ok, found the article. but first my comments...
these guys are plain nuts. it sounds like eddie albert and eva
gabor in green acres. just a couple of backwoods hacker/tinkerers
putting together a little widget literally in their garage. this sort of
thing may sell to the 5 ranchers in north dakota (that is, if they
dont electrocute themselves first), but its not going to convince
the standard issue utility executive.
both itron and cellnet have already acknowledged the market is
kind of tough to crack. utilities are conservative monopolies; theyre
not keen on taking technology risks. this article even mentions some
customer problems.
anyway, here's the article. net influence: none.
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ÿÿÿInventor Paul Hunt is 180 degrees out of phase with the rest of the modem industry. That's how he discovered a nifty little business in meter readers.
Out of the woods
By Suzanne Oliver
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PAUL HUNT sits in the living room of his cluttered Pequot Lakes, Minn. home and struggles to pull a brush through his white hair, which stands on end as if electrified. It is July, yet plastic greenery hangs over a window, and the lights shine on a Christmas wreath over the fireplace. A bit odd? Paul Hunt, who looks like a caricature of a mad scientist, has no self-consciousness about his oddness. Nor does his wife, Lynn, president of Hunt Technologies, who sits on the floor, humming as she clips her toenails.
This backwoods couple has astonished the utility industry with a product as unconventional as they are. It is an automatic electric meter reader for rural areas. In an age when speed is everything--or almost everything--this odd couple's odd product is basically a very, very slow modem. It is called the Turtle because it is so sluggish--requiring a whole day to send its reading along a power line from a meter to a utility substation.
The tradeoff for its lack of speed is economy. At $75 a residence, the Turtle costs less than half the price of most competing products. "With the world going faster--more channels on cable TV, faster computers and modems--nobody considered that a microprocessor could help you go slower, too," says Paul Hunt, 42. He and his wife founded the company to build and market the product. Rural electric co-ops from Alaska to Florida are installing the Turtle, and sales will easily reach $4 million this year.
How did Paul, whose father was a carpenter, and Lynn Hunt, whose parents ran carnival games, build a business in an industry dominated by much bigger companies like CellNet, Itron, Asea Brown Boveri and General Electric? Call it a triumph of old-time Yankee resourcefulness over corporate resources. As a kid Paul had a knack for electronics, subscribing to Popular Electronics since the second grade. As a teenager he had built white-noise machines, automatic door openers and a portable telephone that he used to call Lynn, from her driveway, to ask her out on a date. He dropped out of engineering school at North Dakota State University after two years. "They taught math and pencil pushing--not electronics," he says with wonder. "Their graduates couldn't make an oscillator oscillate."
After ten years working for two small telephone companies, he struck out on his own as an independent designer of electronic products. "It started to bother me that my co-workers were counting the days to retirement with 15 years to go," says Hunt. But the new venture disappointed him, too. "We were involved with people with harebrained ideas from all walks of life," he says. Hunt created products like an electronic egg counter, a coin sensor and an automatic hotel wake-up call system. None of the items really flew, and the royalties were so meager that Hunt's poverty-line income qualified his three kids for discount school lunches. To help make ends meet, Lynn, now 41, drove a commuter van, waitressed and sold Avon products.
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Since college Paul had been thinking about the possibility of sending information at ultra-low frequencies. That's the opposite of what just about everyone else in the modem business is thinking. In most applications the name of the game is speed, and the only way to get high data speeds is to use high frequencies.
Reading electric meters is a special case. After all, the power company is not trying to download a color Web page from the customer; it just needs a few bytes of data-counting kilowatt-hours and the like.
That tells you why low frequencies suffice in meter reading. Now, why they might be necessary.
To read a meter, the utility could set up a communications line--a phone line, for example, or a string of radio transmitters. That costs too much, especially in rural areas. The economical method is to communicate over the power lines already in place. Trouble is, power lines are a terrible vehicle for high-frequency signals. For one thing, the transformers--those big cans you see on utility poles--blot out high frequencies, while letting low frequencies pass through. (Think of the way the walls in an apartment building let the base notes on a stereo next door boom right through, while blocking the high notes.)
You can deal with the transformers if you amplify the signal enough, but then you run into another problem. Power lines carry a lot of high-frequency noise, created every time somebody flicks on a light or turns off a hair dryer.
Solution: low frequencies. The Turtle contains an electric eye that watches an electric meter's disk revolve, and it sends an information packet over the power lines each day with data, including kilowatt-hour usage, peak usage time and number of power blinks.
With the help of a local electric co-op executive, Hunt wrote a research proposal and got $187,000 from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. In return Hunt promised the Association a small royalty on sales of any product he developed with the research money. He and two technicians did their research in the Hunts' small living room. Sometimes, Hunt would start work in his bathrobe and forget to change into clothes until late afternoon. A man so involved in his work that he forgets to get dressed is ill-equipped to run a business, but there was Lynn. She has the common sense and head for details that Paul lacks. "I named her president because I never wanted to manage anything myself," says Hunt. Lynn, who recently got her bachelor's degree in business at Concordia College, did the marketing and accounting and helped assemble circuit boards.
The research grant got Hunt Technologies going. To keep it going, Paul and Lynn Hunt put everything on the line. "We pledged our accounts receivable, our house, our car, our furniture--everything but the children," says Paul Hunt. In 1988 the Hunts got a $50,000 line of credit with a local bank. Today that line of credit is up to $500,000. By 1994, the company had installed 1,750 Turtles at two electric co-ops in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The trusting co-ops paid $322,500 for the black boxes and software, even though they were officially still in the testing phase.
In 1995 the Hunts started peddling the device at trade shows and in trade press advertisements. They got $1 million in orders that year, outsourcing production to a local contractor.
The Hunts' ad hoc approach to starting a business landed them in trouble. Earlier this year there were complaints from customers about faulty Turtles. Fixing the problem put them eight weeks behind schedule on filling orders, and Paul Hunt was busy writing an installation manual, after an employee had failed to produce a satisfactory one. One April afternoon he went home and cried. "I blew a fuse," says Hunt. "I know how to structure software and computers. Structuring a company only mirrors that so far."
Lynn Hunt was also working flat out. The Hunts realized they needed help. They hired Floyd Hale as general manager; with 30 years' experience in the computer industry, he had worked for Unisys and Tandem Computers. They also hired a national sales manager with 25 years of sales experience with technology and industrial companies. "This had to be transformed from a garage shop to a real product company," says Hale.
Things are looking better now. Already 105 utilities are testing Turtle systems, and 21 are installing Turtles throughout their service areas. Itron and CellNet, which sell radio-based meter-reading services to big utilities, are evaluating Turtles for use in the rural-like perimeters of some of the urban areas they service.
Paul Hunt is happy to be back in his laboratory, barefoot and designing new products for rural electric co-ops. Getting wealthy from the Turtle does not impress an inventor who boils oatmeal to avoid the expense of cold cereals. "I could live in a 40-foot trailer and be happy, he says. |
