Green Builder Media CEO Sara Gutterman talks with Greg Calderone of HP Products about why COVID pushed indoor air quality to the forefront of the national conversation. Calderone explains how central vacuum systems remove dust and pollutants from living space rather than recirculating them, and how existing homes can be retrofitted.
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Sara Gutterman: I am Sarah. CEO of Green Builder Media. And I'm here with Greg Calderon, vice president of HP product. Thank you so much for being here today. Excited to talk with you about indoor air quality. I think Covid really brought the concept of healthy home to the forefront of our national dialog, and people are more focused on healthy homes and indoor air quality than really ever before.
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Sara Gutterman: Over the last few years. So can you talk about the importance of Iirc and just some some basic essentials that people should know about indoor air quality?
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Greg Calderone: Absolutely. So, you know, it's interesting that, you know, central banks have always have always been a clean product. It was always about indoor air quality. But before Covid, it just didn't seem like it ever. So traction. It's like you know what you can't see can't hurt you. Right? And everyone's learned through this, this tough two years we've had here that that you know, you're the air you're breathing, you know.
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Greg Calderone: And the impact on your health is so critical. And inside your house is really probably the most polluted space you're in terms of being outside versus inside. And so, you know, when you start talking about, you know, vacuuming your home and cleaning your home and the pollutants that get kicked up into the air, and then you inhale, you know, it became very scary for people.
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Greg Calderone: When Corona first hit, we were very concerned, as everybody was about your business and how people were going to do. In fact, a lot of our dealer network, you know, thought they needed to shut down. The reality was people were now home and cleaning their homes more often, and the call volume was crazy high because the people I need you to service this system, I need this thing working because I, you know, I need to clean.
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Greg Calderone: So it really did change the whole, you know, focus on just what am I breathing and smelling inside my house. And as nice as that bad one.
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Sara Gutterman: Tell us about central banks and why they are more effective than other types of vacuums or standalone vacuums.
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Greg Calderone: You know, this is something that the central vac industry has been trying to teach for years. And it's just it's something that didn't get traction. When you vacuum with a central bank and it doesn't matter what central vac you use. You know, you are sucking air into this hose, and that air gets moved away from the room and taken to your central vac unit, which is typically in your garage or maybe in your basement.
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Greg Calderone: The big difference there is you're not recirculating the air. And anybody who has, you know, vacuumed their home when the sun is shining through the windows knows what I'm talking about. You get a haze. Well, that haze is all of the dirt that you're kicking up. All the dirt that's not quite getting through your filters. And you breathe it and you smell it.
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Greg Calderone: That's. That's the thing that most people who use a central Vasco. I didn't if this doesn't smell because you're not kicking that up, all that air gets removed from the room and that that's what makes it healthy. So in a lot of cases, it's been to the outside. So you're not having to breathe in all the things you're kicking up.
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Greg Calderone: Because again, it's almost like having a blower in your house. When you do a vacuum, you know, you just get this haze. So that is the part of it that's unhealthy. And and with the advent of the corona, people are starting to understand that. So central banks have become very popular. You know, when you talk about, I really want to clean my house without polluting my air.
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Sara Gutterman: So talk about how you can actually retrofit a home with central Act systems, because obviously, you know, it makes a lot of sense for new construction. But I think that the elephant in the room is addressing our existing housing stock with respect to energy efficiency, indoor air quality, water conservation, etc.. So how could a homeowner retrofit their home with a central bank?
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Greg Calderone: The trick with this is you need a professional to do this. Many people, it's a mystery what's behind the wall, and we don't see a lot of people try to do this on their own to go in there and try to, you know, drill holes here and there. There's like a lot of scary things behind the walls. So you need a professional come in and do it.
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Greg Calderone: A central VAC professional will come in and assess your home depending on whether you have a basement crawl spaces. In most cases, if you don't live in a castle, you probably can get a central bathroom. Okay, stone walls are a problem, but most construction you can find a way to get the tubing run in there, except some through the attic, through the basement, through a crawl space to get adequate coverage.
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Greg Calderone: And this these days they have we have retractable hose products, which means that the hose not only, you know, you have the indoor air quality, but the hose also sucks back into the wall, into the piping system. And you don't even have to worry about carrying around a hose. It's just this basically on demand vacuum. So you can do spot clean, very quick clean.
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Greg Calderone: You make a mess to clean it up. Right now you don't have to go get the gear. You know, I'm wanting to cord plug it in and do all that. So it's also very convenient. So you get both indoor air quality benefits plus the convenience at the same time.
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Sara Gutterman: Now why HP products? What makes you unique and different?
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Greg Calderone: I think as far as in the central back, you know, we're very focused. We have a couple divisions here. We do a military, some industrial side, but our Central Division, which I'm the general manager for, we're very focused. Our people, that's what we do. We do it all the time. We're not doing other things. So we have engineering, the 3D printing and we developed and become the market kind of innovators for some of this tractable product.
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Greg Calderone: So it has, you know, you know, also allows us to focus on our dealer base. Again, we like these professional entities out there trying to do your install, doing your retros. And so we work very closely with them. It's almost like a family. And we worked very closely with them to get this done. So you know, there's other the other central manufacturers that are out there.
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Greg Calderone: There are good companies. I know them all. I work with them as well. We're trying to promote the industry. And so they're all good, you know. But what I like about HP is just our our culture and our, you know, our focus on putting out the best products that we can. So I've been here for like 20, 21 years and it's it's great.
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Greg Calderone: It's been it's been fun.
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Sara Gutterman: Now as a former venture capitalist or as I like to say, a recovered venture capitalist, I'm wild for innovation. And you had me at 3D printing. So what do you do with 3D printing?
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Greg Calderone: We we basically. Oh, a number of years ago, I took one of our on our floor people who was assembling product. But he was very MacGyver, you know, and I'm probably dating myself, but he was, you know, he just made things out of anything. So I got him a 3D CAD system, and I bought him a 3D printer, and he started just doing, you know, little projects that he it just we learned that by having a 3D printer, you can accelerate the speed of a project because you make multiple.
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Greg Calderone: We were we were running prototypes and then we the prototype wouldn't even be done. It would stop the print and start with the next version. In the past, you had to send it out to a third party. It was a very expensive, very time consuming with 3D printing. Right now we have three of them. They're running all the time and we my desk is full of little gadgets that our 3D printed.
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Greg Calderone: Most of the stuff never makes it to the market, but a few of them do. And our 2 million valve. It's actually have one on the desk, which is that retractable hose I told you about. This was all developed, 3D printed. We put it in people's homes, we tried it out and and we tested it so we were able to.
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Greg Calderone: It's almost like you can launch the product ahead of time without actually launching it. Test it, make sure everything works before we actually spend the money to have the tool and made to make the things for real. So it was phenomenal.
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Sara Gutterman: Thank you so much, Greg.
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Greg Calderone: Okay. Thank you. Thank you Sarah.