As our warm weather begins in earnest, I want to thank everyone who has supported the Roadrunner Comfort project. Starting with Professor Frank Reinow, who introduced me to incubator programs at New Mexico Tech, to robotics graduate student Steven Lukow whose hardware design served as the basis for our current design (he went on to work for Los Alamos Labs), to Oni Miller at TLC Plumbing & Heating, whose partnership in product rollout has been invaluable, to those homes that took in our test units, to our first customers, to those of you just reading this, you have made the Roadrunner Comfort a reality. You helped birth the next-generation evaporative cooler controller that brings unsurpassed performance to existing swamp coolers at a bargain price. We have done this while generating a bare minimum of waste, most of that consisting of compostable plastic as we learned how to 3D print reliably. We still use compostable plastic, although we think of our product lifetime in terms not of years, but of decades. Anything less is unacceptable. Our controls sometimes replace others that have been in place for decades and still function as designed. We aim for the same kind of life expectancy.
We also aim for unsurpassed user-friendliness. Your cooler controller should not require much attention. When you want to change a setting, it should be as easy the first time as the fiftieth. It should be so easy that you don’t have to remember how to use it.
This year TLC is selling our first 100 controllers paired with a new swamp cooler from our Aussie friends at Seeley International. So far the only problem we’ve heard of is when testers at TLC couldn’t connect it to wifi because their wifi network name (not their password) had a space in it, and these first units could not include a space in the network name (passwords don’t allow spaces, so no problem there). That problem is fixed for future production, and no other problems have been reported, either with new customers or in our test homes where users have been relying on their Roadrunner Comfort controllers for two years now. No problems is music to my ears, and what we all want everyday. Roadrunner Comfort will not add to yours.
This picture of a roadrunner enjoying the breeze from a cooler was generated by AI picture generator DALL-E 2 and then edited by me. AI is even scarier than the internet which brings thieves into our homes. But it’s too powerful a tool to leave to scoundrels.
Until my next infrequent post, thanks for reading and for your support for the Roadrunner.
~ Nancy