Michael Colligan: “Welcome back folks to the Get A Grip On Lighting podcast! On today’s show we have B.D. Erickson II. B.D. is a proven leader and team builder, successfully navigating an everchanging high-tech business climate. Having business and science degrees, combined with Anthony Robbins Mastery University and Leadership Academy, he’s a badass!  B.D. is well equipped to lead his team in the highly technical sector of clean, renewable energy and clean manufacturing. Spanning two decades in high-pressure leadership roles, B.D. has been recognized multiple times for building winning teams, creating an outstanding corporate culture and having a massive impact on company-wide growth. Currently running SATICShield, the country’s leading clean power manufacturing facility and Montana’s most proficient solar company. B.D. possess a proven track record of sustaining high-level team buy-in, and he’s going to talk about it on the show. B.D., what’s happening brother?”

 

B.D. Erickson II: “Surfs up, nice to be here boys.”

 

Greg Ehrich: “Hey I’m going to throw you a nice easy softball and start off with your business here, what is dirty electricity? Give it to us, break it down..”

 

B.D.: “So dirty electricity is a real thing. It is measurable, when you have electricity coming into your home or facility, it’s got to be within some standards, right? So if you plug something in, and it’s a 120-volt outlet, it needs to be 120 man! If it’s 200 volts, it’s going to fry whatever you have in in! In the US, we’re at a frequency of 60 Hertz, in Europe they like 50, right? When I was a kid when my mom was cleaning the house and I was watching Gilligan’s Island or the Brady Bunch and my mom would vacuum, it would put lines, and watching Carol Burnette, PBS baby that’s what we grew up on! So when my mom would come in and vacuum, it would mess up the TV. Well, I’m an 8-year-old jedi, so I jump for the rabbit ears, I’m old man, I’m older than you fellas a little bit, that’s how you got your clear signal, right? I learned as an adult that it has nothing to do with the wireless waves, clean electricity was coming into my mom’s vacuum, she was distorting it with the use of.. you can hear your sister’s blow dryer on your radio! Don’t say you can’t! You can’t! It’s a real thing. HAM radio guys always want this clean electricity! So, there are things that happen to your electricity that make it dirty, one is interference. That’s like cross talk, right? One is distortion, so for every LED driver, every CFL ballast, every solar inverter, has a rating on it, THD. Should be THD less than 3%. What’s that? Total Harmonic Distortion. So oftentimes, the quality of your ballast, the quality of your driver is in direct proportion to, a couple thing, one is THD, Total Harmonic Distortion. Another one is Power Factor, right? So in electricity, we have eight key points, and I don’t mean to be techy I’ll buzz right through them fast, one- Volts, two-Amps, three-Watts which is the product, Total Harmonic Distortion, Electromagnetic Fields, Olm’s Law of Resistance and Primary Frequency. These are the eight things that need to be within a parameter. So dirty electricity is when one or multiple things are out of designed parameter.”

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

costs way too much money and they don’t teach you anything you need to know, and the sooner you get out, if you want to be an entrepreneur, get out there and start selling stuff to people and you’ll learn so much faster, I mean, especially in America.. What’s your degree? Do you have the tickets besides your name and all this? It’s such a load of crap. Americans especially way over-value formal education in universities and way under-value savvy that you learned in the business world.”

 

B.D.: “It’s like a rite of passage and you ask somebody, you know, about their education and in some way that, you know, puts them in a group or puts their credibility or something, and you’re absolutely right, I know guys that right now their shoes are untied and their zipper is down, but they got an MBA. I’ve got a good buddy who’s an MBA and he’s washing dishes right now at a restaurant. I also know guys that didn’t graduate high school that are multi-million dollar entrepreneurs. College is absolutely overrated, and for some reason we give it so much credibility. That’s the American system, right? We give certain things credibility when, what should really give you credibility: Are you a good person? Are you fun? Are you honest? Are you generous? Are you kind-spirited and kind-hearted? That’s the only measure of a man, I think, is the size of his heart..”

 

Michael: “Nah.. I would say: What have you built? What value have you added to the society?  You know, there’s so many grifters and talking heads out there that have tickets that say something like “Oh look at me, I’m smart, I’ve got a ticket from here.” And I’m not going to talk about this because we could do a whole podcast on this..”

 

B.D.: “I totally agree! Great topic..”

 

Michael: “I think it’s a huge problem in America right now, and in Canada too. Like you don’t have a degree or whatever, it’s like, agh anyways, long story short, yeah.. what’s next Greg?”

 

B.D.” But I do have science and business degrees if that helps at all for the listeners! What I learned at work, I learned at work and I didn’t learn it in school.”

 

Greg: “Sure. No, that’s the right way to do it. So dirty electricity, you said a little bit, but specifically why is it bad, or, is it a major problem? Let’s go there..”

 

B.D.: “Okay, so let’s go back, so just so you know, maybe the single largest contributor to dirty electricity in our world today is in direct portion to our lighting. So we’re going to go back just 30 years maybe to 1990. We all used the Edison incandescent lightbulb, right? You’ve got an anode and a cathode, right? Power-In and Power-Out, and then you have this tungsten or magnesium, manganese, usually tungsten filament, and when you apply voltage you get heat. 90% of what is made is heat, but you get this really great byproduct which is light. Now, by the sheer operation of that, that cleans electricity. So my mom’s vacuum is on making it dirty, but that resistive load cleans it. Now according to the Department of Energy at the time, we all had 20 to 30 of these lightbulbs in our home. So every single resident, American, Mexican, Canadian, you pick it, is actively cleaning electricity every time they’re using light. Now they took that away and they brought this really great product to us called CFL, Compact Florescent Lamp. So they shut down all these, I am an American designer, engineer, manufacturer in Montana, we manufacture our stuff in Montana for the most part, some little parts always come from Asia, we don’t make every component, but I think it’s important to build stuff and to be a producer, a creator, a distributor, not just a consumer. So what happened with the CFL? Those are made in Asia, so these great lightbulb manufacturing plants in Michigan get shut down, we’re buying the stuff from Asia, well what’s in it? It is a, so the way a compact florescent works is that you have gases in them, and that gas becomes your filament, I don’t know if you guys realize this but, they need higher voltage..”

 

Michael: “This is a lightning show, everybody listening almost knows all of this kind of thing..”

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

of your fridge is hot, your phone charges slow and hot, now my air conditioner is blowing to beat the band and the top of my damn DVR is now a space heater! So the electronic doesn’t last as long, the electronic doesn’t want to be hot, and my air conditioner is shrugging all of this heat! So the change in lighting had a fundamental change in energy quality, in the world beyond contestation.”

 

Michael: “Well, that’s true. I thought the solution was to increase the size of the neutral wire at the switch gear or at the mean, so we saw a lot of these problems at the companies switch from their magnetic ballasts, their T-12 ballasts, and then they would have problems, their whole building would go down, and the problem was that the neutral wire was smaller than the, at the switch gear was smaller than the load wire..”

 

B.D.: “The conductor!”

 

Michael: “Yeah, the load wire was built in the 70’s or whatever, and so we would change those cables and solve the problem, but you’re saying the problem is not solved?”

 

B.D.: “I love that you guys actually do know your stuff! I usually talk over everyone’s head! I throw and you guys hit it back! I love it! The neutral was never supposed to be that big. The neutral was never supposed to carry that much current! So, we got these houses, in California specifically, where the neutral and the ground is bonded, that was code now having neutral and grounded is not code anymore. So, I plug in my vacuum in the phase blade, so when you’re looking at an outlet, or something I would plug into an outlet, usually one blade is small and the other blade is big, smaller blade is the phase, that’s power-in, and the big blade is power-out. When you throw an amp meter over both legs, you’ve got like five amps coming in, you’ve got 4.9 going out baby! That’s the power that’s lost, that’s Ohm’s Law, well where does that power go? That goes on the neutral. So the neutral becomes the conductor, if you will, of the dirty electricity because we have clean power in degraded by the use of the device out on the neutral. So…”

 

Michael: “That’s not consumption though. That’s not consumption.”

 

B.D.: “That’s not consumption, no it’s not consumption, but dirty electricity has that cumulative effect, and that’s what I’m really talking about. Not watts, not power bills specifically.”  

 

Michael: “So listen, I’ve had people come and try to sell me black boxes before that clean electricity. And I always call bullshit on them, okay? So, you know, one of the things that I’ve done in the past is that we’ve actually metered lighting systems and took our payment out of electricity savings, and we’ve never seen any electricity savings on consumption or load from any of these devices that scrub electricity or clean the electricity. So, we’re in agreement that there are no energy savings?”

 

B.D.: “Well, not on that device! Not on that thing! Any energy savings that you would have would come post that as a result of the dirty electricity. The watt should stay the same, volts times amps times power factor is watts. Not volts times amps, volts times amps is VA, volt amps, total power. So by cleaning the power, you’re not going to reduce or improve the power factor, you’re not going to improve the watt, that’s going to stay the same! What you’re going to lower is heat down the line. So what I’m stating right here is that I’ve got a ballast, I’ve got a driver, I’ve got something, we measure power-in and power-out and we filter it. Who gives a shit? That’s the guy that dirtied it! And do you want to put a filter on your camel or do you want to stop smoking? That’s really the difference too, that’s a different part of the conversation…”

 

Michael: “Let me ask you a question, so if I stick a meter on the whole service before we, it’s a component you stick at the whole panel that you guys are making or what is it? Tell me what it is you’re making, let’s start with that.”

 

B.D.: “Okay, so let’s finish what you were saying. So I don’t argue that you don’t change it on the device that’s making dirty electricity. What’s changed is the other things that now get the dirty electricity. My mom’s vacuum comes in, my mom’s vacuum is getting clean power! It’s my TV that’s feeling the effect. So I go up to a river and its snow melt in Montana and it’s gorgeous and that water is so clean I could drink it and I am also dumping a contaminant in that water. Measuring right before at the place, that’s not where it’s dirty! That’s not where I’m going to pick up the contaminants..”

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

measure watts, amps and watts, at the panel that powers these loads, and then we filter it with any number of filtering devices out there that work, within a few minutes you’ll begin to lower the heat loss, the Olm’s Law, the total power, and the amps, and it will lower those watts considerably at the main service as a cumulative effect of all these things, not necessarily that one thing that’s specifically making it dirty.”

 

Michael: “So I have tested these things multiple times and I’ve never observed that. And I’m not saying your product, I’m not saying your product, but I’ve tested it, I’ve done the tests on this, I’ve put the CT’s around the main loads…”

B.D.: “So what you’re saying is that I’m going to put a meter on your house and I’m going to ship you one of my units and I’m going to show it to you unequivocally beyond contestation. If you’d be willing to play that game, I’ll play it. And here’s an easy way to do it, so there’s guys out there, so what’ you’re probably talking about for the most part is probably coming from capacitor bank, right? So capacitor bank is the easiest way to lower amps, but we know that the amps don’t lower the watts. What you do save though is resistance. So, the air conditioner runs on five amps at a power factor of 50, you improve the power factor to unity, 99, you’re going to be down to 2.5 amps. So those 2.5 amps just be sheerly travelling through the wire will have a savings, you can’t say none. It’s small, but you can’t say none because if I push five amps from here to here, I’m going to lose more to Olm’s Law of Resistance and heat then I am at 2.5 amps!”

 

Michael: “How much does the device cost?”

 

B.D.: “Well, it depends on what the load is or whatever else, so…”

 

Michael: “Single family home?”

B.D.: “1,000 bucks. 1,000 bucks. So let’s keep going, and so, we make lighting and stuff too and our lighting is power factor perfect, adds no THD, adds no EMF, there are a lot of other results that come from as an effect, as a byproduct of this dirty electricity. So you’re water, for the most part, right?, you’re a human being, we’re 70-80% water content, right? We get heavy-metaled, people say chem trails, aluminum and all this stuff, come on man I’m just saying..”

 

Michael: “Mercury is real! PCB’s is real!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

because AC wants to do this, well, that’s what a diode does! You let them in and you shut the door, you can’t let them out, and you let the next guy in and you shut the door and he can’t go out. And now you’re going (make a chopping-like hand jester) like this at 60 Hertz, you’re strobing it, your DC device likes it, friggin nothing else does! Everything else hates it! And the idea that has no repercussion downstream is bullshit! It does! And we’ll measure it! When you clean it, you get a different result. Does it cut your bill in half? No! It’s like six or eight percent. But it’s measurable, it’s consistent, and the reason you get that is that you’re not making all of your crap hot. You’re not making all your crap hot! And so when your crap is not hot, if reform is better, it has to last longer, you’re not going to argue that with me, and your air conditioner is not blowing to beat the freaking band. So let’s say its 80 degrees outside and you’ve got the air conditioner on, your little kid wants to be warm, they bring out a space heater and they plug it in. You go ‘No Way Jose!’ because I’m using watts to make the heat, and then I’m using watts to make it cold. Don’t think the back of your fridge isn’t that same thing! Of course it is! So if I save the watts making it hot, I save the watts making it cold. If your air conditioner can do one event, one less even cycle per day, or shorter event cycles, you save about three percent on your bill. We’ll accomplish that almost out of the gate by cooling down all of your devices. We can show you the numbers, they’re measure! They’re real! You can tell that I’m not full of crap because I know what I’m talking about!”

 

Michael: “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean your device works. So we have to talk more about that..”

 

B.D.: “Okay! Alright! That’s fair enough because we’re going to get there.”

 

Michael: “Haha, well I think there might be part two here, but anyways let’s discuss this further. So I have a farm in the country, okay, and in the summertime they’ve built a lot more houses out there recently, and what I’ve noticed is that in the summertime, weird things happen because I’ve got a ground source heat pump and I noticed what will happen sometimes in the summer at peak heat my generator will come on which is super weird, but what’s happening is the device that senses electricity senses that it has gone down so the voltage is dropping because everyone is using the air conditioner, it’s going on in that area and you have long powerlines servicing these areas and there’s not a lot of the stations that re-use the…”

 

B.D.: “Substations. Yep.”

 

Michael: “Substations, and you have long distances combined with higher than normal loads going on all at the same time and then the power drops on my generator. Does your guys’ device clean power on the way in?”

 

B.D.: “Yes! So what you’re talking about is exactly what I’m talking about. Now I’m talking about a micro-scale, you’re talking about a macro-scale. So what we’re talking about is something in between the clean power and me changing in some negative way the parameters of these powers. So what you’re talking about specifically is low-voltage. Is low-voltage a form of dirty electricity? It certainly can be because it’s outside of a parameter, and now the alert on my HVAC and on my pump or something else is saying not within parameter, it’s resetting, it’s turning on my jenny or whatever else, and so we’re going to add that it’s a cumulative effect. So their CFL, their DC devices are adding more and more harmonics, real and measurable. So, when you get called the foil hat guy, and I can take it, my shoulder can carry it, I’ve been called the foil hat guy, but when you ask a HAM radio guy if interference is real, it’s beyond contestation. They have all of these filtering systems and stuff so that they can get this clean signal. When you ask an audio-file..”

 

Michael: “Like Neil Young talks about this all the time. Neil Young, the musician, he talks about plugging his amp in all the time and knowing if the power is clean or not or the way his guitar sounds.”

 

B.D.: “Our best customers are audio-files. So bands and stuff love our stuff. So let’s say you’re in this audio-files house and you’re watching Avatar and we have drifted away to James Cameron’s incredible light and sound and we are totally encapsulated. Now the minifridge comes on at his bar, what happens? The speakers go ‘Tick’, they go ‘Pop’, don’t say they don’t, of course they do! They can’t help it! When they get that big in rush pulse, that five amps go into that air conditioner…”

 

Michael: “The worst, B.D., the worst is printers. Like a printer comes on to print something and it takes out anything else that’s on that circuit. It takes it out, yeah it’s true.”

 

B.D.: “So this is exactly what I’m talking about! And so it’s one of those things where you say out loud that you’re the foil hat guy and then you say I’m watching the “I Dream A Genie” and the TV is messy, my neighbor’s air conditioner comes on and my lights dim, the HAM radio guy and the audio-file pop and tick in their speakers, this is exactly what I’m talking about, and your phone getting hot, you just had to have it broken down into real simple things that you’re familiar with, and so I’m going to take it one step further, you guys are going to love this one because the UFO’s are coming for us baby, EMF’s are bad for you, EMF’s are bad for the person.”

 

Michael: “What’s EMF?”

 

B.D.: “Electromagnetic Fields. So electromagnetic fields is what makes any motor run. The power of electromagnetic fields, I’m going to put into proportion for you right now, so I think as little boys we all love trains. I would count the cars, and whenever we would get stopped at the train crossing I would count them. And my top one is 111 cars. Well, I’m in Montana, they’re coal cars, some 20-40 tons per car and you’ve got 100 of them. How do you get that thing going? How do you get that thing moving? Now we’ve all pulled a boat or a big trailer, and we used to drive sticks, we’re slipping that clutch, slipping that clutch, pretty soon you’re smoking your clutch because you’re trying to get this thing, or your motorcycle, do you do a wheely or kill it? You have to be smooth with the clutch, right? Well, in an electric motor you’ve got a stater and you’ve got the coil and you’ve got the magnets and you create, by applying voltage to this copper coil an electromagnetic field. That field begins to spin it, nothing is touching! There’s no moving parts or connecting hard parts! So we’re going to get 100 train cars that weigh 40 tons each moving with a field? Yes! That’s how they work! Electromagnetic fields are real and they’re apart of our everyday life! So let’s break it down a little bit farther, what does the grass look like under high-voltage lines? It ain’t busher, it’s bushiless! It’s dead underneath and then a little yellow and then it gets green again, it’s not healthier. Now I’m not grass, grass is way tougher than me! It lives outside all winter, it lives outside all summer, it’s tougher than shit, it’s hard to kill, you can pour gas on the stuff and it comes back, and yet it’s killed or greatly degraded by these electromagnetic fields. Dairy cows! More studies have been done on because it’s a trillion dollar business! It’s not just milk, it’s ice cream, it’s cheese, it’s butter, it’s yogurt, it’s cream cheese, it’s…”

 

Michael: “This guy has gone full tin hat on us!”

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B.D.: “Yes! Yes! And we’re not full of crap, it doesn’t cut your bill in half, but it cools your crap down. It makes it healthier, happier place for you and your crap and your plant and your cat and your audio sound is crisp and your video picture is clear and your DVR is cooler and your phone charges hot and fast and it saves you a little bit on your bill, it’s also a very robust surge protector, lights don’t dim, blurbs don’t come on when your voltage drops from your neighbors, there’s no bleeding tech in it, I’m not the world’s greatest guy! I started looking at my air conditioner when the capacitor went bad so I had to become the freaking expert on it because I didn’t want to spend the 12 bucks! I’m weird! I’ve got a surge protector on my stereo, I’ve got one on my freaking air conditioner but I didn’t have one on my panel! That’s just stupid! Right? So I started looking into EMF’s when my kid got sick. We moved into a house by powerlines, and within one year my dude had never had a B, my dude hasn’t missed a day of school in two years, is now not being that dude anymore. So immediately I felt like I’m a bad dad, is something happening? And I started to go down this road, and I won’t rabbit trail you guys too much farther on that, I’ll just say that our lighting has impacted our electrical world in a negative way and the DC devices have impacted our electrical world in a negative way, and I’m not saying anyone is to blame, I’m not saying that it’s intentional, I’m not accusing any business or creature or anything, I’m just saying that it’s measurable and it’s measurably worse than before and there are some outcomes from that, and one of them simply is that your ballast or your driver will last longer if they operate within a lower temperature. When they get really friggin hot, it just lowers their lifespan, and watts aren’t free and heat is not free.”

 

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

voltage, separating things from in-rush and the other things that happen, so anytime you have a switch mode power supply, anything that is sensitive, downstream of that can potentially be negative effected, effected negatively, I want to use good grammar for you guys, by the operation of that device. It’s just the reality of the world and we see it all the time, I’m just the weirdo that said somebody should make something to fix that! And really, so here’s another one, so you go into the stereo store and maybe it’s a Best Buy or something and you see a really great Yamaha receiver, 5-600 bucks, I’m a Yamaha guy, I raced for Yamaha, not a factory racer I’m a road raced Yamaha’s for a long time, I’m a Yamaha guy, it’s the Tuning Fort Company. Well then you’re in the mall and you see the Apple store and you see the banging Olifson stereo store, and you go in there and that receiver is $12,000! And you’re like ‘Are you out of your mind?!’ I know that 500 dollar Yamaha or other brand receivers is going to work great and it is! It’s going to work great! Why is the banging Olifson $12,000? It’s that damn click, tick or pop in the speakers that you and I just live through and the audio-file loses his mind over it. So he shields his wiring, he doesn’t get interference, he uses these other things, so those are the component sets that we began to look at in creating our device, and we really looked at the eight aspects of alternating current that I mentioned earlier and said okay which component set treats each of these things? And then we began to look at which of those would play nice together because some were competing. And we spent a million dollars and several years finding and sourcing the best components that did each of these things and then getting them to play nice and building them into an electronic that would work. And one of the challenges was this, in your electrical system in residence, you have three pathways- you have A to Neutral, right? That’s 120 volts, that’s a unique pathway to itself. Two- you have B to Neutral, it’s its own guy. Now you’ve got phase-to-phase A to B which is your dryer and your range and maybe your air conditioner. So our system treats all eight aspects but on all pathways, all three different pathways. So the surge protectors and all the components and stuff are different on the 240s than they are on the 120s. So all attributes all pathways, those are our trademarks and our patens, something that took us a long time to get there.”

 

Greg: “So going back to that one example, I just want to make sure, now that I can go solve it, is it something that you put on the outlet that the printer is connected to? Or is it something that you put on the panel that the circuit goes to?”

 

B.D.: “I didn’t fully answer your question, I went down my own rabbit trail. So let’s come back, let’s answer that and then come back to dimmers, and let’s talk about that because.. So, we make products that can either plug in that are circuit specific, you don’t need one for each device, your bedroom or something is its own circuit, if you plug one in that room you’re getting that whole circuit specifically but somehow you treat that whole phase, and so if you have our product in between what we call the ‘culprit’ the printer, the guy that’s causing it, we call them a culprit, between him and whatever is being negatively affected then it will fix that. We also make products that wire in at the panel that treat the whole panel. And that thing is going down, in most cases, the neutral. And so one of the things they did to fix that was increase the size of the conductor in the neutral, right? But that’s like what I was saying before, do you want to just put a band-aid on it, do you want to put a filter on your cigarette or do you actually want to stop smoking? So there’s kind of two ways to go- acknowledge the problem and band-aid it or acknowledge the problem and look to fix it. And there’s two ways you can look to fix it, that manufacturer makes it better or you filter it as close to the source as you can.”

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

it’s like light, nobody really knows what light is. They don’t even know what it is. They don’t know what it does, like, light and electricity are kind of the same thing in a sense, and there isn’t a scientist on the planet that could tell you what light actually is and is it actually different than gravity, they don’t even really know. And how does it create life? How does it grow? Like they don’t know the answer to these questions, I mean, I’ve talked to them and asked them. They don’t know what it is.”

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

panels actually want to be cold, they don’t want to be hot. So Montana and stuff is fabulous for solar because we get this blend of big skies and cool temperatures, they want to be cold, okay? If you’re going to sell somebody solar, the friggin sun is going to come up on the Earth, right? What matters is what you pay for electricity. If you pay four cents a kilowatt hour, solar sucks. If you pay 25 cents a kilowatt hour, solar rocks baby! We’re talking five year ROY…”

 

Michael: “Ehh, you know what, I don’t want to get into a solar conversation..”

 

B.D.: “Let me finish, I’m going somewhere else with this! But we’re a solar dealer, and what you pay for watt makes a big difference. What makes a big difference in our product line’s efficacy is the same thing, how your utility company bills. So most utility companies say on their website or somewhere else that they bill on the watt and not on the total power, not on the VA. Wrong! I’m called grade A holarchy right now because we’ve done things with people’s bills and stuff that mathematically doesn’t work! But I’m not saying once, we’ve got 85,000 installed, I’ve been slugging it out for 13 years! I’ve got more power bills then any, I’ve got as many as the freaking utility! This is my life, I take it seriously, I’m not full of crap, I love people, I want to do good things, my son was negatively effected by it, I care about my fellow human beings, and if I can save you a couple bucks along the way I will! And I’m telling you utilities bill so differently and oftentimes so differently than what we’re told they bill by that oftentimes the result is a lot better then it should be not based on the efficacy of our equipment, specifically, but how the utility is billing you. Where their tears are and…”

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

that! I have no problem putting my money where my mouth is, it’s measurable. And then we’ll go down some of the other things…”

 

Michael: “And if you can’t see what you would get, you probably shouldn’t be in business, you know exactly what you’re going to get! 5,000 people and some lighting distributors are probably going to listen to this..”

 

B.D.: “You know that I’ve played this game a lot of times. And you know that I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t know what the result was going to be.”

 

Michael: “Sure.”

 

B.D.: “And I’m going to tell you what the result is going to be and I’m going to be so close that I’m really going to blow your mind. So we do have 85,000 installed, so one of the reasons, I’ve got a really great testimonial that I would like to share about LED’s, the Tampa Florida International Airport. So one of our guys SEI, Scientific Energy Improvement, is an LED-retofit guy, right? So we sell him the LED retro-phase because three things-it’s going to look beautiful, it’s going to last a long time, it’s going to save enough money on your bill to pay for itself within the life of the bulb. That’s basically LED-retrofit sales pitch. It’s going to look beautiful, it’s going to last a long time, it’s going to pay for itself in the life of the thing. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

about major capital investment, you’re talking about long life, you’re talking about saving dough, and I’m telling you right now that stuff wants clean power, doesn’t want dirty, stuff wants to be cool, doesn’t want to be hot.”

Michael: “Especially electronics, yes.”

 

B.D.: “Especially electronics.”

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

understand where I’m at right now? I think you’re right about everything you’ve said, but I need to see it to believe it and then if it does, I think it goes with every LED retrofit out there, Greg.”

 

Greg: “Sure could! Especially with those bypass ballasts that I have all the time!”

 

Michael: “Yeah.”

 

B.D.: “So, what I would say in response, I’m not a driver manufacturer, so I’m not contesting what you say. I’ll just add this, what I believe is that the driver is so sensitive that it is a voltage spike or something to take it out, that needs to be covered in the f-ing warranty! If you make me something that’s exceedingly fragile and is going to break if something that happens all the time happens, that needs to be covered in the warranty! Drivers are more sensitive. So if we know it’s going to fail, why are we giving them a pass on something that is almost inevitably going, at some point, is going to happen? That’s my rebuttal to that, I think that surges and spikes do kill drivers, I think they should either bill the surge protector in it, they should make the component more robust, or they should cover something that’s likely going to happen within that five or seven year period, then it needs to be covered because that’s why I freaking bought it!”

 

Michael: “Or they should kiss my ass! B.D. Erickson II, you’ll be on again, I don’t know when folks, but we’re going to do round two with B.D. after we run the tests and then all you lighting distributors out there can get excited about scrubbing that electricity. Greg, before we go, we got to keep it easy brother! If you made it to the end folks you know that I speak on behalf of B.D., Greg and myself when I say love you guys and gals that listen out there every week to the show, we appreciate you and if you haven’t joined NAILD, well, we’re not going to let you in anymore, haha just kidding, of course come on in and join us at naild.org. Thanks for listening!" 

​