I was sitting in a conference room in Brooklyn, New York, when he made those comments. He and I had just watched a series of PowerPoint slides that showed a drop of 35 and 38 percent, respectively, in the fuel bills of those two Columbia University buildings. Along with those fuel savings came a record-low number of heat complaints from the actual tenants. I was sitting up straighter.

“The way I see it, that’s like having three more tenants,” he said.

The rest of us in the conference room had been talking about fuel savings in terms of dollars — how much invested versus how much saved. You know; payback time. We focus on that because most of us think building owners care only about the payback: “How much will it cost up front,” or, “How long will it take me to get my money back?”

But, this guy was telling me something new. It was a perspective I had never considered. First, I have to mention that I act as a casual advisor to the people who came up with this product that created the three invisible tenants. I advised the creators because they asked, and because I really like hanging out with people who are way smarter than I am and who don’t know that certain things can’t be done. These people just go ahead and do those things anyway.

It’s No TRV

This started a couple of years ago when Google sent me an alert about a new product from Radiator Labs that was getting a lot of attention. The product, at the time, was an insulated sack that fit over the top of a radiator. It looked sort of like a heavy pillowcase, and it wasn’t pretty. There’s a flexible hose inside the sack that extends from floor level to the top of the sack. A small fan at the bottom of the hose moves the hot air from inside the sack to the room. The idea is to hold the hot air inside the sack until you need it.

This idea came to company founder Marshall Cox when his brother came to visit him at Cox’s steam-heated, New York City apartment. Cox’s brother was sleeping on the floor near the radiator and sweltering from the heat the iron beast was pounding out. So, he opened the window, which made him cold, of course. Then he closed the window and went back to sweating. Marshall arrived, took a quilt off his bed, wrapped up the radiator, solved the immediate problem and got the idea to create Radiator Labs.

Sure, it wasn’t a new idea. I sent Cox a pen-and-ink drawing from the 19th century of a Victorian radiator enclosed in what looks similar to a quilted tea cozy. The cozy has drawstrings on the side a Victorian could use to raise or lower the fabric, thus controlling the amount of heat in the room. Cox liked the drawing and decided to call his new product The Cozy.

He asked me to come and see him. I told him I thought he was nuts and reinventing the wheel because, since the 1920s, we have had this device called a thermostatic radiator valve, which achieves the same purpose. So there.

But then, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a place I hold in awe, awarded Radiator Labs its 2012 Clean Energy Prize and gave Cox $200,000 to further develop the idea. He now had my full attention.

In May 2013, Popular Science magazine honored him with its Invention Award. Along with that came even more attention from the media and building owners. At that point, I figured it was time for me to stop being so arrogant, so I shut up and started listening.

Although Cox is very young, he has a doctorate in electrical engineering from Columbia University and a bunch of patents on things that have nothing to do with heating. He is smarter than I am, but I know a lot about old heating systems. He asked a lot of questions and paid me back by sharing his ideas. If you look at the Radiator Labs’ site, you’ll see how quickly The Cozy has developed because this guy thinks quickly and not like most people I have met.

The Cozy is now sleek and it can also talk to a boiler, telling it what’s going on in each room. And, if you have a smartphone, you can talk back to it, telling it what you would like. This got me thinking about the Nest thermostat, but with a twist. The Cozy works in old steam- and hot-water-heated apartment buildings by zoning individual rooms and saving lots of fuel overall.

Paying Tenants, Not Payback

So, there we are, in the Brooklyn conference room, going over the latest findings. Most of the people in the room are young enough to be my children, and all are smarter than I am. At one point, Meg Sutton, a data scientist for Radiator Labs, showed me the temperature data from the Columbia buildings and asked, “Dan, does this anomaly here mean this radiator trap has failed?”

I looked at the paperwork and gulped. The Cozy had realized that its trap had failed and it told her. That made me think back to how I had once told Cox he was nuts and reinventing the wheel.

“Ah, yes, Meg, that’s what it means.”

“Thanks.”

So, now I am feeling quite dopey and astonished all at the same time when the guy who buys and rents apartment buildings for a living starts talking about the invisible tenants: “They don’t live in the building. They never complain because they have nothing to complain about. They don’t have agents, and, best of all, they pay their rent on time.”

I’m hearing this and thinking I have never met a contractor who relates fuel savings to invisible tenants. Most contractors give the price and then get vague when the building owner asks about payback.

If those contractors talked instead about invisible tenants, and not dollars and cents, the owner would suddenly see the heating system improvements being proposed through the lens that he uses to measure his wealth — the number of paying tenants. This is so much more tangible in his mind than dollars not paid to the fuel provider. He sees the fuel provider as his foe and the invisible, ideal tenant as his dear friend.

And all this made me think of my 4-year-old grandson, Sully. Last December, Sully asked my daughter, Kelly, how much more time he had to wait until Christmas. “It’s five sleeps,” Kelly said.

Sully smiled. “That’s not long,” he said. Sleeps, not days. Get it? That’s the way Sully thinks.

It also reminded me of when, years ago, I helped my Irish cousin move from Brooklyn to upstate New York. His brothers also helped. One brother asked the other how far the trip was. “I think ‘tis about six beers away,” the second brother said. The first brother nodded and packed accordingly.

I couldn’t help but remember those conversations as I listened to the guy with the perfect tenants. Then, I remembered last summer when my daughter and son-in-law took the kids for a trip in their minivan. “How long is the trip going to be?” Sully asked Kelly.

“Two movies,” Kelly said.

“That’s far!” Sully said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked Kelly, when she told me the story.

“Because, that’s the way little kids think, Dad. Don’t you remember?”

Until recently, I hadn’t remembered. And, you know what? Little kids aren’t the only ones who think like that. People not of this trade often think in a different way than we do. And, sometimes, they even think in a better way.

Think about that.

Publication date: 3/16/2015

Want more HVAC industry news and information? Join The NEWS on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn today!