Kevin Cunningham Pt 2: The Code is Driving Safety
Intro:
Today, we’re sitting down with Kevin Cunningham, an elevator professional and entrepreneur who, along with his partner Tim Toan, turned a critical safety challenge into a mission to safeguard lives.
Their company, HydraSafe Brake, isn’t just creating a product – they’re creating peace of mind for everyone who steps into an elevator.
This is a story of how a commitment to safety can transform an entire industry, proving that with vision and determination, we can make the world a little bit safer, one elevator at a time.
Summary:
Kevin Cunningham discusses the HydraSafe Brake, a device designed to prevent unintended ascending movement in elevators, mandated by the A17.3-2020 elevator code. The device, which can be installed on both traction and hydraulic elevators, uses disc brakes to clamp onto rails in case of brake failure. It is particularly useful in hospitals and public buildings, where safety is paramount. The installation takes about two days, and the device can be reused during modernization. Cunningham emphasizes the cost-effectiveness and safety benefits of the HydraSafe Brake, highlighting its role in reducing liability and insurance costs.
Transcript:
Kevin Cunningham 0:00
Yeah, I mean, I mean code when I mean my code, driving it A17.3-2020 drives that in a sense of that’s an existing elevator code. So the existing elevator code states, every elevator, if it’s retroactive, has to have an unintended ascending movement device on there. So states like Nevada, Florida, going back, if they don’t have a device, they need to be compliant by a certain year. So they usually give them a couple years, give the building owners a couple years to be compliant. And And there again, that’s what’s what, what has been driving our device, New York City. New York City has a has what they call a single plunger, type of a code where any any elevator machine with a single plunger type of a brake, you need to take care of that with a device like ours, again, a rope brake type of device, because those single plungers years ago could stick, and that single plunger lifts both sides of a brake shoe, okay? And basically, if it sticks, you’re not clamping down, that machine keeps moving in the elevator, keeps driving toward the top or bottom of the hoist lift.
Matthew Allred 1:12
Hello and welcome to the Elevator Careers Podcast, sponsored by the Allred group. I am your host. Matt Allred in this podcast, we talk to the people whose lives and careers are dedicated to the vertical transportation industry to inform and share lessons learned, building upon the foundation of those who have gone before to inspire the next generation of elevator careers. Welcome to today’s episode of the elevator careers podcast. Our guest today is Kevin Cunningham, an industry veteran with over 40 years of experience in elevator construction, modernization and consulting. Kevin’s journey started with sheer determination calling every day until he got his first job in the elevator trade. In this episode, Kevin shares how his hands on experience in the field shaped his career and ultimately led him to co found Hydra safe break, a company dedicated to improving elevator safety with cutting edge braking systems. We’ll explore Kevin’s insights on career growth planning ahead and the critical role of safety in the elevator industry. So buckle up and join us as we take a deep dive into the world of elevators and safety innovation with Kevin Cunningham, this is part two.
Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin Cunningham 2:24
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Matthew Allred 2:25
Thank you. I’m excited to be able to talk again. It was a lot of fun getting to talk about your career. And want to learn a little bit more about HydraSafe Brake, and that’s the company that you and Tim started, Correct?
Kevin Cunningham 2:37
Yes, my partner and I started a company, HydraSafe Brake. And, it’s, we developed a device, an unintended ascending movement device for the elevator, for the elevator business, and it’s more of a safety device.
Matthew Allred 2:52
When you say ascending, unintended ascending. To me, I mean, does that mean going up? But I guess I’m under I just want to clarify, because I assumed it was if it’s going to fall right?
you need your
Kevin Cunningham 3:05
Your ascending. Your ascending would be going up. Your unattended would be going down. So in certain situations with with traction elevators that are counterweighted Right, right, right, so your 40% heavier elevator is going to head up. So let’s say, in case of a brake failure, your brake fails, a pad can’t clamp a spring breaks. So whatever the case may be, your plunger hangs up, or something like that, the elevator is just going to drift, or it might run away sporadically again because of some other mechanical or maybe even an electrical issue. So our device what it does based upon code. Codes been driving this now for quite a long time. Is once it senses that our device clamps on the rails versus is activated on the rails, is what our device does. So we basically took a set of disc brakes and we put them on an elevator, is what we did.
Speaker 1 3:58
we
Matthew Allred 4:00
did.
That’s cool. And, like, say, just grab a hold of the rail, and as long as it pinches tight, it’s not going anywhere.
Kevin Cunningham 4:06
No, as long as it as long as it pinches the rail, like a set of safeties normally would, it does not go anywhere. So it’s kind of a neat system. And also, what the features will do and later on down the line, which we’re in development on now is to be able to, like a set of disc brakes, pulsate, pulsate. If you do have problem in an elevator and you get stuck in a blind hoist way, you got to get the people out. First responders are coming in. What can they do? We have features where they can go to a lobby panel and take the key and pulsate that and go.
Matthew Allred 4:39
So essentially it goes down slowly, because it’s kind of bite, bite. As it goes down
Kevin Cunningham 4:44
It would kind of like that. Yeah, you’d actually be going up in that type of it depends how many people are in an elevator. But yes, that would actually be the concept of it, yes. And to get that to a safe landing, open the doors, brake sets, you know, you’re safe first Responders are safe as well. They can exit people out of the elevator, and then a technician can also then start taking a look at what the problem is.
Matthew Allred 5:07
Yeah, interesting. I mean, I’m a little intrigued because, you know, elevators have been around 150 years, and so part of me saying, Well, why didn’t this get invented 100 years ago, and here it is. So explain that a little bit to me, you saying the code is actually developed to where it’s saying, hey, we need a, essentially, a second brake. We need, we need protection in case the brake fails
Kevin Cunningham 5:33
A redundancy feature, basically that’s built into the system for safety. So you know what has happened over the course of the years is, again, like I say, brakes fail. Elevator could be open at a floor, and all of a sudden that brake fails, and the elevator drifts away, whether it’s in the up or down direction, sure, could take off at any time. So again, with the brake failures, they need a secondary measure, right? A redundancy. There’s other products out there within, within the field that we got into, called a rope brake. Okay, you stop the ropes on an elevator. There’s an external type of a disc that would mount on a machine. And with both of those, again, with a rope break, your machine could potentially keep spinning. Again, you’re going to stop the ropes, stop the elevator on a disc type your elevator can keep moving because your ropes are kind of sliding over that, that shift our stops directly on the car. So you’re, you’re literally stopping the car right where it’s at. So a little different, a little different way of stopping an elevator.
Matthew Allred 6:32
Yeah, tell me, tell me a little bit about the demand for this. You mentioned code is, are there customers saying, hey, we want your device?
Kevin Cunningham 6:40
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean code. What I mean by code, driving it A17.3-2020 drives that, in an essence of that’s an existing elevator code. So the existing elevator code states, every elevator, if it’s retroactive, has to have an unintended ascending movement device on there. Okay, so states like Nevada, Florida, going back, if they don’t have a device, they need to be compliant by a certain year. So they usually give them a couple years, give the give the building owners a couple years to be compliant. And there again, that’s what’s what, what has been driving our device, New York City. New York City has a, has what they call a single plunger type of a code where any any elevator machine with a single plunger type of a brake, you need to take care of that with a device like ours, again, a rope brake type of device, because those single plungers years ago could stick, and That single plunger lifts both sides of a brake shift, okay? And basically, if it sticks, you’re not clamping down, that machine keeps moving and the elevator, keeps driving toward the top or bottom of the hoistway
Matthew Allred 7:52
Gotcha. Gotcha. So you obviously you it’s, yeah, works for, like, I say the ascending or the or the descending. And I think you had mentioned the brakes on the roped elevators before, as we’ve talked, but it sounded like, from what I The impression I got, that a lot of hydraulic elevators maybe didn’t have much to hold them, they’re just going to fall.
Kevin Cunningham 8:19
Well, yeah, I mean hydraulic elevators again. When we built our device, we wanted a device that could work on really, all types of elevators. The other two I mentioned, those disc driven and the rope brake type applications only work on traction elevators. Okay, ours works on hydraulic elevators, any elevator with T rails, sure our device will work on so what is a hydraulic, a regular in ground hydraulic type of a if it’s not a roped hydraulic, right? It has no safety device. So really, no, no, no safety device on a hydraulic elevator, if it isn’t roped, what does roped mean? Rope means it has a set of hoist ropes, counter weighted and does have a device that would set a governor and trip a governor in case of a runaway or an over or an over speed, right? So that’s the rope side of it. A regular hydraulic elevator, though, doesn’t really have any type of device. So if you’ve if you get a cylinder that maybe has a hole due to excessive water in the ground. Over the years, it blew a hole that elevator. It cannot go up. It would only go down because you’re losing pressure. So once you sense that, our device senses that based off of an encoder, if you will, understands where the counts are, floor level, things of that nature, and would clamp on the rails, stop the elevator and shut the elevator down.
Matthew Allred 9:43
Gotcha. Gotcha. You had mentioned some time ago in a conversation a hospital that lost its CAT scan machine, what happened in that situation?
Kevin Cunningham 9:55
You know, that was it was it was a unfortunate situation. The elevator came up to the landing, open the doors. They were about to wheel a machine on there. And what happened is that that the packing in that certain situation actually blew out, which, again, was not able to contain the pressure inside that cylinder. So what happened is the elevator took off and went down. Literally took that machine, the scanner, the CT scanner, that they were wheeling in, and cut that in half, caused a lot of damage, wedge the elevator at the opening and caused quite a bit of damage. So with that, that prompted, prompted some hospitals to give us a call and said, Hey, do you your device? It can stop that from ever happening. Well, yes, it can. And a lot what you see out there is, you see a lot of buildings, hospitals or whatnot, public use, government facilities, commercial buildings or whatnot. Their elevators are old. They might not have the money, or they don’t want to, you know, so, but what we did find is, in hospital situations and public use. They always have money for safety features, and that’s a good safety feature to have. So that’s increased our our end by saying, Hey, you have a device that would work. Yes, we do. We’ll keep the public safe. Yes it will. So that sparked a lot of interest
Matthew Allred 11:16
Yeah, well, and you obviously have a group of customers there that they can see the immediate benefit. I mean, obviously there’s super, super fortunate that no one was was on, yes, was in there with the CAT scan machine. Because I know those things are not cheap, but they’re not light, no. And that could have been much more catastrophic than just a CAT scan machine in an elevator.
Kevin Cunningham 11:43
You know, when they look at it and they say, Hey, look, they’ve had problems on elevators in the past, and and when people are involved and they hurt themselves, or they may get killed or wedged in an elevator, the cost of that lawsuit is just is astronomical. So when you think about a safety device that you’re going to add on an elevator for, you know, 20, 30,000 bucks, sure, you might have 10 elevators, but, boy, it’s a hell of a lot cost effective to run with a safety device. And your insurance companies look at that too, say, hey, wow, you know what? Now, you’ve lessened that liability impact, if you will, and it does affect some of their rates and costs and things of that nature.
Matthew Allred 12:28
Well, just the reassurance of knowing, you know, to your point a minute ago, that a lot of the hydraulic elevators just don’t have anything. So who’s to say your packing is not going to blow and have some kind of unintended descent that, like, yeah, we you never know.
Kevin Cunningham 12:47
You don’t. I mean, you’re packing your again, you know, electrolysis in the ground, water in the ground, transferring back to, you know, you get a 2,3,4 stop elevator where you have 40 feet of cylinder in the ground. Again, it might not be protected by PVC. Today’s codes, you’re you sync a PVC shooting in there, if you will, and now your cylinder is going in there. So you’re keeping that dry. You’re keeping that away from all types of catastrophic effects on that, on that cylinder. So again, the odds of you blowing out a cylinder are very slim at that point now, but there’s hundreds of 1000s of elevators out there, hydraulics that are not, do not have that PVC type of sleeve or encapsuled. So.
Matthew Allred 13:33
Yeah, well, and yeah, you’ve kind of got a story to tell now, right? You can, you could, kind of approach every hospital in the country and say, Oh, here’s what happened. And here are all the people that called us. Do you want to, do you want to get on board?
Kevin Cunningham 13:46
Yes, yeah. And that’s been, that’s been part of our end as well contacting some of the folks direct. The elevator companies too have looked and looked at our product and says, Well, you know what? This is a pretty unique product. And boy, this would work in a lot of these situations. So there, some of them are smart enough to to go out and say, you know, I’m going to pitch this to a hospital that gives me a little bit of what we call open order work in the industry keeps our teams busy, and this is great for safety factor, right? So that’s helped. It’s helped them both sides.
Matthew Allred 14:17
Yeah, how difficult is it to install on an existing elevator?
Kevin Cunningham 14:23
You know, our product is… Number one, our product is very costly because of the way we did built it. We built it to withstand different climates, Florida, Texas, high humidity. You’re in a parking garage, right? We don’t want our product to rust. So a lot of what we use is a lot of stainless within our product, our pumping units, a high pressure pumping unit. So the material costs are higher, but the labor to install it is the biggest ticket, right? So once we have trained folks on how to install our product, normally, we tell them it’s probablygonna take you about two days if you’ve never installed one. After that, we’re seeing some of the team, the teams that are out there, the technicians that are out there, we’re seeing anywhere from six to eight hours to install one of our devices, and then you’re ready to go. You can test it the next day, pass it on inspections or whatnot. But so roughly about a day to install. If you’re in a modernization situation, you’re kind of split that up. You’re probably four hours to install the device later on down the line, another couple hours to wire it in as you’re wiring the car top. So you’re even, you’re even reducing more of the time frame. So the biggest key is the labor savings. Labor savings per team is very, very expensive across the country, depending where you’re at, from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, you could be $1,000 an hour for a team rate. So again, when you’re spending a couple extra days installing another device, let’s say like a rope brake or external disk type that could take, in some situations, you know, anywhere from three days to two weeks to install one of those, right? So that’s a lot of labor.
Matthew Allred 16:06
Yeah, no, absolutely. And how long do they last? I mean, would you, would you say, hey, you need to replace it every time you modernize your elevator? Or can you take it off and mod and then just bolt it back on?
Kevin Cunningham 16:19
Yeah, the best part about ours is it can be reused a modernization so with with even some of the codes driving the existing elevator, end of it with A17.3-2020 as an example, you could put it on a 15-20, 25, year old elevator. And when you do go to modernize or again at that time, they do have the money to put a modernization plan together for all their elevators. They can reuse the device. My device can be reused. So that’s not a problem at all.
Matthew Allred 16:48
Very cool. That’s very cool. So if somebody wanted to learn more or see more, or, you know, understand how it works, where would you direct them?
Kevin Cunningham 16:58
You know, I have you go to our website, Hydrasafebrake.com and it’s H -Y- D- R- A- S- A- F- E- B- R- A- K- E.com and everything is on there. We’ve got tutorials, we got safety bulletins, we’ve got AHJ documentation, where the AHJ is, how do you inspect the unit. Again, we’re tied in with with NASA and some other platforms for the elevator inspectors that are out there as well. So we’re out and we’re trying to in certain parts of the country. For NASA, we’re teaching our end on it’s about an hour goes toward your CEUs for the hours that you need to keep your elevator inspection license. You need 10 hours a year. So what we do is we try to help them out. We go through code on ours Sure. We go back to 2.19 A171 2.19 we run through all the aspects of that and how to inspect it and things of that nature. So all the information is on the website, and that’s the best way to get a hold of us.
Matthew Allred 18:08
Yeah, and as we, as we wrap up this interview, Kevin, what would you say to those who are maybe teetering on the edge trying to decide if they want to spend that extra money?
Kevin Cunningham 18:17
You know, again, it’s a safety product. We’re very big into safety. And you know, it’s funny when, when I think back in 1985 when I got in the elevator business and they gave me this little belt, and it had a rope on the end of it, today’s day and age, with harnesses and the gloves and the glasses and all the PPE that’s out there right now. Again, we’ve advanced so much in technologies and with safety that’s out there. Why would you want to compromise any one of your elevators if you know that you have an avenue to keep the public safe? So that’s what I would say. It’s a great option, and we’re not for every application, but again, for several applications out there, we’re perfect fit. So
Matthew Allred 19:08
Awesome. Awesome. Kevin, thank you again. It’s been a pleasure, as always.
Kevin Cunningham 19:13
Thank you. Appreciate your time and having HydraSafe Brake on your on your podcast. I appreciate it.
Matthew Allred 19:18
You bet. You bet. Well, good luck to you as you continue keeping people safe.
Kevin Cunningham 19:22
Thank you. Have a nice day.
Matthew Allred 19:24
You too. Thank you for listening to the Elevator Careers Podcast, sponsored by the Allred group, a leader in elevator industry recruiting. Please visit our YouTube channel at Elevator Careers, or check us out online at elevatorcareers.net. Please like and subscribe and until next time, stay safe.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai