OnAire Episode 2 Transcript:

Welcome to the SonicAire OnAire Podcast. This is episode two, thanks for joining us. This is where we talk about all things dust: combustible dust, fugitive dust, that dust that escapes and goes where it wants to. I’m Jordan, I’m your host today. And today I got a co-host, a special co-host, Mr. Taylor Andrews, welcome to the pod.

Thank you, special, not sure how I feel about that.

Yeah, well, you know. Hey, I see you’ve switched chairs. I don’t know that’s an upgrade chair, but.

It is a chair. It’s better than a bucket. Better than a bucket, better than the plant, a chair.

It’s a chair, all right, we’re gonna go. Our special guest today is none other than Mr. Chuck Morrison, he’s our Vice President of Sales. Chuck, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, appreciate you having me.

Yeah, so today we’re gonna be talking about dust collection and kind of the history of dust control and dust management and where it’s come and where it’s going. But first we wanna start with hearing a little bit about you, Chuck, and kind of what’s your background, how you got here, what you’ve been doing. And, you know, so you’re our Vice President of Sales, our sales leader. Did you grow up thinking you wanted to be in sales? Were you that kid that was selling candy bars and light bulbs and everything else down the street and just excited to make people’s day a little bit better with some new product?

In dust collection?

In dust collection.

Seriously? No, I actually grew up wanting to be a veterinarian.

Really?

So that was completely 180 degrees from where I landed. Engineering and mechanical engineering was kind of a fallback for me. And then I went to work for a company early on, like in ‘84, and actually ended up spending about 26 years there. It was a Danish conglomerate that went through several buyouts. And I kind of grew up in the culture, in the company. Wasn’t a lot of culture, but it was a company. And I started out in the engineering department doing drafting. So, worked my way up through products and inside sales and outside sales. I mean, I wore about 10 different hats over the 26 years I was there.

You said you did drafting. I think you have a good story about you going to school for drafting and maybe not going back to school for drafting.

Actually, I went to school for pre-vet, but I was asked not to come back to school. That’s when I went to my plan B, and that was when I went to school to do mechanical engineering and drafting. And that set me on the path of the engineering side of things.

Mr. Morrison, maybe you have other talents and gifts you could use elsewhere.

I quickly realized that in engineering and the drafting world, there was not a lot of money to be made. So inside sales was one of my fast tracks. Then to outside sales and then into product management and then ultimately in large project management. So, I would take it from inception all the way through commissioning to, it seemed to be an internal talent to be able to do the integration of the equipment for the customer.

And that set me on the path to dust collection. I’ve been doing it now for going on 41 years, I think.

Wow, impressive.

So, I did dust collection for this company for 26 years. Then I went into, we went into 2008 when the housing market took its toll on the economy. We downsized. I was working for a small company at that time, and we downsized. And then that’s when I actually took on my own company. So, I flew to Germany, we met with a German manufacturer, and we started basically bringing German equipment over, dust collection equipment over.

So, we became, it was a two man show, and we became a systems integrator, just carrying on what I had learned over the last 26 years. We did that for about seven years and then things change, paths change and seasons change. And that’s when I got back in touch with Brad Carr, our owner. I had a previous relationship with Brad from his old company. We sold them ductwork when he was at the previous company. So, we had a relationship. And we had lunch one day, and we talked about the potentiality of us ever having a relationship, a working relationship together. So that’s when things started to move along a little bit. Jordan, I think was very new in the position around 2008, nine.

Let me back up just a step though, because when I had my own company, that’s actually when I got back together with Brad. And we actually carried SonicAire as a product in our product line. And that’s how I’ve got familiar with what the technology does. So, I was doing dust collection, trying to get it at the source. And then I was learning that these fans could help prevent it in the rest of the facilities. And it just seemed like a natural match to me.

That’s been a tough connection for a lot of people to make, because we’ve worked with a lot of dust collection suppliers throughout the years. And you would think natural fit, hey, you’re there in a space that’s making dust. You’re collecting what you can. You’re not gonna get a hundred percent of it. So, let’s work together with SonicAire and try to capture.

That space never goes away.

Yeah, let’s put a barrier on that overhead space.

In dust collection, you’re in the mid range around the equipment, but nobody ever really looks up to think about, well, my customers got issues here. And that’s what I was doing to make the crossover with dust collection and SonicAire fans.

Can you talk a little about the difference between dust collection and what we do?

Yeah, dust collection is…anybody that creates dust in their process needs dust collection or dust extraction, air pollution control equipment. A lot of people call it different things. So basically, what it is, it’s a very large industrial vacuum cleaner that pulls dust from a source, be it a blade, a sanding belt, a pouring operation in a grain operation, where they’re anywhere they have to get rid of this dust because it’s a nuisance or a danger to the personnel working in that area.

And then what they do with it after that can be many things. So, it can either be disposed of in a landfill, it can be compressed into a briquette and then put back into a recycling part of the operation. The other key part is being able to recoup the air that you’re pulling out of the space and bring it back into the space in a cleaner light.

Like a make-up air in return.

Yeah, if not, what happens is your buildings become very negative pressurized and the doors, the doors will slam behind you. I mean, it’s very wasteful.

So, the difference between that and what we do, we do preventative dust control, we don’t collect. So, a lot of people get that kind of crossed up that, oh, where’s your filter on your fans? Yeah, we don’t have filters on our fans. But what we do is we work in the upper space, keeping the dust from going up there and collecting, keeping it down in the working space where actually some of that fugitive dust could be collected by source capture from a dust collector.

That’s why I never thought of it as being a competitor, a competing product, where a lot of integrators or dust collector suppliers will think, oh, I can’t put the fans up there, then they don’t need our dust collector. Well, that’s so far from the truth. It’s the one, two punch, right?

Chuck, so you talked about how the fans prevent the dust from getting to the overhead spaces, but a lot of concern I hear is from customers who, or potential customers who are not familiar with the technology. They say, okay, so you’re gonna blow it down and keep it all in suspension, and it’s gonna blow in my employees face, and they’re gonna have to breathe it all in now. So where does the dust go?

It’s really funny, Jordan, most every customer or prospect I talk to, that’s their mindset. You can educate and educate and educate, but they still think about it. I mean, they think about just the simplistic physics of it. It’s like a fan in a dusty area. What else can it do? It’s gonna blow the dust around. So, I use your video a lot about, don’t these fans just blow dust around? Because there’s a good explanation of the agglomeration feature of what our fans do.

So, what’s agglomeration? Because that was a new word to me when I first heard it.

Yeah, it also happens a little bit in dust collection as well. The smaller particles, most types of dust in an industrial setting are fuzzy or abrasive, and they’re not as smooth. It’s not like a ball bearing. The dust, if you look at it under a microscope, it doesn’t look like a smooth sphere.

They’re hairy.

Yeah, yeah, could have a little hair on it. What happens is as those smaller particles tend to move around with airflow, in the strata, they bounce into each other and they have a tendency to grab. And as they grab, they grow. And as they grow, they get heavier. As they get heavier, they fall in the atmosphere.

In that space, what happens is they get heavy enough to fall to the floor and then they’re just swept up in normal housekeeping procedures, or they get caught in the airstream of the dust collector. So, it sounds really simple, but it’s really hard to convince a customer that we’re not just gonna blow the dust around.

Yeah, it’s interesting when you walk into a facility before they install the fans and you look into their lights and things and you’ll see kind of that halo and that fog kind of where their process is going on and the dust is being generated. And then once the fans are installed and you walk in and the air’s just visibly cleaner, like the dust does fall to the floor quicker. It doesn’t stay in that breathing zone.

A great example is we had a customer that actually took the test for themselves. They put on personal monitors, dust monitors, on their employees. And we’ve not done that and proven it with our engineering team yet. But this customer wanted to know for sure that it was getting cleaner, the air was getting cleaner. And it came back positive that the air was actually cleaner than before when they, before they put the fans in.

Yeah, it’s a big deal because I’ve been in a facility where they made me wear one because they were worried about once we turned them on that there was gonna be a problem. So they made me keep one on. I had to turn in my cell phone. I couldn’t wear a watch. I couldn’t do anything because that is a big fear that you’re just gonna add all this particulate into the air. But it’s really counterintuitive because like you’re saying, they stick together and then they fall to the floor. I think the second most question we get is, can you fix my toothbrush?

(Laughing)

That’s a pretty common question. Yeah, SonicAire. Not that SonicAire.

Yeah, hopefully our marketing team gets that lead out of our system before it comes to us.

So, tell us about where you’ve seen advancements in dust management and particularly in the combustible dust space. Like where have you seen the industry come? You said you’ve been there, been in this space for 42 years. So, what are some of the advancements you’ve seen? Where’s the technology going?

Yeah, in my early years, I didn’t get a lot into product development of dust extraction systems. I sort of just was given the design, said here, make it work. But it was, like I said, it was like a big vacuum cleaner. No, it was a big box with bags in it, filter bags in it. We had different types of media for different types of dust, very similar to the way our fans are. We do different types of dust, and we apply our fans differently to different types of dust based on weight, moisture, abrasiveness and density, bulk density. So very similar in the dust collection world, we had to do the same thing. So, you have to design for the application.

One of the biggest things that I’ve seen in recent days, over the last, I’d say 10 years, is the development of energy management systems. So, what it used to be is you just, you used to add up all the ports on the equipment you needed to pull dust from. You add all those up through some formulas, and you come up with a total air volume that you had to pull through a dust collector or filter system.

That translates in the horsepower.

That translates into huge horsepower. 150, 200, 300 horsepower fans, single lines that are so inefficient because clients don’t always run at 100% of the time.

But the system’s on or off, right?

On or off, correct. So now they’ve gone, they’ve gotten into more of a monitoring of the openings which are needed during the process, and which aren’t needed in the process using a series of gates, cut off gates. What they do is then tie that back to a variable frequency drive that’s on this 100-horsepower fan. And then they have sensors, velocity sensors in the duct work that allow the fan to ramp up and ramp down based on the need of airflow. So that’s one of the biggest advancements in dust collection that I’ve seen over the last 10 years. And they’re getting smarter and smarter all the time.

Yeah, makes sense. So, talk about the fugitive side of things. So, as the filtration systems have gotten better, they’ve gotten more energy efficient, what about on the fugitive dust? What’s that been like over the past 40 years? How do people manage that differently?

Yeah, again, the general industrial population seems to grow. They advance all the time. So, they’re always looking for better ways to use less labor, use less power and automate things. So, you know, years and years ago, you know, our fan technology has been around for 40? Maybe, I’d guess 40 years. But it was primarily used in the textile industry. Back in the day when we had tons and tons of mills around here, cotton, spinning mills, you know, socks, t-shirt companies making it, making everything here. It was part of that technology. And then Brad, our owner, had the foresight to see how the fans could be used in other industries. They had never heard of it. The woodworking industry never heard of an overhead fan.

Goes back to, don’t they just blow this dust around? Right. And so, we’ve had the dubious task over the last, I’ve been here going on nine years. So, we’ve had to educate the general industrial public to understand that the technology is there to help them be more efficient and to make the workplace safer.

Has that been a hurdle going from industry to industry? Like you said, it was initially just in the textile world, but going into, you mentioned wood. Was that a different obstacle from when you were doing industry to industry in dust collection?

Not really. In dust collection, the industries are, they accept the fact that they have to have it. They don’t want it because they don’t see it making them any money. Yeah. You know? So, it’s a necessary evil. So, guess what? When you have a necessary evil and a client that sees that it doesn’t make them any money, they want the cheapest solution they can get. So that’s the other mindset that we have to get around with our fans because in my opinion, SonicAire is the best fan on the market. And we know our industries, we engineer our solutions, we’re continually innovating, and that’s the hardest part to get over to a customer to help them understand they got the best solution supplier on the market.

So I don’t, did that answer your question?

Probably a tough message coming from the VP of sales, too.

(Laughing)

What about awareness? Do you think customers are more aware today than they were 40 years ago of the dangers of combustible dust? Is there more education? Is there more, just general awareness when you talk about combustible dust and the hazards around it? Are people more problem aware?

I think they’re problem aware because places have blown up. I mean, there’s been a tremendous amount in the grain and ag industry, the woodworking industry, the primary woodworking industry, like on the sawmill side, before it gets to a cabinet manufacturer or anything like that.

And also additions of folks like Chris Cloney, who is educating the public and has been doing that for the last several years. It’s growing. OSHA certainly educates people. Yeah. Because they put the big sign on them.

Sometimes the hard way.

Yeah, the hard way. And I think companies like us that partner with other companies like Chris’s organization, is just continually peppering the industry with that and keeping it in front of mind. That’s the biggest thing.

So where are we going? Where do you see dust management and combustible dust going in the future? Is it going away? Is the need for that one-two punch, the fugitive dust management, is that going away as dust collection gets better and better? What do you think?

Is AI going to overtake the dust?

It’ll never overtake the dust, but it could certainly lessen the personnel in the dangerous zones. I mean, robotics certainly are growing. Automations are growing where people are working on the outside of the dangerous area. It’s not gonna change the zone, but it could change the importance of people being in the zone. It’ll never go away because manufacturing is gonna be there. You’re gonna machine metal, you’re gonna machine wood, you’re gonna machine different substrates to make things we want, where that’s not gonna go away. The human want’s always gonna be there. How they make it is gonna change. There’s gonna be more automation, but the dangers are still gonna be there. And I don’t think that will do anything but grow over the next coming years.

Well, I think we’re about out of time. So, Chuck, I wanna thank you for being here with us today. Thank you all for watching and listening to us. So, if you enjoyed what we’re doing here, go ahead and like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we will see you next time on air. Thanks, Jordan.