 It is Friday afternoon folks. Seth Rolston here in our downtown Honolulu studio of Think Tech, Hawaii. Actually, we've moved the studio, as you can see, to Waimanalo for this particular show. And joining me on the show today is by the route from England through Las Vegas to Honolulu is Andrew Dennis. Andrew, thanks for coming on board, thanks for taking time out of your vacation here in Hawaii to spend some time with us at Think Tech. Thanks for having me on the show. Oh, the accent's still there, isn't it? You can't take the Englishman out of England, but you can't take the accent out of the Englishman, right? This is how it goes? Okay. Part of the brain drain of England that is benefiting us here in Hawaii through Las Vegas. Anyway, we're here on a really interesting subject today. This is where the drone leads. We normally have drone subjects, drone people, and I want to thank Mike Amoda for running the show last week when Margie and I were in Tucson and not able to be here in person, but Mike had to care of the action last week. Thanks, Mike. We talk about drones, what they're useful for, how they're certified. We talk about all this technical stuff, but we have here today in Andrew the end state of what benefits might occur in certain cases associated with the information that's collected by a drone. Say we had a disaster or something like that going on or a tsunami coming through here. We have buildings that are deconstructed. We have dams perhaps that have reached. We have trees that are down and such power lines. All this desolation after a storm, and the drones are useful for going in there and getting pictures of that. We can then turn them into digital elevation models and get damaged pictures and such. Now we have to think about how we're going to get something restructured, something rebuilt, something back in place in order to start providing services and such. Water electricity is certainly important, but physical structures are essential to everything. So the utility of a very effective and low barrier to entry type construction technology fits wonderfully in the disaster management domain, and that's where these drones play in. So you, Andrew, with gigacrete, the replacement for concrete, I might suggest, have created a construction system that fits beautifully as the end state of actions that occur based on information collected in the disaster situation saved by a drone. So that's the lead-in. No, you have to follow with how this all works. Back in the 80s, I made a trip to the Caribbean. This is the 1980s, not the 80s. 1980s. I could say 1980s, and people all know I was around at that time. I think I'm older than you. No, I don't think so. Wait a minute. Let's compare notes here. I remember when the Earth just crushed it over. Do you remember those days? I think I've forgotten that. Ah. The old act of it in my mind. Back in the 80s, I visited a few different Caribbean islands, fell in love with five, and decided I wanted to build a vacation home there. But I was an architect in Southern California at the time, and I thought, I'll make it there, but it has to be green. Green. Green. As in eco-friendly. Eco-friendly. Okay. Since 1984, I've been an environmental architect. I've avoided using wood. I don't use Portland cement as a giant CO2 producer. If you don't know this, you probably do, but one ton of cement makes one ton of CO2. One ton of cement, one ton of CO2. A greenhouse gas. Okay. That then challenges all the amoeba in the ocean to ingest all that stuff and turn it into oxygen. Correct. What came out of that was I couldn't find the materials. I didn't want to use wood. I didn't want to use gypsum board. It had to be mold and mildew resistant, which took both of those two items out. It had to be 200 mile an hour hurricane rated, manhandlable, loaded in a container and assembled in five days where you could live in the building within seven days simply because I'd never had a two-week vacation. Okay. These are your self-generated specifications because of your own personal interest and need and your, so rapidity, durability, simplicity, green, and not dependent on trees or Portland cement where the main criteria, what, how different would those criteria be here for Hawaii, for Oahu here? It wouldn't be any different. It wouldn't be any different. Same thing. Right. Now, I intended to fly out there, get maybe four or five guys locally, assemble it and build it. These are untrained, unskilled, or low-skilled workers. And the only final skill needed was the final finish on it. And almost every country in the world or every, just about every location has someone that's capable of handling a trail either in a stucco application or a plaster or even a cement finish. So basically, people who can be trained on the job relatively quickly with straightforward tools, how different is that from post-disaster recovery? It's about the same, isn't it? It's very simple. So this is a very good analogy to what would occur and what would be beneficial after disaster. Right. Now, the important part in all of this would be we have a very lightweight building system that's extremely strong to a point where we can actually put finishes on the building interior or exterior that are bullet resistant. We have a product called Ballisticrete, which is now military-approved, U.S. government-approved, National Institute of Justice-approved. So this new concrete material just applied thicker than becomes... Let's call it a plaster instead of a concrete when you say concrete. Okay. Everyone thinks foundation is... I will use concrete from my vocabulary, how's that? And concrete is also always Portland cement-based as the binder. Okay. So what do we call this? Gigacrete. Gigacrete. How about that? Gigacrete. What more can you say? Yeah. The interior, fire rate, coating over foam, all natural ingredients, everything in it, edible, everything food grade, non-toxic, non-allergenic, non-harmful in any way. And 9,000... Except for the bugs. 9,300 PSI. Way more than Portland cement-based products. Exterior-wise, StuckoMax, totally waterproof, even under a head pressure of five feet of water so the place has flooded. The tests we've got in the lab, which actually you've seen in Las Vegas. On now, will be five years old in March with no water penetration. So you get a column of water, I'd call five feet high, that evaporates after replenish it time to time. And that water's trying to push its way through a diaphragm of trying to of... In quarter... Actually less than quarter of next three, six years. In five years it hasn't made it yet. It hasn't made it yet. Right. If I were the water, I'd probably try to look at something else to do with my life. I think that choosing evaporation would be a better deal. Right. To discuss what your first question was, what would the application be after a disaster? It would be a rapid deployment. It would be the... Even the homeowners that have lost their own place could actually be building their own home again. Well, step one is we go in there with a drone and pick up the imagery of what's going on. Right. From that we can determine access and the nature of damage and where we can stash materials and such and issues where there could be potential landslides you want to stay away from. We can find our path of least resistance in and allow the materials to come in that you bring the materials in or arrange to have the materials brought in which are easily handled and easily turned into a building structure within... Manufactured locally here in Hawaii. Manufactured right here or on any island situation as the case may be and pre-engineered in a sense that is the design and the loads and all that sort of thing, the load pass and the ability to withstand loads, that's all built into the design. All pre-calculated. So in the field, the field people don't have to do anything with calculations or with measurements for that matter. Just basically follow the implicit instructions which are created by channels you've cut into foam. And the shapes. And the shapes. So every building has a corner. Here's an example. This is our six inch thick expended post-iron panel. This would be eight feet, nine feet or ten feet long. So it's not a block. This appears to be a block. It's just a six inch sample. Next to every connector, and a connector is two steel studs. So each stud is a two by four, two become a four by four. So every time one shape connects to the next, you've got a four by four construction. So we have a steel frame carrying the main loads, all pre-engineered and pre-designed and the channels that the steel goes in are set distance apart in the foam by channels. Yes. So you simply find something that matches the shape and stick it in with the right length. There's a tiny model. This is a 3D plastic model showing the corner, which is this one. A T. A T is obviously an intersecting wall where another wall abuts. And then the panel is in between of one foot all the way up to four feet and increments of those numbers. So you design the, you want to make the design optimum by having, by reusing those standard panels, fours and eight foot panels. Preferably. We can make custom panels. Okay. But ideally. You want to go with those, use those panels. Yes. And they range from one, two, three, four and increments of pretty much one foot increments. So it means the building can go up very, very quickly. And you can see what's happening here. By the people who are going to live there. By who? Exactly. Our, our emergency staff. Emergency crew can get there. Right. But you don't have to be a trained journeyman carpenter or something like that to go build this. You can do it with whatever skills you bring to the party. Right. If you can get to the site, you can help with the construction. Right. Got it. One of the first ones to ever go in was to Haiti. The instruction that unfortunately I wrote in English, not realizing they couldn't read nor, nor it was, it wasn't French or Creole. And it took them two days longer than it should have because of that. So what you can see here is going on is we're not building with the stud first. We build with the insulation and the insulation determines where the structural components drop in. So now it's unskilled labor or low skilled labor to actually drop that in and then pass a screw straight through the foam to connect this to the top and bottom tracks. So you internalize the structure by screws, but they're simply installed and actually the foam can keep the screw lined up with the driver quite well. So the foam is actually not carrying any load, it's actually has a built-in tooling in effect. Right. And the tooling happens to have insulation capabilities. Exactly. It happens to have the design measurements built into it. So the tooling is a very effective way to take all the time it's spent in measurements on site and such and cutting, you know, they say measure twice and cut once to make sure you don't cut. All done in a factory. It's all done, right. We have a factory tolerance of less than a sixteenth of an inch. So you start in a corner, go all the way around and the last two pieces that come together, you slide the connector down and it fits perfectly. And you can sit there actually in the afternoon of the first day with the drone and go supervise, survey the area, pick up any information that is needed back at headquarters, transmit the data back there. And here's what it looks like again. So you guys thought this was going to look like, here's what actually showed up. Notice where we have the material distributed, notice where the construction's going on. And you could tie together the construction site. Oh, we could say, hey, stop putting the window there, that's the door. Right. Okay, you could certainly want to make sure that's going to be correct. So that's cool. Obviously a well thought through, ordered, structured system here that all came from your own personal desire to put up a vacation time, assemble a vacation home in the Caribbean. And nothing about what you've done is different here in Hawaii. Exactly. And ideally suited for islands. Islands are typically a lot more expensive, everything has to be brought in. In this particular case here in Hawaii, being a much larger island, it makes sense to actually put a manufacturing facility here to supply the local and not get trapped in the Jones Act with this horrendous shipping cost. So instead of bringing in a foam in this expanded form, bring in the resin and blow the foam blocks here. Yes. That's a much more efficient way to... Cut them here, roll form here, create the patented connectors. And ultimately we'll make the coatings here. So what we would do in a workforce thinking process here is the workforce would be move from the job site back into the factory situation. The workforce being folks who are doing the calculations and such on the various designs and also running the factory operations. And so that skilled labor ends up in the shop and the local labor, the on-site labor ends up taking place at the site with basically me as a homeowner or my friends or something like that with a supervisor of some kind and we could actually put this together on site. We also see not just natural disaster, that's a limited market here, but housing, homeless, is definitely affordable housing for Hawaii, no question. We can do it less expensive than the way you're doing it now. That's a really important message, you want to make sure everybody hears. Let's pick up that and talk about it in more detail after our first break. Okay. Aloha. I'm Carl Campania. I hope you please visit us this summer. It's a wonderful summer. It's actually a cooler summer than we're used to. But I hope that you come back and visit us and watch our show, Education Movers, Shakers and Reformers here on Think Tech Hawaii. It's at noon every Wednesday. See you then. Hello and Aloha. My name is Raya Salter and I am the host of Power of Hawaii where Hawaii comes together to figure out how we're going to work towards a clean and renewable energy future. We have exciting conversations with all kinds of stakeholders, everyone who needs to come together to talk about renewable energy, be they engineers, advocates, lawyers, utility executives, musicians or artists, to see how we can come together to make a renewable future Tuesdays at 1 p.m. It is still a Friday afternoon, folks. Friday evening hasn't hit yet. Ted Rawson here hosting our show where the drone leads, the drone leads in this case to some quite incredible technology that could come after the drone has done its work and the desire to reconstruct something after a disaster or in my case just a plane rebuilding in my house. We have Andrew Dennis here from Las Vegas, CEO of Gigakrete Inc. Founder. Founder. Founder and inventor of the quite incredible integrated construction technology. You know, we talk about the foam being the tooling in effect with all the engineering built into it and then the structure goes in obvious locations and the wiring and plumbing would go in where they fit. But on the outside you're going to have a coating on the outside of this which is, is that load carrying? That coating load carrying? It is, but we don't count it engineering wise. All the engineering is done through conventional steel framing. There's a page in the book for the building code that has this in it. But the coating on the outside does add to the load bearing capability of the structure. Yeah, and certainly the impact, hurricane and wind resistance. So you'll have an inch thermal barrier here between any steel in the external atmosphere environment and then on top of that external foam goes the external coating. And that's one of the greatest inventions you've made is that external coating which we're not going to call the C-word concrete anymore, right? We're going to call it... Cucomax. Cucomax, which would be the external configuration. Right. And Plastromax would be the internal configuration, but that is all describe what it is. Difficult to say in just a few words. And of course... Let me start with this. Everything in both bags, stucco-max or plastomax, which are mixed on-site, are all food-grade. They're all edible ingredients. You've eaten every single one of them. I can't tell you what they are, but obviously that's an interactive part. Preparatory rights are completely acceptable. Right. So, 300 psi interior Plastomax was really designed to be the first fire-rated finish replacing gypsum board. So, we passed all the NFPA fire tests and uniform building tests. So, we don't have to bring any gypsum board into the whole area anymore? Absolutely not. Okay. That's great. That's nasty stuff. Yeah, it is. Especially in a humid environment. Stucco-max, so one's really fire-rated and very high impact in abrasion and scratch-resistant. Almost zero maintenance. In fact, if you want to hang a picture, you can't knock a nail in it. It'll bend the nail. But you can use a drywall screw that's designed to go through our material into a steel stud and just on the coating alone, only 3.16 or 5 millimeters thick, it will support 70 pounds of weight. And if you want to stud behind that, a couple hundred pounds, right? Exactly. Right. So, TVs, big TVs and kitchen cabinets find the studs, which we normally do with wood framing. Now, exterior-wise, Stucco-max is a waterproof finish. Just use natural limestone, calcium carbonate, plenty of it on this island. Calcium carbonate is basically the raw ingredient in Tums, an acid buffer for your stomach, it's edible sand. So you can eat your house if you had a bad... You'll have to have really strong teeth. Even your concrete-eating termites cannot get through this stuff. All right. Okay. I like to know that. That's great because with all your termites out there, you're done. Right? No more food. I'm going to know the house or die trying. So really the coatings are the final encapsulation of the house. So there's no seam lines, but obviously our individual panel pieces have seam lines and in the U.S., modular housing or prefab housing had a bad rap for a long, long time. Because of seams. Post-war. Post-war. Yeah. Post-World War II. So the younger architects are actually enjoying the fact that prefab, they know nothing about it from their previous generation. Their fathers did, but they don't. So it's a new thing for them. So a lot of young, modern, minimalist architects are actually purposely designing prefab houses with all these joint lines in them. We can make it look like that if you want, but we really don't want that. Why not? Why? Right. Right. So the structural joints in the foam, that seam line is on there. It's completely taken away, right. So everything's encapsulated. You end up with a monolithic coat on the outside that's very, very strong. Okay. Which is carrying load. Cool. So you have a load bearing external shell, which adds to the strength of the steel frame. The steel frame's all the one you've had to calculate. And we've had trouble in the past, I shouldn't say trouble, but high expense in trying to put a, understand the load through a monolithic structure without the steel frame. Because it takes an FDA analysis, and that's a complicated process by a specialist to get that done. And there's no page in the building code book, so the inspector's going to give you a bad time. Okay. So the steel frame takes care of that problem. Right. In fact, double steps. No. Code calls for one step every two feet. We're dealing with four by four, two by four, four by four. Okay. Way beyond uniform building code. So we have the strength. We have the easy assembly. We have the easy shipment in. We don't consume any trees. We don't consume any Portland cement in the process, and we don't load up the landfill then 50 years later with all that material that has to be taken care of somehow. And everything we use as recyclable. Everything. And then it, and you have the fireproof interior and the basically. Weather resistant. And the weather could, if the weather happened to include bullets, you can put this stuff on really thick. Yes. And deflect them as well. Yes. You can put it into a bank if you wanted to, to keep the 37 millimeter from going through. Or a safe room. A safe room. In any house. Okay. Perfect. I think of a renovation material, or if a lot of people now turn in closets and things within the, you know, something that doesn't have a window into a safe room. Okay. So you could, within a house, you could have a hard zone that is impervious to anything that anybody wants to bring to it. Yes. And what this already says is the simplicity and the lack of the total greenness and the lack of putting landfill full of timber and such, lack of cutting on the site, all that stuff, the ability to use in place labor, that sounds like a great plan or great position or great way to go forward in the case of dealing with our broad problem with houseless people here. Yes. We call them homeless sometimes, but prefer to call them houseless because they really have a home. It's just not a home like we're used to. So we need to find a way to get them a home that we're used to. And this would give you that opportunity and they could even participate in the fabrication. Absolutely. They could. And there's nothing in here that can hurt anybody. Right. There's no chemicals that would be of any, I think a drill gun to shoot drills or shoot screws in. Actually, a cordless screw gun. Cordless screw gun is the total tool required here and probably a, actually, for the anchors through the bottom track, we use an electric drill and drill down and then put an expansion anchor or an epoxy anchor into the concrete. So low cost, locally assembleable by the people who are going to use it, fully functional, stronger than a conventional frame structure, much more environmentally friendly and probably a lot more pleasant to live in because you have the insulation value of the thermal insulation. Right. And the sear, which as you know is a very big concern on the seacoast and noise is kept out as well. Right. So we have a great STC value of 52. Our second home that we've built in the Caribbean survived two hurricanes. The last one was 155 mile an hour sustained winds for two hours in Exuma, Bahamas. And that particular client has documented 60% energy savings. Okay. And after the 155 with 200 gusts were told, they have zero damage, no leaks whatsoever in the house. So here in Hawaii, reduced air conditioning costs would be something that people would measure right away as 60% as 60% folks, as well as a heater, are you listening? As well as as a much more comfortable internal environment, ventilation to take would be functional in terms of taking care of air movement and stuff like that, which you can arrange through windows and louvers and such. Right. So you got to put together a very comfortable place that anyone would be very happy to live in. And affordable. And affordable. That's the best part. Affordable. And your sweat equity can go into it in terms of participation in the construction. Then it's really affordable. Yeah. Right. And the weight looks like it's going to be a bit lighter than a conventional structure. A little bit lighter than a typical wood frame house, and I'm glad you brought this up because also sharing the same electrical conduit is an all thread that actually goes into the foundation, comes up all the way through and connects to the roof. So now we tighten it down, think head bolts on a car engine where you're pulling the head into the block. Now we're pulling the lightweight building material, making it really heavy after you've lifted it. So you got basically through bolts all the way from the foundation to the roof structure. Yes. And we pull the roof into the ground. The only way that roof's coming off is the whole thing's got to come out. So the ground has to go with it. Exactly. And you have to bring up all of Kailua when you had a strong windstorm out there in Kailua Bay. So that's great. So we've got to figure out a way to get a demonstration unit here of some kind that people can participate in, can walk into, they can even help make and have a celebration here about low cost, affordable, but not unpleasant, I mean totally comfortable accommodations for people and take houseless people and make them not houseless people. But not in a way that is industrial, in a way that's very friendly, in a way that's very comfortable. And what you provided here is something that does that and is also green, which the world and the state ought to care about. We also found in the Haiti house that the people that built the house took more pride afterwards because they participated in the construction of it and they take good care of it. Well, you know, I was thinking about that. I wish Mike Amoda was here and we'll get him on, we'll have to meet him sometime, but Mike Amoda is helping me on the drone world in that area. And what we find is that community involvement through educational system and the kids talking to their parents and that word of mouth education that goes on is an essential part of any new technology coming into the business. Same thing would be true here. If we have people involved in fabricating their own structure and kids, I'm just imagining here, but kids in the educational system can go through architecture training or something or even software training and they could end up in the design side of this business in the shop. I'm glad you brought this up. In our overseas factories that we're putting in different continents, there should be five or six, maybe even more next year going in. They're actually creating an alliance with the local technical college or university or at least schools and part of that process is not only teaching architects who are not being taught in green materials. It's also teaching application of materials, how to color it, how to create different finishes in it. They will be panel installers, it could even be factory workers. We call it a mega factory that will produce as many as 36,000 houses a year is creating about 6,000 jobs in the field. Jobs and local employment and a local high-tech industry can actually follow from this and something we need here. So you don't have to cancel the rest of your vacation. We've got people at the community college to talk to. We've got people all over the city council to talk to. So Andrew, we'll get a hold of Marilyn and have her alter your reservations. You can return in February rather than in December. But thanks for coming on the show today. It's been a fascinating education for me and seeing how this all works and it all ties back to our good theme on this show which is where the drone leads. In this case, the drone leads to a really incredible reconstruction capability which could also be a primary construction capability in the first place. Thanks for having us. Once again, Andrew, thanks for coming on the show.