Stephen Duarte, Sr., founded Du-Watts in 1980 and incorporated the company in 1985, planning to grow.

NOTE: What kind of name is Du-Watts? According to Duarte, an explanation provided on www.duwattselectic.com: “The name came from the difficulty some people have with pronouncing Duarte (Do whar tay). It’s often said as ‘Do What?’”

When Hill arrived from the mainland in 1988, the company had three field electricians and one warehouseman. In better times, the company had as many as 70 in the field; these days, it’s closer to 30.

Hawaii is, of course, a paradise – but not necessarily if one wants to specialize in one kind of electrical work. “We have a geographic limit, as you might imagine,” Hill said. “So the more you can diversify – the more different types of work you are able to do – the better your opportunities. We send a lot of our people to manufacturer classes, and there’s a real good apprenticeship program here from the union.

“We do a lot of the security work. That work can be more interesting to bid than general commercial work, which is very competitive these days. The customers for the security work like to pre-quality the contractors doing sensitive jobs.

“Work in Hawaii seems to go in spurts. There’s a lot of work out there – in one two-week period recently, we had close to $20 million of work on which to bid, which is encouraging. But then it will turn off for a while. The part that’s encouraging is that a number of projects on which we had bid in the past few years, and which were postponed, are coming back out right now.”

Du-Watts’ managers believe the company has led the way in estimating on the islands. “We were the first ones using an estimating program, and had that status for years,” Hill claimed. “It kind of fits with the emphasis in this company on training for our field workers. You might say that we’re the most technically advanced contractor in Hawaii.”

Hill had worked in electrical estimating before relocating from the continental U.S., and he’d worked with other systems. But when he came to the company in 1988, he worked with a McCormick Win 3000 program.

“It’s funny to think about those days, the computer we used didn’t even have a hard drive!” Hill said. “We’ve always used McCormick here. We find it flexible and easier for our estimators to learn. There are just so many features you can work with.

“And you can’t beat the support we get. Any kind of problem we have, we get the McCormick people on the phone inside of 10 minutes. Usually, they resolve it for us in a half-hour. The support is unbeatable.

Looking for work, Du-Watts has ranged to other islands for some jobs – including the Marshall Islands. “Estimating the job was not much different, except for the logistics involved,” Hill remembered. “The last job we did there involved installation of a two new 2-megawatt generators. It was a pretty standard estimate, except for some special issues.

“First, we had to find places for our guys to stay on the island. Then, we had to pay attention to the work involved in getting the material there. For example, we had to run a feeder right down the middle of the island. We had to get reels of 500 MCM to the place. But there was no crane on the island’s dock big enough to lift wire reels off the barge! We scraped up a couple of forklifts to get the job done.”

If one does electrical work in Hawaii, one – quite naturally – lives there. What’s it like? Hill noted that “the people you work with are generally great. A lot of people who live elsewhere might think that everyone here is kind-of laid back.

“But I’ve worked with people in the electrical business in Arizona and here, and some of the most productive foremen I’ve ever work with are in Hawaii.”

After growing up in New Mexico, Hill found himself working as an estimator in Arizona for 10 years. He and his wife really liked Hawaii, though – they had honeymooned there and fell in love with the place. When Hill met Steve Duarte, discussion turned to relocating.

“There are interesting points about working and living here,” he noted. “When it comes to electrical work and the estimating, you know that you are going to take on all kinds of work.

“And when you talk about living here – well, you can’t beat the weather, or the people, or the general environment of Hawaii.”

Booking your room has never been easier!

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 "We've gotten a fairly strong reception from our customers on the introduction of the new 'hand' estimating classes," President Todd McCormick noted, roughly one month after these new educational offerings were introduced in this newsletter.

"We had one large electrical contractor bring our instructor in for a 2-day on-site Basic Estimating, followed by a one-day refresher on the McCormick software. The demand for this kind of basic approach to estimating seems to be even higher than we had thought."

If you missed the details of this new McCormick educational effort, see the May 1, 2010 newsletter, accessible from the "News" tab on www.mccormicksys.com.

Sensors + Health Care

Now, this is -- I think -- interesting:

Imagine a job that involved sitting in front of a refrigerator 24 hours a day and checking its temperature every five minutes. It is doubtful many people would apply. Plus, what organization would want to spend the money on that person’s salary? It might be nice to be sure the temperature in the refrigerator remained constant, but is  it really worth it in the scheme of things? How much would the owner be out if just one refrigerator breaks?

Try $80,000. That’s how much a research pharmacy lost when one of its refrigerators failed over one week-end. The unit contained $80,000 worth of research pharmaceuticals, which all had to be thrown out. That’s quite a loss for one weekend.

This is all about "M2M" -- machine-to-machine. The short article also talks about remote monitoring (of patients, not just refrigerators!) in health care.

A Building Is Like A Battery

That's what it says in a Design News article -- and I'm not taking issue with it. This is the kind of thinking that we maybe need right about now.

Read this:

A building is like a battery in many ways. A facility can store energy in the form of hot or cold air and has a thermal mass that can also result in energy storage. The idea is that if electricity is more valuable in some parts of the day than others, buildings could set up a profile to store energy in the form of pre-cooling or pre-heating and coast through those peak times. The net effect is that a large facility or series of buildings would look like a big virtual negative generator because the electrical wholesale market is primarily driven by capacity. There is load on the line, a need for capacity and a safety margin.

The whole article is interesting, but I'm not going to paste it in this box -- go here.

A specific implementation of these idea is featured here.