Monster Gardens visits AirROS by SAGE Industrial Facility Part 1
Monster Gardens Grow Stuff INSIDER recently visited our facility to learn more about our AirROS Industrial surface and air purification systems. Brian, our co-founder, was interviewed about how the systems work and what sets them apart from other purification systems on the market. He explained that AirROS systems use advanced technology to remove contaminants from surfaces and air, making them ideal for use in industrial settings. Brian also talked about how the company got its start and how it has grown over the years. He shared his vision for the future of AirROS and how he hopes to continue to provide the highest quality purification systems to our customers. Thanks for taking the time to learn more about our company, To read the full transcript from the YouTube video, see below. Thanks for Grow Stuff INSIDER for visiting us and giving us the chance to talk about our products!
Matt:
Hey, Steve.
Steven:
Hey, how’s it going?
Matt:
Oh, it’s not bad. Where are we today?
Steven:
We’re at Sage Industrial in Fresno, California.
Steven:
It’s a cool business. These guys came into my crosshairs a few years ago with clients looking for mold and mildew control, something ancillary they could add to their environmental control system. I thought it was pretty cool and it applies to greenhouses and indoor. Let’s check out what they got.
Steven:
Hey Brian.
Brian Taylor:
How you doing sir?
Steven:
Hey, doing well, Steven. Yeah.
Brian Taylor:
Nice to see you.
Steven:
It’s been a while.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, it has been.
Steven:
Thanks for having us.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, no problem. I’m glad you’re here.
Steven:
Yeah. Well it smells clean in here.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Brian Taylor:
We’re running our system, so…
Steven:
Oh, that’s great.
Brian Taylor:
[inaudible 00:01:13] it’s all safe.
Steven:
Yeah. You run it in this room itself?
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, We run the whole facility.
Steven:
Oh, that’s really cool.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. Why not?
Steven:
Yeah. Why not? That’s right.
Brian Taylor:
Why not? We protect ourselves so.
Steven:
Well, give us a quick rundown.
Brian Taylor:
Well, basically AirROS makes a purifier, an advanced purifier system that uses reactive oxygen to purify the air and surface it. So that’s our claim to fame, right? We have the ability to actually touch these surfaces, the doorknobs, everything that the air touches is protected by our equipment.
Steven:
So, all the little nooks and crannies are being touched?
Brian Taylor:
Nooks, crannies, under tables, drains especially, things like that. That are like food, we’ve started in food, so we’ve started with food processors. We’ve done live plants, nuts, meat, fresh fish. All that type of stuff.
Steven:
Well, you’re in the Central Valley here. It makes sense. All the produce…
Brian Taylor:
Almonds, right?
Steven:
How old’s the business?
Brian Taylor:
We’ve been about 10 years in business.
Steven:
Oh, good for you.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. We started in 2011, so.
Steven:
Good for you.
Steven:
And this building really nice. How long you been here?
Brian Taylor:
We moved here about a year ago. So we started in the back of my house. Yeah. And moved all the way to here.
Steven:
That’s awesome. Some of the best companies in the whole entire world…
Brian Taylor:
Start in the garage.
Steven:
That’s right.
Brian Taylor:
Exactly. Yeah.
Steven:
Oh, That’s cool.
Steven:
So what initially got you into the cannabis thing? Did a customer approach you?
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, we’ve been in greenhouses. We had a customer that grew orchids and when he was growing the orchids, he had great success. All of a sudden he says, hey, I want to grow a cash crop.
Brian Taylor:
What does this do for cannabis? And I said, I don’t know. It kills mold. It kills bacteria. It kills odor. And he said, well, let’s try it out, so that’s how we originally launched into it. It was one of our customers flipped.
Steven:
Oh, interesting.
Brian Taylor:
From growing, orchids basically.
Steven:
Right. And just a little bit, I know about orchids. Lower light. Higher humidity. So I’m sure that transition to cannabis was tough.
Brian Taylor:
Remote control. Yeah, it was. Cannabis was tough for us at first. Yeah. They’re more sensitive to any type of a sanitizer that’s in the environment. Obviously the light controls, humidity controls, things like that.
Brian Taylor:
We’ve actually, since about ’17 is when we got into it. We started in, at the end of 2017 and we’ve actually developed our control systems more and more because of cannabis, to have better control systems.
Steven:
So you have your own separate control for your own device. Is it compatible with other industry controllers?
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. Like it’ll tie into like greenhouse controls and things like that.
Brian Taylor:
So we have a couple ways of integrating with their systems so that you can monitor A. I’m monitoring relative humidity. I’m monitoring my CO2. I can see the ROS levels as well.
Steven:
How many models do you have?
Brian Taylor:
There’s about 18 configurations.
Steven:
Oh wow.
Brian Taylor:
They all fit primarily in four classes of models. We start with small models that are, we call the 40XX series. It’s a small model that’ll do anywhere from… depends on the application, so we have to size based on the application, but in cannabis we can do up to 10,000 cubic feet potentially with one of these. And we talk cubic because we’re treating all of the air.
Steven:
The volume, right?
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. The volume of air.
Steven:
I guess what I’m thinking about is a few different things. Are there times in the growth cycle that are unsafe for the product?
Brian Taylor:
No.
Steven:
So you can tackle it. Even ancillary areas drying, trimming.
Brian Taylor:
We do. I mean we have people treat hallways even. I mean really because…
Steven:
Offices.
Brian Taylor:
Cross contamination, offices now is a big thing for us with killing Coronavirus that we do.
Steven:
Right.
Brian Taylor:
We call it an indiscriminate killer. I’ve had blueberry farmers go, well, what does it do on blueberries? It kills mold. What does it do on pomegranates? It kills mold. What does it do on cannabis? It kills mold. It kills the odors, the VOCs in the air. It does indiscriminate killer for that.
Steven:
So it’s even tackling odor.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. VOCs is a big thing. That’s one of the orchid farmer I was talking about, he went and outfitted one of his multiple greenhouses with the unit, for the cannabis that he was, because I’m going to grow cannabis. The next day as parents own the facility, they came in and they’re like, what happened? Did you lose the crop? And he goes, why? He goes, they can’t smell it. They’re used to driving up and smelling the cannabis and it was gone. So we had people do that. The very first people that tested in dry rooms are like, oh my gosh, you killed everything, and they turned off the system and all of a sudden…
Steven:
Start smelling again.
Brian Taylor:
The smell comes back. Yeah.
Brian Taylor:
It’s like, well, I’m killing the VOCs in the air, not what creates the VOCs.
Steven:
I could imagine that being a significant amount of pushback for early adopters is does this zap the terps?
Brian Taylor:
Terps, flavor profiles, all of the potency testing. We’ve had a lot of our first adopters, we didn’t realize how big they were. There’s some large customers, and they did all that testing and they’re like, you’re not affecting my terps, you’re not affecting this. I’m growing strains that used to not be very healthy strain, they’re hard to grow, and I’m getting full crops out of them and we’re passing state labs. It was one of the things we didn’t really know in the very beginning is, what are we going to do to the terpenes and things like that. Luckily we have a lot of good customers.
Steven:
Yeah. No, definitely.
Brian Taylor:
They’ve given us a lot of data about that, that is not an issue.
Steven:
And it’s a fresh product. I mean the consumer is demanding it get tested, let alone the regulations.
Brian Taylor:
Yes.
Steven:
Is it easier for you to implement this early in the design process or is it more of a retrofit solution?
Brian Taylor:
Both, really. I mean, for us, we can add it at any time in the process. Obviously, if you already have a huge PM outbreak and I put it in there, now the PM might die, but it’s still on the plant, right? I can’t abate mold. I can kill it, but it’s not going to remove it, from the wall or whatever.
Steven:
Right. You’re keeping it at bay.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. I’m always stopping it. So it’s better the earlier in the process, you get it in the growth cycle. Doesn’t matter if it’s an old building or new building that’s not a problem. We are even this large unit, which we’ll do in cannabis, this will probably roughly do about 45,000 cubic feet. A lot of times they’re using greenhouses multiple of these, this only draws three amps.
Steven:
Oh really?
Brian Taylor:
It’s not like, oh, now I have to put in an extra electrical circuit in order to handle this. It draws, I mean, three amps. The Triple Stack, this guy will do three times as much as that one. And it’s still under eight amps, right about eight amps.
Steven:
Wow. That’s very impressive.
Brian Taylor:
Very low power.
Steven:
Voltages, what voltage do you offer?
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. This comes in single phase 120 and we have a world power. So we have a 230, 240 volt, it’s single phase. So it’s not 240 for the U.S., they all run on 120 single phase. We have to invert for world power, but yeah. All of them, depending on the size take less amount of amperage, so we start with the small I talked about, our XX series. We go to a YY series, which is the next step up ZZ is a little longer looks exactly like this, so we can show you in production, what ZZ looks like, then it goes to the 4120, and then we do even make 4240s, which are NEMA 4 and even NEMA 4X version. I have these on stainless steel with an air conditioner and heater on the side of it on top of a roof in the snow in Dakota City year round. We make those for specialty applications for outdoor use, things like that.
Steven:
I’m assuming a lot of it has to do with contact time across the unit itself. When you have a constant ventilation in a greenhouse, do you find you need to deploy more of these?
Brian Taylor:
That’s where we’re very different. A lot of our customers ask us, hey, what’s your CFM? This guy’s only running 150 CFM or less. One of these guys is like 28 CFM.
Steven:
Hardly anything.
Brian Taylor:
I don’t have to turn the air in order to treat it because I have a sanitizer. So the way it’s working is it’s taking the ambient air in, humidity, right? Whatever’s in the air, taking that in, applying a high voltage, high frequency pulse, creating reactive oxygen. The reactive oxygen that’s inside is very short lived. So it doesn’t even make it out of the unit. So anything that comes into contact with that is being killed. Negated. Yeah. Spores, everything destroyed. DNA, RNA level destruction. Anything that is in the environment itself, that doesn’t go through here, so what happens when a plant gets PM, spore relates, the spore now moves to plant two. If that spore doesn’t go through a purifier, it doesn’t get killed. But with our system, because we have the sanitizer in the environment I kill plant to plant, cross contamination.
Steven:
Yeah. You’re killing it.
Brian Taylor:
That is our claimant fame. I don’t have to turn it all here. I don’t have to have dwell time in here because I have a even level sanitizer in the room at all times, right?
Steven:
Wow.
Brian Taylor:
So it protects here. Irregardless of whether I’ve actually filtered the air or not. In some cases like in a lot of makeup air units, for schools or for meat processors, the air is being pushed out. It never recirculates. I still have 90% reduction, real world testing. So it’s a dramatic thing because of the output of our unit.
Steven:
Is it common to put this in an application that would clean the air duct or ultimately maintain your HVAC?
Brian Taylor:
It can. I mean, it’s a two for two.
Steven:
It’s a byproduct.
Brian Taylor:
It’s a byproduct, right. If I run this and tap it, like we did in our room here, in the offices here, we’re tapped into the duct, the duct defuses all the clean air everywhere. So in essence, am I cleaning the duct? Yes. And am I also cleaning the spaces? Yes. As well as any of the air that goes through. So it’s a multi-step process.
Steven:
So the only real consumables I see, like a filter here and a filter here.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. Really there’s three consumables, the filter, really difficult to change, comes out and comes back in difficult. Sorry.
Steven:
Two seconds.
Brian Taylor:
I’ll slow down for you. The chamber inside, which we’ll show chambers later, but there’s a chamber inside where the reaction takes place. What happens is all the broken microbes, the destroyed microbes, they’re not even really alive anymore. They’re destroyed cells collect as a film on the chamber. Eventually the electrical field does not create. And so you’re not getting ROS production longterm. The way you know that is through the sensor, the sensor is always detecting the saturated level in the room to keep it at safe levels to keep, hey, I need to up the production because the door open, I need to slow down because the door closed, it’s blackout curtains at night in a greenhouse, hey, the volume of space just got shorter.
Steven:
So in this thing tells you, all of a sudden I have a higher count than normal. This thing isn’t capturing it as well. So you replace it.
Brian Taylor:
Shut it off. Yeah.
Steven:
Simple.
Brian Taylor:
So as soon as you’re not getting basic levels in the room, then you know that it’s time to either change the filter because it’s not getting airflow, change both the filter and the chamber, or potentially even the sensor as well. So those are the only three consumables.
Steven:
So I’m an indoor grower. I want to apply this. Does this controller have, is it lit up, the back display?
Brian Taylor:
That is lit up. So this one, most likely wouldn’t go into a cannabis whereas…
Steven:
Could go in the hallway, outside the room.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. A lot of hallways. We do that. Now the other thing we do offer where the purifiers in the room, this is in the hallway. So you can have every room, all the controllers outside, you can see them, they can be locked. Nobody can touch it, but you can read them but the sensors inside. So it becomes a three piece. Versus something like this, is an all in one, right? Controllers, sensor, everything. This one’s even portable with feet. You know, this is an all in one. Whereas if you do some, a controller like this or this, the cannabis controller tends to be this one, because it’s solid. So you don’t have a blackout. Basically capability. And then they open it up to get the readings I see inside.
Steven:
That makes sense.
Brian Taylor:
This came because okay, this customers are like what do we do about light deprivation? Good question. Let’s get them the solid. Then all the lights on the large units now are offered in full green.
Steven:
You’re doing green. Smart.
Brian Taylor:
Because our agriculture is white, blue, and the green. They didn’t want any blue light. So we have an all green cannabis option. All of them now have a switch capable so you can open them up. I’m not sure if a switch is installed in this tester, but we’ll check. No, but all of these can come with a switch and all of the lights on all the units go out in the room. So from the controlling look and see if something’s on or off, but all the lights are off. So you can remotely turn those lights off.
Steven:
I like how quickly you adapted.
Brian Taylor:
We have to. I mean really ultimately we’re providing a solution to a problem. I want to pass state testing, I have odor control issues. I’ve obviously mold issues and loss issues. We’re trying to provide a solution. When you said, hey, what model is that? Well about 18. Do you want a solid? Do you want it with a switch? Do you need it with a sensor? Do you need it for through and through, it’s going into a duct or no, I’m mounting it above, just want to mount it and pipe it above fans. We even will provide a inflatable sock with holes in it that comes in this, catch it here and inflates out. Now I’m diffusing evenly throughout your room without you having to run a bunch of hard pipe.
Steven:
Well man, this is awesome. Why don’t you…
Brian Taylor:
Want to take a walk through?
Steven:
Yeah, show me inside please.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, come on this way.
Brian Taylor:
This is behind the curtain.
Steven:
All right.
Brian Taylor:
As we call it, but these are the people that make it happen.
Steven:
What’s going on guys?
Brian Taylor:
The best team in the world right here. We do production in lines, so depending on what we’re doing, we’ll have a set of controllers going that may be, we talked about the solid lid, cannabis. We may have a whole set of them going for environmental. Various XX models, YY models constantly moving through the process. So they’ll go from parts to a pre-build whereas we don’t know what the model’s going to be yet, to then finally having it configured. Like I mentioned, there’s about five, six models that are available for this, let alone some of the configurations that can happen on top of that. We’ll get it to a point so that the turnaround of the customers faster.
Speaker 4:
Come back and do the pretty stuff.
Brian Taylor:
Go, hey, look at this process.
Speaker 4:
Then you…
Speaker 5:
You can get as close as you want, but be aware it’s high voltage. So at some there’ll be a distance where it’ll be a problem for your camera.
Speaker 6:
That’s it right? That was the competitor’s.
Speaker 5:
That was our big issue. Yeah.
Speaker 6:
I mean we have people coming to… oh, great.
Monster Gardens was able to see our manufacturing process and learned about the importance of air quality. They also interviewed a specialist from our team about AirROS products and how they benefit cannabis cultivation operations. We are grateful to have had this opportunity to show off our facility and share what we do with such a large audience. If you are interested in learning more about AirROS, or if you want to purchase one of our purifiers, please contact us. Our team would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
