Monster Gardens visits AirROS by SAGE Industrial Facility Part 2
Monster Gardens of Grow Stuff INSIDER recently visited our facility to learn more about how we make the air and surface clean for commercial cannabis grow rooms. Our founder, Brian was interviewed on his vision of what sets us apart from other purification systems out there today and gave Steven a tour facility of our advanced technology that removes mold plus odor with ease! To read the full transcript from the YouTube video, see below. Thanks for Grow Stuff INSIDER for visiting SAGE Industrial and giving us the chance to talk about our products!
Steven:
We’re at SAGE Industrial in Fresno, California
Brian Taylor:
AirRos makes a purifier, an advanced purifier system that uses reactive oxygen to purify the air and surfaces. Our XX series. YY series. ZZ is a little longer. Then it goes to the 4120. And then we do even make 4240, which are NEMA 4.
Brian Taylor:
This is behind the curtain.
Brian Taylor:
From beginning to end to build one of the large units takes us roughly 80 to 85 days. Now that was before supply chain went crazy on.
Steven:
Oh, right.
Brian Taylor:
So that’s insane. But in the process of it, now we have the ability to get ahead of the customer orders, have the ability to then configure to their needs quicker.
Steven:
So do these just stay in like a work in progress.
Brian Taylor:
They go from this, yeah, into a box that says it’s a prebuild and then as soon as… And we know which models move a lot.
Steven:
Sure.
Brian Taylor:
So if we’re moving a lot of sevens-
Steven:
You build up those.
Brian Taylor:
… 20, 30 sevens on the shelf. And then the prebuilt are ready, too. “Oh, we just got a big order for fives. Okay.” Now we shift all these to fives if we need to. So we’ll do it according to the orders and to demand and history.
Steven:
I see. I see.
Brian Taylor:
So we take it from parts to prebuild, from prebuild to a finished goods of sorts, and the finished goods to the actual configuration the customer wants. Because what we’ll do is, hey, Mr. Customer, you want 20 feet of cable between here and your control? We actually will wire it with 20 feet of cable to the controller. Put it all in one box. All he has to do is hang it up on the one and plug it in.
Steven:
Oh, how nice.
Brian Taylor:
So they’re not having to do all the wiring.
Steven:
Wow. So if worst case, they’d have to disconnect four or five wires, run it through a conduit if they needed to, and then reconnect them.
Brian Taylor:
Sure.
Steven:
But they’re not having to do that.
Steven:
That actually is a good question. That reminds me of like, is there any issues with RF interference from a lot of grow lights in a given room?
Brian Taylor:
No, not for us. We’ve actually recently just passed all of the UL testing, CE testing, UK CA testing, because of the Brexit. You got to love that. RCM for Australia and New Zealand. So we have about 57 countries worth of testing that’s been done so that we’re not affected from outside sources of RF and we’re not generating RF. So we do EMF testing, EMC testing, FCC testing, all that. So these are all recently have passed all of that.
Steven:
Oh wow. You manufacture things here.
Brian Taylor:
Yes.
Steven:
So that’s awesome.
Brian Taylor:
All USA made product, yes.
Steven:
100% United States. You make it right here?
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, we build. So some of the parts… USA made requires a certain percentage-
Steven:
Sure, sure.
Brian Taylor:
… of the product to be that. So the challenges we have capacitors, resistors, things like that are not made in the US. Fan motors are not, but everything we have that is capable to be USA made. The powder coating is done locally. The metal bending is done locally. We source all the… Even anodizing, all that stuff’s done locally. The harnesses are made right down the street. Everything else that we build here is obviously USA made.
Steven:
And all your guys are right here right now making it.
Brian Taylor:
Right. Yeah. We control the quality that way.
Steven:
So what are these guys doing over here behind us?
Brian Taylor:
Okay. It start starts in various points where they’re actually pulling a back panel out. Whereas he’s taking a raw back panel over there and we’ll show you that. Once we get all the metal formed for the back panels and for he’s doing ZZ’s right now, for those back panels, they get anodized, a local anodizer. When they come back, now we are etching onto it the labeling basically. So the customer knows where the positive and negative goes.
Brian Taylor:
Then they’ll take and start adding the harness and everything to the back panel. So they’re going to rivet that on. And then as it progresses down, now we’re adding sides and fan assemblies.
Steven:
Yeah. Okay.
Brian Taylor:
So now we’re starting to get the enclosure into it, put all the lights into it, get this. This eventually ends up what we call a prebuild. They’ll take that. And then they’ll add in all the power supplies and turn it into a 4050, a 4028. So this model can go into one of about four different model styles, capacities.
Brian Taylor:
So the reason we have those is because we’re doing, like I told you, treating the surfaces, the volume in the air. So if I know the volume of the air, I know the temperature, what type of oxygen level? Believe it or not I do a lot of controlled atmosphere environments for apples, kiwis, pomegranates, stuff like that.
Steven:
I could see that.
Brian Taylor:
So I have low oxygen levels. So you have to know that. That’s my fuel. Reactive oxygen. And then from there, then it’s the commodity. So if I’m pomegranate or am I cannabis? Am I a flower room or am my clone room? The bio loads change. Based on that, we provide a unit that is designed to treat that bio load so that it’s not running 1% of the time. It’s like putting a 12 ton unit on a house that needs a two ton.
Steven:
Yeah, good analogy.
Brian Taylor:
You don’t want to have the wrong… Yeah, it cools the house, but it’s not efficient. So we don’t want to oversell somebody something costs them way more that’s never running and we don’t want to sell them something so small that it’s not working. You want results. So that’s where all the different models come into is sizing it to the room.
Brian Taylor:
And then it’s just a matter of configuration. So what kind of controller do they want? Where do they want it? These models are the 4120, like I talked about. They’re very… We’ll call them potent. They’re very strong, high capacity, low, low amperage. Like I said, three amps. Whereas this guy’s drawn under two, for sure. The small ones, some of them only draw like a quarter of an amp. I mean, not very much power at all.
Steven:
So what’s this gentleman doing here?
Brian Taylor:
What he’s doing is he’s calibrating. This particular unit has a brain in it called a watchdog and the watchdog pays attention to all the reactions that are going on inside the chamber and can tune accordingly to make sure that it’s effective. So what he’s able to do is run it, test it, program it, make sure that all the brain basically that’s in there is doing what it’s supposed to do. So he can quality control this and let it out the door. So before the customer gets it, he’s touched it, made sure it’s working perfect.
Steven:
Oh, wow. Nice.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. The quality control requires two people at least here to go through a whole checklist of stuff.
Brian Taylor:
Customer support, very important to us. We have a whole portal that we let everybody… All the customers have access to videos on how to, how to do this, spray regiments that have been recommended by other growers to work with our system. All of that we have on a portal. And we keep adding to the portal. A knowledge base basically for our customers-
Steven:
Oh nice.
Brian Taylor:
… to understand what’s going on. Or call us. We will answer the phone. We will walk you through it. We’ll spend a lot of time.
Steven:
So you’ve been great, really. The jobs that we’ve worked on have been great.
Brian Taylor:
We have to do that. We’re partners.
Steven:
That’s awesome.
Brian Taylor:
You can kind of see in this one. This one’s kind of fun because you can kind of see in the end and you can see that there’s an array inside. And we’ll go into the array room where they test those. So you can see in there.
Brian Taylor:
So we made everything accessible from the front for quick change. Even even the turbine chamber, all of that comes out with very minimal tools. This unit takes a screwdriver to open the lid and a 10 millimeter socket to loosen four bolts, loosen them. And the whole thing twists off. Quick connect plugs, change the chamber. In under 15 minutes, you can do service on this.
Steven:
Wow.
Brian Taylor:
It’s real quick and easy to do service. All of them are very similar to that.
Steven:
Very thorough well thought out design.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, I started out in the field and the designs of old were painful. And so we have gone through when we redesigned from scratch. Back in ’13 about is where I started redesigning from scratch the 4000 series. It was all… It was thought to I want as little tools as possible. His little tool pouch right there is enough really to do any service on there. And even less than that’s probably needed. You can see just this whole fan assembly is just two screws.
Steven:
Right. Wow.
Brian Taylor:
So two. Two. And that’s the M10 again. So it’s the same bolt. Even though I could probably use a smaller bolt to bolt that down. I use the same one-
Steven:
Standardized .
Brian Taylor:
… to keep it standard, yeah. Keeps parts, supply chain, a lot easier yep. Interconnectivity between parts. This same fan in a ZZ and YY are exactly the same. And we do offer various varieties of that. We have a back pressure fan. We have a super quiet fan. So we have various fans depending on your application.
Brian Taylor:
Here let me show you the warehouse. A little colder out here. We moved into this facility about a year ago. And this year, this facility is about 15,000 square feet. 5,000 of it in production. Balance in office and warehouse space.
Brian Taylor:
And so we stage. I mean, I can walk you this way. We stage finished products already in their box. We have custom boxes made with custom foam in order to ship it correctly. They’re labeled with what they’ll be long term. This will turn from a 4050 into a 4050 with what kind of controller? I don’t know. Does it have a sensor. Does it not? Does have a switch? Does it not? All of it will still end up in this box in the end.
Steven:
I see.
Brian Taylor:
So it goes from that prebuild to the model. So here’s 4050s here’s 37s. So a variety of the items that are stocked. So these are able to be pulled off the shelf, wired up to a controller that’s also on the shelf, and get out the door in less than two weeks. That’s the goal. Because otherwise it takes way longer to get the metal formed, get the powder coat done, get it assembled. There’s is a longer process to it, but like anything you start now and get it to a certain point. Now we can get it out the door.
Steven:
Really well organized.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. Thank you. That I can’t take all the credit for. My inventory manager David does all that.
Brian Taylor:
But all the boxes. So we have custom boxes made. So that they… Shipping was an original issue we had and we wanted to solve that so that it’s not bubble wrapped. So we have custom package that was designed to be able to manage through the standard shipping methods.
Brian Taylor:
We do all our testing in here. I don’t know if you want to look at that real quick right now.
Steven:
Yeah, definitely.
Brian Taylor:
The core engine, as we discussed earlier was, is the reaction chamber. The array itself… I know it’s kind of a tight little space in here. But the reaction chamber itself has to undergo testing through my brain and through a custom system that measures it. And I create very tight tolerance because it needs to meet a manufacturing tolerance that’s really tight that will last in the field for a certain amount of time before it fails.
Brian Taylor:
I’m going to turn this on. And what happens is in this room normally the door’s close so it’s pitch dark and the quality control person can look and visually inspect what’s happening on the array. So you can see the plasma being formed here in purple. As well as you can see that the testing set point it’s 240 and we’re hitting 230. So we’re 10 low on this particular one.
Brian Taylor:
Now I just turned it on. The test room’s not up to speed. They have to run through a bunch of calibration first before they start putting it under test. So it’s just an example, but that’s what they do.
Brian Taylor:
Because we started out as a contractor and do still service in the field, like there are customers right down the street. That large pomegranate grower that we go and do service, they got 57 units and we spend a week or two out there doing their service for them. A lot of customers still, and dealers, will send back any of the parts that they service. So we’ll get back all the chambers.
Brian Taylor:
We’ll do our best to recycle. So if we can get the tube out and clean again, it can be used again. So we’ll do what we can to keep it as green as possible. Even our grease eater is a smart washer. So it’s like an antimicrobial grease eater. It’s really cool. So it’s very, very green and safe obviously for the environment.
Steven:
I love it.
Brian Taylor:
That’s how we have organic certifications and we can work with organic farmers is because we’re not adding chemicals into the environment. We’re also even in our practices of manufacturing not doing that.
Steven:
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Brian Taylor:
This little room here, it’s kind of fun because it’s its own little environment and they can run little tests in here. But most of the time this is just for testing sensors. And it’s own autonomous HVAC system. And we can test sensor heads that come in to make sure failures, are they within our calibration spec? They come in calibrated. They come in with certificates. We want to verify that.
Steven:
Yeah, that’s great.
Brian Taylor:
And so things happen in shipping, et cetera. So we test them here before they even go on the shelf. Once they’re on the shelf, then they’ll put them in the unit and retest with a full system before it goes to the customer because we’re measuring parts per billion. So you’re talking very small amount of ozone that we’re measuring in with the center. And that parts per billion, if it drifts one or two, not a big deal, but if you’re drifting five and I’m trying to keep a 30 that’s out of calibration for us.
Steven:
I see.
Brian Taylor:
It tends to be one year really suggested, “Hey, I just, even if it’s reading right, I would still replace it once a year because it’s a critical component.”
Steven:
It’s critical.
Brian Taylor:
It really is a critical component. In reality, we suggest every six months and we have customers that religiously have us go every six months and just do service every six months. That’s what we call preventative maintenance. I’m just doing my oil changes whether I need it or not, right?
Steven:
Yeah, yeah.
Brian Taylor:
Versus I’m waiting till there’s a problem and then I do it.
Steven:
Oh, wow. I really appreciated this tour.
Brian Taylor:
No, I appreciate that. I appreciate you coming by, yeah.
Steven:
Very informative. I love what you guys are doing.
Brian Taylor:
Cool.
Steven:
Really. It’s a good product.
Brian Taylor:
Nice. Yeah.
Steven:
Good business.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, I love it. Good people.
Steven:
Your people seem very happy.
Brian Taylor:
Oh my gosh, yeah. It’s a great team.
Steven:
Well, I look forward to more feedback and doing more projects together.
Brian Taylor:
Yeah. No, I appreciate it.
Steven:
Thanks again, Brian.
Brian Taylor:
Thanks, Steve. Yeah, as Always.
Steven:
All right. Well I’m Steven from Monster Gardens. Till next time.
Brian Taylor:
It took us almost 16 months, but we now have it. So that’s super awesome.
Camera Crew:
Don’t do that.
Brian Taylor:
I am very sorry about that.
Brian Taylor:
To that panel in order to do that.
Steven:
So this right behind you here?
Brian Taylor:
Yeah, there you go. Made in the USA.
Steven:
So all this?
Brian Taylor:
Right.
Steven:
Wow. I’m sorry to touch it like that.
Brian Taylor:
No, you can touch it. Yeah.
Steven:
That was not appropriate.
Brian Taylor:
Oh, that’s all right. We have cleaners come out right behind you.
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.
