On this week’s Interviews with Innovators I followed up on the most unusual thing I saw at DEMO: a silicon-based flow-control valve for air conditioners. Mark Luckevich, VP of engineering for Microstaq, explains how they’re using MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) to enable a simple retrofit that could save large amounts of the energy currently used for commercial air conditioning.
This conjunction of old-fashioned and newfangled styles of plumbing represents the sort of cultural mashup that always gets my attention. As Amory Lovins has been saying for decades about energy conservation, there’s low-hanging fruit we can harvest by instrumenting, monitoring, and controlling our HVAC systems using modern sensors, controls, and information systems. The Microstaq valve is a great example of that.
More generally, it points toward an interdisciplinary cross-fertilization that enables a set of well-established IT practices — logging, testing, debugging, hot-spot analysis, refactoring — to be applied in a very different domain.
October 2, 2008 at 2:46 am
[...] Old-fashioned and newfangled plumbing On this week’s Interviews with Innovators I followed up on the most unusual thing I saw at DEMO: a silicon-based flow-control valve for air conditioners. Mark Luckevich, VP of engineering for Microstaq, explains how they’re using MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) to enable a simple retrofit that could save large amounts of the energy currently used for […] [...]
July 18, 2011 at 6:10 pm
I like to see new things that come up on the market that can prevent any kind of water damage. This valve will definitively prevent a lot of financial heartaches associated with water damage. Thank you so much for the post.
October 8, 2011 at 12:22 pm
The ultra modern kitchen doesn’t differ too much from kitchens of say 20 or even 30 years ago. It’s still home to a cooker and a sink, a fridge and possibly a freezer and there’s still plenty of storage space for food, pots and pans, crockery and cutlery.