It’s just math. Joe Piccirilli explains how simple it is to figure out what your critical power consumption is to right-size your Hub.

Transcript

Joe Piccirilli:
Again, this is a terrific question and we deal with it constantly. What the integrator has to understand, and to your point, why did the integrators get these questions, and it is because the equipment that we put in, we the integration community put in, it’s really the first line of equipment that is affected by power problems. Oh, my power glitched and none of my stuff works. My network’s not working. They first go and say, “You got to sell me better gear,” and then it becomes an energy problem.

What do they have to learn? This is where people overly complicate it, because what we provide with people, here’s a checklist. In fact, we have a document that’s called a power plan document. What we ask the client, and when we ask the integrator to do is ask the client, okay, what systems in their house are the most critical, are the most microprocessor intensive? We just have them make a list, because all of the power consumption of those systems is readily available. And then you can add up the power consumption.

There are some de-rating formulas that we provide them, and we go, “Okay, based on what you want to protect, this is the size device for you.” It really is that simple. We’re afraid of it because we think if we make a mistake, oh my god, if we make a mistake, nothing’s going to work. All the breakers are going to trip. The client’s going to be mad. Everything’s going to be horrible. But it is really as long as you can do the arithmetic, and I’m not trying to underplay this, it really is not very difficult.

Even in houses where I don’t know everything that’s connected theses household, we end up telling them, “Look, take a fluke meter or something that you can clamp the input, turn everything in the house on, just turn it all on, and we can tell you what max draws immediately.” You can design a system just from that. The rest of it is really… Like in the case of our product, which obviously I’m not objective, but it is the most complete product, the electrician is four wires in, four wires out.

As we are discussing off-air, one of my technicians is on site at all times to make sure the four wires are attached properly. But it really is not as difficult as we think. Trying to overcome that and let people know, hey, this is not that hard, and people will not believe us until they actually go through a couple of these. That’s it. Okay, what is it? We were doing a project, I guess, the last week or week before. This house is on the historic register. God knows where the writing is.

How are we going to do this? I’m going, okay, this is really simple. Let me speak to the electrician because he’s going to have the meter put it there, and two weeks later we had all the data. Here’s the size. We can do your entire house. It’s done. And then from there you can also tell them how long is it going to run with the batteries.