The Silicon Valley model of business creation and growth is the most successful economic force we have seen in contemporary times. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix. They are all part of that story in some way. And there are many more examples. Too many to list here.
The model that drives this success, when it is just sprouting up as a sapling in the earliest stages, is about pairing up good ideas with capital and top-tier management and development support resources. It is a natural ecosystem inhabited by VC’s, incubators, angel investors, gurus, and visionary entrepreneurs.
Incubators pool together strong networks, management and marketing expertise, funding resources, legal expertise, and all the ancillary and generalized pieces that make a great idea work as a great business. Incubators take an investment interest in the companies they work with and often own licensing rights to products. But, oddly, there are very few publicly traded incubators in the market.
One of the most interesting new incubators to emerge in 2020 that we have come across is Eco Innovation Group, Inc. (OTCMKTS:ECOX), a company that discovers, develops, and commercializing promising inventions with the dual capacity for commercial and ecological success.
Your Savings Today: Planet Earth
The company has already put together some strong product initiatives and deals with inventors. The first product it has taken in for development and commercialization is called PoolCooled, a climate control solution that leverages proprietary technology to cool a home or building by taking cool water from an existing swimming pool and looping it through the existing air conditioning system to boost efficiency on a per-unit power consumption basis.
The idea is certainly a good one with a strong common-sense appeal. If you think about it, it basically exploits an inefficiency inherent in configurations where a pool is next to a home or building. You have to filter the pool to maintain it. That’s how swimming pools work. The water from the pool is cycled through a filtration system. For in-ground pools, the water is mostly below ground, which keeps it much cooler than air above the ground. That’s why it is refreshing to take a dip in the pool during a hot summer day – it cools you off.
In other words, there is heat (energy) in the air inside the building. And there’s a substance just outside that can work as a heat sink for that energy if it is exposed to that air. The PoolCooled system just reroutes the filtration through the AC system to transfer the heat from the air in the house or building into the pool water.
But does it really work?
On the Fast Track
Eco Innovation Group, Inc. (OTCMKTS:ECOX) just announced this morning that it has completed its first controlled test of the PoolCooled system. How did it go?
According to the release, the initial test was performed under controlled conditions. The test compared the power usage involved in cleaning a swimming pool and cooling a home equipped with a three-ton central AC system, where the pool was immediately adjacent to the home. The test showed that, over a specified period, the separate tasks of operating the pool filtration system and the home AC system, independently and with traditional systems in place, required 4,300 watts of power. By comparison, based on the company’s statements in the release, both tasks were accomplished equally well by the PoolCooled™ system, which consumed only 1100 watts of power over the same time period.”
In other words, it saved about 3,200 watts in the controlled comparison, side by side. That amounts to nearly 75% in energy savings. That should translate into savings for the energy consumer as well as the planet.
This is particularly compelling because it suggests that “going green” can be both cheaper and better for the environment.
The company’s CEO, Julia Otey-Raudes, put it quite well when she noted in the release that the PoolCooled has strong residential promise, but that it also seems very well situated to draw a lot of interest from hotel chains looking to scale these gains across a large number of properties and to also capitalize on the messaging benefits with ecologically conscious customers. She also noted that these test results allow the company to push forward in go-to-market plans for the climate control solution.
The last two points here are very important. ECOX is sitting on something that holds the potential to revolutionize the hotel industry by saving big businesses money at scale and providing them with a competitive edge in marketing to green consumers. And the strong test results suggest there may not be serious hurdles on the path to market from here.
