, like the same day, within a few hours.

And if you're talking a place like McDonald's, you know, they lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a day because, you know, by health code regulation, they got to shut down, you know, the business model for a hotel is, you know, a clean bed and hot shower. And if they can provide that, you know, people, if you look at the reviews, the studies have shown that if they get one bad review, the occupancy rate goes down by 50% for the next six months. So, this stuff has a direct impact.

So, let's just find a problem that is very meaningful to somebody, solve the problem, and then you can sell them the solution. And the one caveat to that is whatever problem you're solving, it would be great if your purpose in life is aligned with it, because then you tend to go at it, you know, some of these things are very difficult to solve. You know, water heating, for example, there's an interesting backstory.

We as human beings, we haven't showered that long. It's only been since the industrial revolution, so call it 150, 175 years. Before that, you know, just as an anecdote, you know, the French invented the perfume so you could mask the smell, and a lot of people got married in spring carrying a bouquet because they would smell nice.

If you were super rich, you took a bath maybe three or four times a year. So, the process of, you

know, industrialization started providing creature comforts, you know, heat in our homes, domestic hot water, piped water, and so it's very, very recent. Several technologies have improved and, you know, have really advanced in the last 150 years, but unfortunately, water heating, which kind of sits hidden behind and consumes as much as 40 or 50 percent of a building's energy.

I mean, if you have an apartment building, nearly 40 percent of your energy goes to water heating. So, they sit and consume a lot of energy, but the technology for that is relatively the same as it was 150 years ago. So, you know, it's a tough thing to solve because it sits behind and it kind of works for a while, and so it tends to get ignored.

You know, I think it's important we start to, let's reverse engineer a little bit what IntelliHot's doing. Let's talk about the innovation and invention of what's been created, and, you know, and I think we should probably start with, you know, we have instant hot water heating now, and we have these canistered devices in our basements. We heat all this water, and it stays hot all day, and we might only need it for 20 minutes a day, but yet we are running the gas bill up.

I can see the inefficiency of how we are heating and storing water in our homes. You know, the rise of instant hot, you know, that came, that was a while ago, and what, for those of you who don't know what instant hot, that means you're just heating water on demand. You're not storing it, so you're just, you have a demand, you turn the water on, the machine turns on, and you get hot water.

For the most part, I'm trying to keep this pretty simple. So, let's go to where we are now with IntelliHot. Can you talk a little bit about what is the technology that is going to provide a more sustainable, more environmental, more efficient, you know, are we talking better quality, less breakdown? Can you run me up to speed, and our audience up to speed, of why is this new form of technology so important? So, you know, going back to the previous question you asked, right, how do we think about the problem here, which I personally experienced? First off, it wastes energy.

Second is, you know, when I go to the bathroom and I open the faucet, it takes about 45 seconds. That's a lot of time of good, clean, treated water coming into a house that's going down the drain. And so, I quickly did some math.

I called a bunch of friends. I found that everybody waits, you know, 45 to a minute and a half. And it turns out, like, a small city the size of, let's say, 150,000 people, every day, this is happening in the United States today, they waste about three Olympic-sized swimming pools just waiting for water to get there.

And then you kind of add up the number of seconds we all spend. It turns out to be about six months of a lifetime. Wow.

Human beings are super clever, right? While the water is coming, we grab the towel, we grab

the toothpaste, we walk around. But in reality, we're standing there with our hands in the faucet for about six months of a lifetime that water is running down. So, that's waste.

The second is, you know, keeping this quantity of water, most people in their homes will have a 40 to 60-gallon, you know, tank. It's a very easy math, right? You get, let's say, a 40-gallon tank times, you know, 100 million homes. That's 400 million gallons of water that's kept hot 24-7.

Yes. They can shower 24-7, yet we are feeding it fuel, either gas or electric, and we're just keeping it hot. And so, all we're doing is we are, you know, putting heat into the atmosphere, running up a gas bill, paying for the gas bill, and nobody's taking a shower.

So, that basic technology is not matched with how we, as human beings, consume water. So, you know, so I sat back and I thought, okay, how, you know, I kind of take showers in the morning, you know, between, let's say, seven and eight. It would be nice if water showed up automatically at that time by learning my behavior.

It would be great if the water was heated on demand so I'm not wasting energy. And so, I thought a lot about, you know, one of my heroes is Henry Ford. As Henry Ford famously said, if I went to my customers and asked, what do you want, they would say, give me a faster horse.

Right. So, you've got to kind of think about it on your own and see, if I did this solution, would it solve my customer's problem? You know, rather than ask, the customer will tell you the most apparent thing, but you've got to really think beyond it. And so, we are at IntelliHot, you know, we are a tech company.

We really think outside the box. We think about what is meaningful to our customers and what can make their lives better. And we try to, you know, develop solutions.

A lot of it starts from putting ourselves in their shoes. You know, whether they're a business owner, a homeowner, you know, what are their experience? Right. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it.

Let's go to the end user for a moment. And let's say that we put this new form of IntelliHot technology in this hotel or let's call it an apartment building, possibly. What kind of an end user experience am I going to get? Is my wait time shortened for the hot water to get to my sink? Yes.

So, you know, the benefits you would see, and this was an interesting nugget that we cracked. When it comes to sort of creature comforts and some of these basic necessities for life, a lot of it is driven by economics. You know, people normally are not compelled to spend, let's say, you know, more than 10% of what the current technology or the product is, you know, unless it is a kitchen stove or a refrigerator or something you touch and feel every day.

If something operates behind the scenes, you don't feel like you should pay more for it. So what, you know, so technology that's generally superior and better often costs more. But what

we found in this case is we were able to develop a product that was substantially less to begin with.

It costs less to buy, and it's not because we are cheaper. What happens is in commercial businesses, because they want all the reliability and they never want to have a Friday night failure, they would typically double up the equipment they actually need. So if you're like us, you've got two water heaters.

If you're a hotel, you've got four water heaters. If you're a church, you've got six. I mean, you know, they probably have church just on Sundays, you know, 9 to 12.

They've got banks and banks in the unit. So what we did is we said, look, we're going to modularize it. We're going to put in only the correct amount of equipment you need, which means right away you spend less.

And when you own the equipment and operate it super efficient, you know, we operate in like 98 plus percent. And so it costs less to also, you know, operate. And we have seen this day in and day out.

There's a hotel just outside San Francisco Airport, a 400-room hotel. Their monthly gas bill used to be $20,000. After they installed a unit, the first thing they saw and they couldn't believe it, the gas bills dropped to $5,000 a month, 70 percent reduction.

And the comments from the guests were, hey, the hot water smells fresher and cleaner and it's more consistent in temperature. So that's kind of what you hear. Where would that come from? So if you're are you heating the water in a way that it's not, you know, that maybe it's a different element.

What's the secret there? You know, when you sit and cook water 24-7, it's like in a kettle. It kind of becomes a little stale. And then mixed with it, you know, you're constantly circulating it and a lot of scale formation.

Most people going to hotels will say you don't drink the water from the faucet because it's accumulated bacteria. So it is a little bit stale. If you heat, you know, it's like anything.

It's like fresh food. You know, if you heat water on demand, it just intuitively tastes better. Interesting.

Yeah. All right. So let's talk a little bit about how it's learning about me as a user of the water, hot water.

Is AI involved with improving the performance of your machine? No, I would call it this. You know, we started doing this back in 2011. Some of this is quite simple in a sense.

It just observes your behavior and it starts collecting data on when you use water. And human beings are quite predictable, it turns out. And so, like, you know, so we monitor seven days of

the week and we constantly update, you know, when you consume water.

And, you know, like in my house, you'd see it'll say Monday through Friday, you know, I consume water between seven and eight and then a little bit in the afternoon and mostly, you know, some in the evening. And so the unit would come on at that time, heat water, and then bring it right up to the faucet, anticipating that you're going to use water. And so when you open the faucet, you get water right away.

So this one is not AI, it's more data analytics, where we are analyzing, collecting data and analyzing. We do have a product that we launched a couple years ago, which actually helps modify mechanical rooms. That product is, I would say, borderline AI.

Again, it's not true AI has it deployed today. It's more on the data analytics, where it analyzes how equipment is operating and it analyzes all the data and it says, here's how energy is being consumed, here's how the equipment is running. If you did this, you can cut your operating costs by X percent, at the same time, achieve more reliability because you're not running your equipment 24-7.

So I would call that fairly advanced for this industry. It sure sounds like it. Okay, so if we were in the business of, let's say we're a hotel business, and your organization is explaining the benefit of your technology over what else is out there right now, what are the main points that you would bring up to show those differentiating factors? Yeah, the very first thing would be, you're running a hotel, that's your business.

The first thing we do is we provide good, reliable hot water. You never, ever have to worry about a Friday afternoon call because we are modular and then we are also monitoring our equipment 24-7. We have advanced data analytics and predictability on what needs to be serviced.

So you're never going to be surprised, first off. So reliability is high. You're going to immediately save on owning and operating costs as much as 40% reduction, which means from day one, when you purchase that equipment, you spend less to buy and then you spend less to operate.

So it's actually positive cash flow right from day one. The third and probably the most important thing for a lot of businesses, which they don't talk about it, when you heat water in a tank and you store it, it tends to grow bacteria, a bacteria called Legionella bacteria that grows on the walls because water is stagnant and it happens to be at low-warm temperatures. This bacteria, when you take showers, if you inhale it, and you can Google it, you'll always find these Legionnaires outbreak from time to time.

Most businesses have heavy-duty water management programs in the background to try to test for water, and obviously they don't advertise it because they don't want to scare anybody. Our technology solves that problem because we heat on demand and there is no bacteria production in our units. And so that's a significant elimination of business risk for whether

you're a hospital, a hotel, an apartment, senior living, all of them have the same issue.

So that's the third benefit. That and under that first benefit you mentioned, you mentioned monitoring. So is the machine sending data back to headquarters where you are and then you're monitoring all these different machines to identify early warning signals that maybe something isn't going wrong so we can get on that and fix it beforehand? 100 percent.

Every device we put there goes out with connectivity as standard. We were one of the first companies to introduce. Interestingly, when we introduced connectivity back in, I think, 2012, we had to write things for the first and second generation iPad.

I had people coming up to me asking, why would I need to see this on my iPad? This is so crazy. Right, right. Now it's become standard.

Yeah, so we monitor all the critical components in our unit. For example, if this were a car and you're a NASCAR driver and you're always making left turns, we would say after a certain number of miles, based on how many miles you're putting in, you're going to replace your left tire. And we kind of give a heads up.

We do that for all our critical components. OK, so if I was to ask you to look into the future and what do you see in the field of heating water in 10, 20, 100 years from now? Where is this technology going to take us? So unfortunately, this technology tends to be driven more by codes and mandates. And what's happened is, you know, the EPA has said, starting in 2026, all commercial water heating has to be high efficiency.

So that's driving a lot of change. Intel makes only high efficiency heaters. So that's going to be a night and day change.

There is some regulation in the works on the residential side as well, saying starting in 2029, everything has to be high efficiency. Both residential and commercial are going to see more changes in the next five to 10 years than they have in the last 100 years. Now, electrification, energy storage is another super interesting area.

And that is where we are starting to apply AI, truly. What we are finding is because of solar and wind, you know, energy is produced at times when we don't consume it. And so you have to store energy in some form, either in batteries or in our cars or in some kind of device.

People are coming up with ways of storing energy, you know, in raising water to an elevated height or, you know, high pressure. We've come up with a way, we've invented a thermal battery where you can store a lot of energy as heat. And so what we are starting to deploy are actually the equivalent of an electrical battery called thermal battery.

You would put these in your house and then it interfaces with a grid. And whenever the grid has good, cheap electricity, we buy that power, store it, and then you can use that energy for anything. You could use it to heat water.

You could use it to heat, you know, your home. It sort of becomes a universal device. What I see

in the future is a very connected world where you get energy, you know, and you store it and then you tend to use it for different purposes.

It's not specifically for water heating. It could be, you know, to power your devices, to heat your home, to heat hot water. I think these things are going to come together.

They have to. I'm seeing what you're seeing as well. I agree with you 100 percent. So thank you for that. That's good. That's good insight for our audience.

So if I wanted to learn more about the technology, this water heating technology that your organization works on, how can I find out more information? So you could go to our website in teleheart.com. We have lots of videos there. We have a lot of actual real world installations. Chances are, you know, if you own a hotel or you're running a hospital or you're running a stadium or a school, we have done work in your area.

Real world examples that I've run for many, many, many years successfully. So you could see those case studies and definitely reach out to us. Contact us.

We are eager to help you. Thank you for that. I'm excited for this because you've been in the field now long enough that you're proven, your technology's proven.

You have customers out there. You've moved from prototyping to now mass production, customer reactions, and you're continuing to do reinvestment in R&D to keep the wheels on, so to speak, to get to the future. Absolutely.

If you stop innovating, you die, right? That's the motto. That's it. All right.

Well, thanks for being on our show today. And everybody, that's another edition of Tomorrow's World Today. Thank you for listening to this episode of Tomorrow's World Today podcast.

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