How the EIM Solves HVAC Wiring Problems and Powers Wireless Upgrades with Tom, Randy and Ben
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AC SmartSeal, the professional's choice. Welcome back, guys. So wireless controls are going to be the future of our industry. I mean, they're around, but it's going to be the future because we're getting better at this technology. So from Copeland on this podcast, we have Tom Lorenz, we got Randy Ruiz, and we also have Ben Reed, who's an expert on radio frequency because he's studied it and he's been into manufacturing with it in the past. So,

What we do here is we take a smart thermostat, the Sensi Touch 2. We control everything wirelessly to our indoor unit and our outdoor unit if we have two equipment interface modules from Copeland. Okay, we can use one. We can go from thermostat down to indoor.

If we want and end it there. But if we want to go wireless from indoor to outdoor, we can add one to the outdoor unit as well. So that's what this discussion is about. This is the future of the industry, guys. So pay attention. This is the HVAC Not All podcast. I'm your host, Gary McCready.

This podcast is sponsored by Master and if you guys are looking for additional training, commercial and residential training, reach out to your local rep because here in Ontario and even out west they have training facilities and they are doing consistent and constant training on different things, commercial and residential. So check them out guys, check out master.ca. Welcome to the HVAC Know It All Podcast.

Recorded from a basement somewhere in Toronto, Canada. Your host and HVAC tech, Gary McCready, will take you on a deep dive into the industry discussing all things HVAC. From storytelling to technical discussion. Enjoy the show. All right, Tom, we're going to start with you because you're one of the leaders on this product. It's an EIM module. What does that stand for, Tom? Yeah, Equipment Interface Module. Okay. Okay.

All right, perfect. So what is it exactly? It's a wireless control. It allows you to communicate wirelessly from a Sensi Touch 2 thermostat to an air handler, then via an outdoor piece of equipment, right? That's right. It really comes in handy when you don't have enough wires. When you're upgrading, especially from an air conditioner to a heat pump,

where you need more wires. And if you can't pull them, then you can put the equipment interface module, you know, outside on that heat pump, and then it'll wirelessly talk to the Sensi Touch 2. So it's great for upgrades. And whenever you get into like a, I don't know, sometimes they call it problem solver. You know, it's, you're not going to need it all the time, but

You know, it's there if you have some wiring challenges. Okay, so we'll get into some uses and advantages of a wireless product in a second. So Randy, you were the lead engineer on the product? Yeah, yeah. I managed the hardware and firmware team that developed this product.

Okay. So what kind of process, take us through the process of how do we go from start to finish on a product like this? Is there a couple of years of work done on this to get it to the way you want it to work? Yeah. Ideally, we have a 12-month cycle time for our new products that we develop. So we'll start with, say, product requirements from Tom.

And then we'll do run through like various prototypes and fine tune it as we run it through our certification testing, which could be lab testing like your ESD, your surge testing and make sure that the product is hardened and robust enough to survive what things are going to happen to it out in the real world.

And then from a firmware perspective, we'll run it through SQA, a software quality assurance program to make sure that does it do what we intended it to do. And then finally, once we get it fine tuned, we'll start field testing it, right? Find out, does it do what the customers are expecting it to do? All right. And then after that, we get their feedback, fix some more bugs, and then we're about ready for prime time at that point. Okay, cool.

All right. So we'll, we'll come to you, Ben, and you have some expertise in your past life on, on wireless communication. So maybe set that up for us. We'll come back to you, uh, now and again during the podcast, but what is the, what is your expertise or your background on wireless communication? Yeah. Thanks Gary. I've done about 10, uh, just over 10 years of, uh,

working with small teams prototyping IoT products. And so a lot of kind of research in the lab, field deployments. And one of the ways that I got into HVAC was with one of the startups that I worked with, which is Haven. So they're out of Vancouver and very small team, but we kind of had a very similar process to what Randy explained there, where

where, you know, we'd have the hardware, we'd be developing the PCB designs, we send those out to a PCB manufacturer, we'd get the kind of those pieces back.

We'd assemble them maybe with 3D printed enclosures. And then we'd do firmware development and firmware testing. And then after that's all done, then we would kind of prep it for production. So it's a very lengthy process with so many little nitpicky details because...

you really want the product that you release, it has to be reliable. Especially what I've found in the world of HVAC is that kind of any downtime, any sort of bad taste when a product first comes to market will impact the, I guess, the uptake of that product in the market for years and years to come.

And so with Haven, it was really eye-opening to kind of just see how time-consuming and how careful you have to be during that development process. So yeah, Randy, really interested to kind of learn more about kind of how that all worked in your world and how you guys brought it to market. I have lots of questions, but I'll kind of save them for the rest of the podcast. Cool. Okay. So listen, Tom,

Why would somebody, because wireless controls, I think is going to be the future. It really is. You can just, I've made predictions in the past when I see certain things like press or digital media

smart tools. And I've always said, these are the future, just looking ahead, what are people going to be using in 10 years from now? And a lot of times when you make bold predictions, you get people that laugh at you. And then five years later, those bold predictions start to actually show like they might have some truth to it. And then you kind of get the last laugh. It's just about where's look at the world around us and what, what are things advancing towards?

And I mean, when TV remotes went wireless, I mean, that's an indication that more things are going to be, I remember getting up as a kid and having to go over the TV and push the buttons on top for my parents. Right. So I'm still in those, in those days myself as being like a mid forties guy, like the old wooden TVs with a tiny little screen in the middle and the control was a big

big clunky box on the top at the press. Then we went to wireless controls. So that was kind of probably one of everybody's first experience with wireless controls or maybe like a remote control car or something like that. So what was the purpose of

for Copeland to create something like the EIM? Like, what was the purpose behind it? What's the problem that we're trying to solve? The problem is not having enough wires. But, you know, as techs get more used to the wireless technologies, they become more familiar with it. And then, you know, who knows? You're right. Maybe in the future we won't have any wires. But yeah, it was all about

Actually, my mom's house, she had a tech came out there because she didn't have cooling and he found out a rat or something ate the wire inside the wall. So she lost cooling. So I was like, what? There's no way. How do you break a wire? But yeah, so this is just a great solution when you don't have enough wires. But we do have what we need particular wires to go to the module. And what are those wires that we need to go to it?

Yeah. So it needs power. You need 24 volts to the thermostat and then 24 volts on the module. And then the module, of course, you wire it from furnace or air handler or the heat pump or AC unit. So. Okay. So let me give you, let me bring up a scenario where this could work. So it's an older home. Maybe they're doing some upgrades or renovations and they've just got

basic heating and they've got four wires they got a four conductor thermostat wire going from the indoor unit to the thermostat now now we're implementing cooling we're going to use like a heat pump or we're going to use dual fuel or something along those lines because that seems to be a big push right a lot of people are going heat pump and they're putting dual fuel as as a gas backup or gas auxiliary if you've only got the four wires there a lot of these heat pump installs need

You need like an eight wire conductor ran because there's a lot of things implemented going back and forth. So this is a good case where we could use the EIM right in place of those wires, because even though it needs to be powered, the actual communication of the heating, the cooling, the fan, that's all done wirelessly. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You nailed it.

Okay. Now the other important thing, Tom, is it's waterproof. So we can put it outside. We can mount it like outside, outside of the outdoor unit. It doesn't have to go inside it. Correct. That's right. That's right. It's weatherproof. Um, it's great for the outdoor being weatherproof, but also, you know, even on the indoor side.

If you have a, you know, a drain pan or leaky humidifier and it drips on it, it's whether it's waterproof there too. So cold benefits inside and outside. So Tom, I wanted to ask you a question regarding the power because we have to run power to the module, but,

We don't need to have wires running from the inside to the outside for that. We can actually install a step-down transformer in the outdoor unit and have that module sitting standalone basically out there, right? That's right. Right. Completely wireless if you mount the transformer outside. Yep. Okay.

All right, Randy, to you now, the outdoor module and the indoor module are the exact same design, the exact same way. There's no difference between them. It's the same part. It's the same part. So it's one skew. So what would be the advantages of,

having two, having one at the indoor and one at the outdoor unit? Or what do you guys recommend? You recommend one or do you recommend putting two on a system and using it with the Sensi? Well, I guess it's really on the installer, right? Do they want it to be completely wireless from the indoor to outdoor and completely wireless from the thermostat to the indoor, right? Where do they need to run wires? Okay. So if they wanted to cancel out all wiring,

Besides power, they could have a module at the indoor unit and one at the outdoor unit. And now it's totally total wireless communication. Right. Cool. Okay. Ben, what are your thoughts on that? It's a great solution. And what I'm really curious about is, you know, the cost is the cost.

On the business side, if an HVAC company or a homeowner was evaluating whether to put in the EIM, let's say inside, outside, or maybe just outside versus running a wire, have you guys done estimates of what the cost difference would be for the labor and the parts for running the wire from the inside to the outside versus putting in that EIM? Because that could make a very easy decision for somebody. Because I would also assume that that was one of the primary factors

you know, decision-making factors when you decided to green light this product is to be like, you know what, this is going to be within the price range that it makes sense to in

install this instead of running a wire. So do you have any of those numbers for us? Yeah, I can share with what, what the contractors have told us. You know, if they have to pull wires and bring in, you know, someone to do construction work, or it could take an hour of their time to pull wires and to fix, you know, the patch holes or, you know, whatever they need to do to get wires. So they said that average is about three, 300, $350. So to save them an hour.

Plus, then they can get to another job and they'll make more money and they don't have to spend that time. I'm going to give you an example of something that was way more than an hour. This might be on an average thing that could be new construction, whatever it is or if it's existing. But I was changing out a furnace. The customer wanted to go completely zero gas. And so we put in a heat pump. We put in it with a heat pump air handler that had electrical backups.

electrical auxiliary and we put in a thermostat so this was a five level back split so getting from the thermostat down to the air handler was going to be an impossible mission without cutting holes in the ceiling holes in the walls and probably cursing a million times trying to get this wire run

So the thing that was done here, and I won't mention the thermostat's name or I could, but you guys might get upset with me anyway. So what happened was we had to put a thermostat in the mechanical room and we had to put a sensor up where their thermostat was. And then they just used their phone to control it because then we just basically ran all the wires from the air handler right to the thermostat that was mounted right beside it. But that thermostat wasn't

responsible for monitoring the temperature of the home. It was only responsible for monitoring or controlling it based on what the sensor in a remote location was telling it. So that was how we got around that one. But now that I know this product exists, this would be something that I would use in that kind of situation. Randy, what are your thoughts on this scenario?

Yeah, I mean, that was our primary objective is ease of installation or speed of installation for when you're updating your equipment. As there's mandates out there that people are going to the heat pumps, right? That's the trend we're trying to solve for people. So how difficult is this from a setup standpoint, Randy? How difficult or how easy is it for a contractor once it's installed, it's mounted, the power's run? What is the, I guess...

the methodology behind how we set it up. What is the steps we take on how to set the thing up? Is it, does it take five minutes? Does it take an hour? Maybe take us through some of those steps. Oh, it's pretty simple to connect the EIM to the thermostat. Once the EIM has power, it starts, it starts advertising itself. And really you just go to the thermostat menu. You, you click the, the EIM button and then you'll see the EIM appear.

You'll click that and it'll automatically pair to that device. And at that time, that's when you'll decide if it's an indoor or outdoor EIM. Cool. So that also gives you the capabilities of, again,

I know it sounds like a silly question, but some people might be thinking if I'm on vacation somewhere, if I'm in Jamaica, right? And there's an issue with my house, I can check on it and I can turn up the heat or turn down the cooling or something using the wireless technology still, right? We can still control it from...

remote location? Yeah, it uses our traditional Sensi Touch 2. So it's the Sensi Touch 2 that we already sell today. We just added another firmware feature to it. Okay. And is that the only thermostat we can use with this currently is a Sensi Touch 2? Currently. Okay. All right. So Ben, coming back to you on your experience with wireless communication, what advantages does wireless communication give us

I mean, we, there's people out there that will say wired all day, wired all day, because we don't have to rely on parts failing, but there's people out there that say, you know what? I've been using wireless and my Bluetooth tools and this and that for, for years. And I love it. So tell us some of the advantages of, of using a wireless device.

communication over wired and your, your opinion. Yeah. Everything's a trade-off, um, because like there's, there's no free lunch, the wired, it'll always take more time, more money to implement that. And the result might be more reliable, uh, communications, especially in extreme situations. And so like take, you know, just as a

Use case in factories that have like a lot of very sensitive equipment. Oftentimes you go with like specialized shielded wired communication methodologies because there's a huge amount of electromagnetic interference and you can't have any downtime.

But like the costs for that are astronomical. So in consumer applications or even in just residential applications in general, we've kind of reached a point where the wireless technologies are actually at a level of reliability and also a level of, I guess, sensitivity that they can have long ranges without downtime at reasonable costs.

So there's been huge, huge advancements in the last decade, like the last couple of years even, on making those radios that are inside those embedded devices to be extremely cheap and also extremely reliable, even in some challenging situations. And so I think that in the last couple of years that the hardware has finally crossed the threshold wherein

in the majority of situations, it makes financial sense to be able to deploy our wireless control system versus a wired system. Because time is the one thing that we can never get back. Time is the most valuable asset that anybody in this industry has. And so this wireless application is fixing the time problem, which is one of the

most difficult, most important problems to solve in the industry. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And time is everyone's most valuable asset, not even just for the industry. So if I can install something quicker as a self-employed person and get home quicker so I can pick up my kids from school or something like that, instead of being in someone's basement cursing and swearing, running wires through it, then yes, I am probably going to try to lean on that technology so I can save time for myself.

So Tom, I want to ask you this. We can, so anything that the Sensi Touch 2 can control, make us, maybe tell us what the Sensi Touch 2 can control. Heating?

cooling? Is there any sort of auxiliary control in there for humidification or anything like that? Maybe take us through that and let us know. Can we do all of this through the IEM or the EIM? Sorry, that's a hard acronym to get right sometimes. For sure. Yeah, walk us through that. So

The EIM can control up to four stages of heat. So two stages of heat pump and then multi-stage indoor unit. So that gets you four heat stages and then two cooling. So yeah, it's a four heat, two cool. Covers the majority of systems out there. And then it also controls IAQ equipment. So you can hook up a dehumidifier, a humidifier, and even ventilation.

And you can control all that from your Sensi Touch 2 thermostat. So you just, you configure it. You can put, you know, lockouts in there. You can do pretty much anything you want with hum, de-hum, and ventilation. They can work independent of the system or, you know, with the system.