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Let's Talk Cabling!
Unlocking Door Frame Success: Electrified Openings Made Simple
Due to the holiday weekend we are running a blast from the past. One of the most requested episodes!
The FrameFrog system creates a seamless pathway for wiring electrified door openings, solving a decades-old problem that has plagued low voltage installers and access control specialists.
• Architects Ron Hicks and construction expert Gary Johnson developed FrameFrog after 20 years of struggling with electrified opening installations
• Traditional methods for electrified openings often fail due to metal connectors breaking or flex conduit being impossible to fish through
• FrameFrog features integrated funnel-shaped ports that guide fish tape automatically through the frame
• The system creates a complete loop connecting all components (door position switches, electric strikes, EPTs, etc.)
• Pre-installation in hollow metal frames eliminates the "division problem" between trades that leads to field conflicts
• Live demonstration showed how easily wire can be fished through the entire frame system in seconds
• Buildings last 50-75 years, making infrastructure for future security needs essential even if not immediately implemented
• System works with all types of access control including POE and traditional low voltage
To learn more about the FrameFrog system or to find a distributor, visit www.framefrog.us or contact Ron directly at ron@framefrog.us.
Knowledge is power! Make sure to stop by the webpage to buy me a cup of coffee or support the show at https://linktr.ee/letstalkcabling . Also if you would like to be a guest on the show or have a topic for discussion send me an email at chuck@letstalkcabling.com
Chuck Bowser RCDD TECH
#CBRCDD #RCDD
This week on the let's Talk Caving podcast. We're talking about access control and, specifically, electrified opening.
Speaker 2:Welcome to let's Talk Cabling, the award-winning podcast where knowledge is power and the low-voltage industry connects. Hosted by Chuck Bowser, rcdd. We're here to empower installers, designers and industry pros with the tips, stories and best practices you need to stay ahead. From copper to fiber, standards to innovation, this is the show that keeps you plugged into success. So grab your tools, turn up the volume and let's talk cabling.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show where we tackle the tough questions submitted by installers, estimators, project managers, ict people, even customers. We are connecting at the human level so that we can connect the world. If you're watching this show on YouTube, would you mind hitting that subscribe button and the bell button to be notified when new content is being created? If you're listening to us on one of the audio podcast platforms, would you mind giving us a five-star rating? If we're not a five-star rating, email me. Let me know what I need to do to make this a five-star rated show. Those simple little steps help us take on the algorithm so we can educate, encourage. Helps us take on the algorithm so we can educate, encourage and enrich the lives of people in this industry. Furthermore, while this show is free and it will always remain free if you find value in this content and you would like to support it, make sure you click on the QR code right there. You can buy me a cup of tea, you can schedule a 15-minute one-on-one Zoom call with me after hours, of course, or you can just make a donation to the show to help offset some of the cost of the show.
Speaker 1:6 pm Eastern Standard Time. What are you doing. I do a live stream on YouTube, tiktok, linkedin, instagram, a bunch of other places where you get to ask your favorite RCDD. Of course that's going to be me, your favorite questions about design, installation, certification and even career path questions. But I can hear you now, but, chuck, I'm driving my truck at 6 pm. I don't want to get into an accident. That's okay, I record them and they're available at letstalkcablingcom. Also, make sure you share it with somebody who might find some interest in this as well.
Speaker 1:You know a lot of people lump low voltage contractor work and they think it's just voice and data cabling. Low voltage expands well beyond those borders. There's also access control, building automation, all kinds of other stuff, and there's unique challenges with each type of work, because not everybody gets to work in a drop tile ceiling environment drop a cable down a hollow wall. Today we're focusing on access control and electrified openings, because, while I consider myself a really good person when it comes to fishing walls, I don't know how well I would be fishing a door frame. But you know, I've got something that might help you with this. So I'm bringing in today some subject matter experts on how to make this easier the folks from FrameFrog. Hello Gary, hello Ron, how are you guys doing?
Speaker 4:Good Chuck.
Speaker 1:How are you Glad to have you on the show. I'm glad to be here, thank you. Why don't you guys give us you know, I don't know 15, 20, 30 second introduction, who you are, your expertise, what certifications you may have? I'm Ron.
Speaker 4:Hicks and my background is in architecture. I'm a licensed architect, been an architect for over 40 years and about midway in my career I joined a large firm in Cincinnati and within two years I took over the supervision of our field service group. And that involves my colleague here to my right, Gary Johnson, who was one of the field reps on our project. So, to finish me up, I basically managed the field service group for about 20 years, which is where all the fun is, where all the problems explode on the projects and you have to get involved in trying to solve those problems, and Gary was the initiator of bringing this problem to our attention at the firm.
Speaker 5:Basically I was a carpenter and evolved into a construction superintendent, did that for about 25 years, came to Steedham and Paul with their field service group and we're out there trying to make things work and it's my responsibility to see it all does when we leave. And about 20 years ago I got my first access control job. It was a 300,000-foot school with 600 doors and 58 of them were electrified and I figured if I get everybody in the trailer, it's supposed to know what they're doing and give them their marching orders and everything should be fine. And it wasn't. It was terrible actually, and I didn't make many friends throughout that. And we went on to the next job and the next job. We refined the way we were doing things. We thought we had it figured out but we still couldn't get people to do it. And we have actually, we think we've thought of every possibility and our, our product that we're we're working with, you'll see here today is the culmination of all that effort.
Speaker 4:About 20 years of focusing on this issue and felt like we finally came up with a solution about four years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just thinking as you guys were introducing yourself. I've been in the industry for four decades and I've been an installer, project manager, all that stuff, and I've dealt with architects and stuff like that and I always think about the disconnect between the installation side of it and the architect side of it. So, gary, do you have to educate Ron every now and then?
Speaker 5:On a constant, daily basis, every day.
Speaker 4:You see this flat head here.
Speaker 5:It used to be pointy, it was a pointy head yes, Gotcha, gotcha, we've seen that down and he's a regular guy now.
Speaker 1:Nice, he's almost a field person now, huh.
Speaker 5:Almost. Yes, not not quite. I said almost almost. He still wears his loafers out, but you know yeah, what what you?
Speaker 4:you gotta wear appropriate people that's an architect for you gary, gary's from indiana, I'm from ohio, he's, he goes.
Speaker 1:You damn fuck guys well there's, yeah, there's, there's another rub between you two. Yeah, I bet working there is fun it is fun.
Speaker 4:We could not be more different, and we've become the best of friends. True.
Speaker 1:Thank you for saying that, because you know I say that all the time. I actually just did a TikTok video last week, where it was a staged video, obviously, but where some iron guys cut through a bundle of low voltage cabling I saw that it was a staged video.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty sure it was staged video and then that kind of stuff does happen. But if we all just kind of work with each other you know the electricians, the iron guys, the hvac man the job's gonna go so much smoother. So much smoother. I so much smoother. I bought it.
Speaker 4:I thought it was the real deal. Oh, I could see it happening Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, it does happen Absolutely. I said in the comments that I'm pretty sure that it was staged, but it highlights something that does happen. That's why I posted the video and that thing took off. It's got multiple thousands of views. I can't believe how much. It took off oh yeah. Yeah. So since I've got the guy who actually does the work and the guy who designs the work, how is access control cabling different from doing like a?
Speaker 4:traditional voice and data network. Well, it's again. We're not cable experts. I mean they're, and back when Gary was starting this it was most it was all just low voltage wiring. But now we have power over ethernet so you can run, be running cat five, cat six into a door frame so they can be different or they can be the exact same cabling. It depends upon the hardware that you've got on your frame as to how it's driven.
Speaker 5:All the safeguards that you guys build into your cabling out into the building about sweeps and all that stuff. None of that happens inside of a door frame, none of it. I mean the problems that you have with six months down the road when a door stops operating or an opening isn't working anymore is usually because of the inertia of the door shutting and you've crammed it in there and now it's metal against metal and pretty soon you expose that wire and it fails and you would never put up with that in your data room or above the ceiling. I mean things happen. You'll get me wrong. A hammer blow in the wrong place can mess you up pretty bad. I mean it's inside that door frame or inside that system. It just isn't a nice place. It's jagged, it's rough and this is a way to clean all that up.
Speaker 4:Chuck, I suspect you're familiar, at least to a certain degree, with construction specifications and specifications, the CSI format. Yeah, exactly. So we have divisions and then we have spec sections in each division, and those divisions, to me, have always been folders. They're like this is the folder for that spec, all these specs. But it's come to my realization through this effort that they're really that the word division means exactly what it says it's a division, and the construction industry does not like to cross between one division and the next. So technology guys don't typically deal with hollow metal frames, and hollow metal frame guys don't seem to care about network cabling. It's like somebody else's problem. And yet where these things come together, somebody has to cross that division. And we've taken that on as an architectural firm, because our client is staring at us and going how are you going to make this mess work when it doesn't? And so now we have to get the contractors to understand somebody's got to cross across that division and bridge between totally different industries of work.
Speaker 3:Let's take a short break. Are you looking to grow your low voltage business? At Bowman Vision Media, we don't just market to the low voltage industry. We come from it With decades of experience. To the low voltage industry. We come from it With decades of experience. We uniquely understand your business and how to help it grow. From social media to content creation, we deliver marketing that works as hard as you do. And while you're leveling up, check out the 49 Volts podcast, your go-to source for industry insights and expert interviews. Visit Bowman vision mediacom to learn more and subscribe to the 49 volts podcast on YouTube or wherever you listen so to address, uh, gary's comments about the minimum bend radiuses and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:those are put in place because we're dumping huge amounts of data across that cable, right? Not just obviously it is current, but huge amounts of data and we're operating at high frequencies. Now correct me if I'm wrong. I mean you're really just powering on and powering off to activate a device, so not a lot. You're not doing bandwidth, you're just doing current. So theoretically, those bend radiuses for an electrified opening aren't as critical.
Speaker 4:Okay and I understand that, although it's I mean, I hear you now, I didn't understand that before but it still doesn't address the issue of these cables being protected for one, in a stud wall. And right now the technology is generally just power. But as we move along and progress, the notion of extracting data from what's happening in an opening is becoming more and more likely and commonplace. More likely and commonplace, right. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity to extract the data of what's happening with an opening, how many times it opens, collecting all that data, and then not even to mention the whole issue around video cameras. You know A-phones which have a video stream, which I don't. I think it's a phone makes a relatively new product where their a phone is only two inches wide, four inches, five inches tall and it sits right on the face of the door frame. So you're now running a video feed through that, through that hollow metal frame.
Speaker 5:Historically a door, and its frame and its hinges were basically the, and the lock were the only moving parts, and we're kind of looking at this now that these openings have become sophisticated machines that do a lot of things and will likely do more in the future.
Speaker 1:That's the whole industry in a whole. I mean, just when you look at the telephones, you know 40 years ago we just had pots, plain old telephones or analog phone lines. Now you got, you know, you got voip telephone systems and all kinds of other stuff and and, all right, we're getting some really interesting and cool stuff. Power over reason, that building, automation stuff. I mean just there's a lot of cool stuff coming down the pike really and I don't know.
Speaker 4:I don't know if this is likely or not chuck, you would know better than I but I mean, is it possible that at some point there might be fiber being run to door frames? I don't know, but I guess.
Speaker 1:Well, you need, you need current to activate it, right?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So if you have fiber running to the door frame you would have to have some kind of a copper carrying conductor for the current and I don't know if there's ever going to be enough information exchanged between an electrified opening. That's going to require the bandwidth that fiber brings to bear. You know, I mean category 6A cable can do 10 gig. 10 gig that's a ton of energy, a ton of bandwidth. I really don't think.
Speaker 4:I don't think hey, watch me be proven wrong in five, ten years down the road right, or maybe it's some new technology that none of us has ever seen, that happens in five years and explodes into the world.
Speaker 1:Right, right, right. So they scan your retina and then, while they're scanning your retina, they do a DNA check to make sure you are who you are, and take your temperature and see if, if you have any genetic defects so you might want to not have kids, and who knows what's coming down the pipe.
Speaker 4:Yes, exactly. And so to our point is I think people need to be rethinking the need for a pathway to an opening that currently you may not need a pathway for, but these buildings are built to. You know, schools, which is what we do, are built to serve for 50 to 75 years, and who's to say that you may not need wire into that door frame two years, five years, 10 years from now? How many times? I can't tell you how many times our owners come to us as the building is opening up, it's ready to open, and they can't. Can I get a card reader on that door?
Speaker 5:A little late now, typically what we do with all the hollow metal frames, the exterior doors, at the very least will have a contact to tell you that it's closed and shut and latched so you can arm the building. And what we were doing, we were putting three boxes in it. So just for that occasion that when it comes down to it the owner comes to you and say you know, I'd like to have a card reader on that electric room on the back of the building. Sure, we can do that.
Speaker 4:You know, I'd like to have an electric electric lock on that electric room on the back of the building.
Speaker 5:Sure, we can do that. I'd like to have an electric lock on that door. That we never planned on. So we ended up outfitting the outside doors and maybe the data rooms. If you got some really important documents and things that you want secured, then those were the doors that we planned on. And then an owner would look at it and say I'd like to have a card reader on this, because I got a school next door and my teachers are traveling back and forth and so there's always some additional things before it's over with. And that's what we try to plan for. And then now we're seeing school districts look at it like I may want to lock this whole place down, I may want to lock the classroom doors. So maybe they don't have the funds to do all of this at the time, but for very reasonable and low price they can put the infrastructure in so they can always go back and do it and not have to get back inside the wall.
Speaker 1:So two things. First, ron, thank you for saying that the average life of a building is 50 to 75 years, Because I've been saying that for a long time. I don't know where I got those numbers from, but I've been saying it for a long time. You'd be surprised at how many people argue with me over that. Oh wow, no, that's an industry accepted number. I obviously learned it somewhere. It's not like I'm not an architect.
Speaker 4:That's a higher number on what I think most designers would suggest is what their designs are, but the fact of the matter is they don't come down in 50 years, they just refurbish them, they regenerate them, right, right. How many buildings are 100, 120 years old running around?
Speaker 1:here, or older, exactly. So let me ask you this, and this is not one of our listed questions. This is an architect question, right? So you said the average life of a school building is 50 to 75 years. Is that number true for a commercial office building, or is that a different number that the architect world uses?
Speaker 4:I would say that's a totally different number, for I mean the building, the structure itself may be 50 years, but the number of times that that building is going to undergo alteration just partitioning interior partitioning that could happen every couple of years, especially if it's a government.
Speaker 1:So, since we're talking about electrified openings, first off, what is an electrified opening?
Speaker 5:You want to take that or you want me to. Well, in my opinion, is that anything with a wire to it is an electrified opening and therefore you're talking contacts, you're talking electric strikes, epts to get wire back into the door itself for locks, or electrified panic hardware and, as Ron mentioned while ago that we are seeing some camera type things and it's anything that's got wire to it should be prepared for any of its inevitabilities. I would think. I mean you don't have to, but I mean help yourself while you're building the building I mean there is.
Speaker 4:There's always wireless hardware which doesn't really require a pathway, but that is typically, in my opinion, a cheaper solution and it's done because you don't want to tear into the frame and remove the frame. But if you're doing new build, my understanding is the federal government won't even talk about wireless. It has to be wired, and I think it's more reliable.
Speaker 5:It's certainly a maintenance issue.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the maintenance of wireless and battery-powered devices is right, would be quite a headache. So you know we've, we've ripped our. You know, big believers in the wired solution.
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Speaker 1:I don't think wireless would be a viable option. If you need current to activate a magnet or something, wireless would be good for setting off an alarm. You know, if somebody opens a door, it doesn't open a door Again. Not for the government, and I tell people all the time wireless has its place, but that's another argument social media loves to get into. We talk about cable, just go wireless. Wireless is not the answer for everything. Not even close. Yes, not even close. Thank you for pointing that out. And Gary, you said it. I'm the acronym king. I do the acronym challenge on my LinkedIn page every day. You said an acronym. I'm not familiar with EPT. What the heck?
Speaker 5:is that.
Speaker 4:Electric power transfer. What does that?
Speaker 5:do Next ones. There you go, we're going to show you, we can show you that on our doorframe.
Speaker 4:Chuck. Power transfer is the hardware device that jumps a wire from the frame into the door. You can get power into a door two ways an EPT or an electric hinge.
Speaker 1:Four decades four decades in this industry. I'm still learning new stuff.
Speaker 5:You're not a. You're not an opening access control guy.
Speaker 4:And we're, and we're just we're just now starting to tip our toe into your whole industry.
Speaker 5:Right, that's true. I don't know hardly any of your acronyms.
Speaker 1:Right. Well then you should follow my LinkedIn thing. I do an acronym challenge every weekday morning.
Speaker 5:I see it.
Speaker 1:And then I put the answers out on.
Speaker 4:Saturdays. It's a demonstration of the divisions that everybody lives in their own little silo of construction.
Speaker 5:Yes, and I mean electricians will say we don't do low voltage, and I mean it's just like taboo for some of them. And if I hear it's not my job, like one more time, I don't know, I'm prone to violence.
Speaker 1:I think you just wrote my next meme for me. It's not my job, yeah you did.
Speaker 5:You wrote my next meme in a trip Right there you go.
Speaker 1:There you go, all right. So now that we know what electrified opening is, what special kind of planning tips should somebody know, you know, before they actually go out the kid, make their job a little bit easier okay, wow, that is a big can of worms and uh, um, I don't even know where.
Speaker 4:I'm not sure I know where to begin. I mean, we, we believe that the architect needs to kind of become the leader and the facilitator of bringing all this together. Architects are good at collaboration, but they're not experts in virtually anything. I mean, even building code requirements have gotten so complicated that often they're hiring their own building code consultant to help them navigate the complexities of an ever-evolving and more complex building code requirements on buildings and they never put together a hardware schedule.
Speaker 5:They get a hardware manufacturer to do that, right, right, and the whole thing is it has to all work. Nobody's done until everybody's done, and I think that is is the the lesson here that needs to be taken. But if, like I said, it's not my job, that's, that's I. You know, I didn't put that in my bid and and all this stuff and this is this is a thing that falls between disciplines. I mean, if you look at who benefits from this, who are the customers? They're the owner to begin with, because it's his building. He understands probably nothing about it, how it works. Or you know, just as long as it does work, that need to know enough to be able to speak to this to convince them that they need to go this direction or that direction to get it. And then you have the hardware guys. They probably know more about the whole system than anybody because they've met with the owner and know what his needs are. They know the devices that need to be used need to be done.
Speaker 5:But again, I mean, you can go to any YouTube thing and it'll show you how to put an electric strike in, and when you look at it, one second there's no wire, and then the next second there's a wire there. How the heck did that happen? Nobody shows you that.
Speaker 1:YouTube can be a great resource. Youtube can be a great resource. Absolutely can be a great resource. I have a farm. I got an F-350 pickup truck because I'm always hauling something or another. It's a Powerstroke diesel. I'm good with gas. I've never had diesel before.
Speaker 1:Something happened to my truck about six months ago. I didn't even have an idea how to fix it. I hopped on YouTube, watched one video, had my truck fixed in five minutes, boom running. But the problem with YouTube is you got to evaluate where that resource is right. Now, the video that I watched came from an established YouTube channel on power strokes, right, I don't remember the exact name of it, but so I trusted them. If I had to come across, you know, terry's taco channel and you having to make a video about a power stroke, yeah, might not be a good resource, right? So, yeah, you got to evaluate your resource when you use, when you're using YouTube. And so we're talking about door frames and stuff. And I mentioned in the intro I don't know if you guys heard that I'm really good at fishing walls. Absolutely, I've done it for years. That I'm really good at fishing walls Absolutely, I've done it for years. I've insulated double drywall, even furring strips off a block wall. Dude, I can get it down on anything.
Speaker 4:I've seen people pull that off in existing construction and I'm like how the hell are you going to get a wire through there? You guys have got a lot of tricks, Magic.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of different ways you guys can do it. Yeah, don't talk to the guy behind the curtain.
Speaker 5:It's all magic. Right Right Chain trick. Right, You've used that.
Speaker 1:Right, and one of my best friends has his own alarm company where he goes out and puts in alarm cabling for he does residential, he doesn't do commercial buildings, and and I've watched him fish like door frames and and and wall frames. I'm like it's magic to me, right, and how are you gonna get a cable down that door frame, right? Yeah, um, so let's talk about that for a minute, because that's that's where I see the biggest, biggest thing so, um, and back to your previous question a little bit.
Speaker 4:So, like I say, we believe the architects need to be the ones that kind of lead the charge and bring this all together, but there's a lot of other players in this thing. There's the, as we've talked about, there's the hardware consultant and the. You may have a security consultant that's involved in helping to strategize on how we're going to create a secure envelope on this building. Your owner needs to be involved, because they're going to be the ones that are making the decisions as to you know, what do I want, what do I not want? Exactly, what can they afford? Exactly?
Speaker 4:Yeah, there's a whole host of people that need to be involved and if somebody needs to bring them together and we believe the architect is the one that needs to do it. Problem is the architects. When we get the project Gary talked about back 20 years ago was a reaction to the, to the Columbine shooting of 1999. So all of a sudden, in 2020, we have our clients saying I want access control on my school and the architects did what they knew. They said, yeah, we'll get the hardware guy to specify the hardware and that was that.
Speaker 2:yeah, well, 2002 is when that project went out.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and, but that was as far as anybody thought about it. The rest of it is a construction problem, and they'll figure it out when, when you, when you have a, when you decide you're going to figure it out on the job site. It's usually an argument and there's usually money that has to be spent in order to fill the gap.
Speaker 5:This was in the days of five primes that we had in Ohio as the law.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and so nobody had to get along.
Speaker 5:Right, I mean, if they did get along, it was great, are you?
Speaker 4:familiar with that term. Five primes, chuck. No, I've never heard five primes before. Okay, so back in publicly funded buildings. Back in those days you could not hire a single general contractor to build your entire building. You had to hire a separate general and a separate electrician, a separate plumber, a separate HVAC guy, separate sprinkler guy and even back then, a separate elevator contractor. So that was the way we bid our work. The owner had five contracts, or six contracts with six different companies that are all building one building and they got to all figure out how to get along, and he was the one trying to make that happen. But each one of them their attitude once I'm on the job site. I got this job because I was low bid and everybody else is in my way.
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Speaker 1:You know that's how the majority of new construction works for us. I didn't know, they called that five primes. What happens is a lot of time is an architectural firm or maybe a GC would submit out bids to several GCs. The GCs would grab those bids and then they would because the GC doesn't do everything they'd get a price from the electricians, a price from HVAC, a price from the sprinkler guys, a price from the electricians, and then they'd say here's the price to do the job, and then they would manage those contractors. We as low voltage, or at least especially for voice and data, maybe not necessarily for access control I'm not sure, because I've done much of that, but voice and data we generally work for the customer, not the GC.
Speaker 4:Exactly, and that always creates a problem. That is a major part of this, because what happens is because you guys are so late to the game. You show up when the building's almost done, right, and nobody's thought about you. Nobody cares about you, Chuck.
Speaker 5:Nobody loves you.
Speaker 1:I got things, Ken. I've known that for years. Yes.
Speaker 4:Well, we believe that we're your best friend because we are thinking about you and we want to pave the way to make your life as easy as possible, because if you can't get out of there, then the owner's not happy and we can't get out of there, exactly right, exactly right.
Speaker 1:So you guys came up with a really cool device. It's called the Frame Frog, right, the Frame Frog. So even anybody a brand spanking new newbie can fish a doorframe. Now, right. Yes, exactly, I guess this is where the architect comes in, because there's got to be some prior planning to this, doesn't there?
Speaker 4:Yes, there does. It has to be specified. It either has to be specified or somebody needs to buy it before the building's built, before the walls are closed up. This is not for retrofit. If you're doing retrofit, it gets much more complicated. You're probably tearing out drywall. If you're doing retrofit in a concrete block wall, then there's only one way to do it and it's really not fully concealed. You're talking about running a piece of wire mold down from the ceiling down to the top of the frame. You can then put your completed pathway in the frame, but you're still going to have a piece of wire mold and you're going to have to buy a new frame because you're going to be tearing out the old frame that's in that block wall.
Speaker 1:So walk me through. Let's say I'm a building owner and I want to put some electrified openings on my doors for security and stuff like that. And you got me, you got me convinced. I want to use this frame fraud because my my access control guy say the price will be go go down some because I've got pathway. Walk me through the process. How does this whole system work?
Speaker 4:Okay, so up until you know, before we got involved in this I mean most and I'm sure you've run into this most projects there's no accounting for any kind of a pathway in a hollow metal frame. But if you had a actual pathway in your hollow metal frame, it's going to be. It's likely going to be a metal box. It's going to look just like this. It's going to have a couple of holes for connectors that go on the end of it. This box is going to be welded into your door frame. The problem with this solution is a lot of the metal shops think that this is free because they make it out of scrap. But that doesn't make it free.
Speaker 2:They're still making this thing.
Speaker 4:Somebody's still got to put these connectors on here. This is laborious, and then you got to run a conduit around the frame. So and the problem with this, this box, is that you're usually fishing through a small hole in the frame right here trying to hit a connector that's way up inside that frame that you can't see. So if you can get lucky enough to hit that port, you don't know which port you're in. You just know you're, you're going through something where, and so what we did is we came up with a totally different design and this is the cross-sectional view of our original model and what we did is we decided to make those ports integral to the box. So now you don't need to attach anything to our box. You basically have caps that cover these holes and you pop off the cap that you want to remove when you're trying to connect exactly, yes, the other. You leave the caps on, except for the ones that you're gonna add a conduit to. But the unique thing about this is there's a couple of features. One, it's all funnels. You can see here. Everything funnels right into one port or the other, and the inside diameter of this conduit matches up exactly to the inside diameter of the port that's feeding into it. So there's not even a bump here, it just slides right in. And both of these ports are funnels divided by this little divider wall right here. So what happens is when this thing's sitting in a frame like this is on a door jam, and you shove a fish tape in here, if I lean that fish tape, we'll do this on a full frame demonstration as well. But if I lean this fish tape to the right, it hits this funnel and slides right in. You cannot dead end that fish tape. If I want to go to this side, I just lean it to the left and it goes right. In this way you can literally steer your fish tape through this box and hit that conduit every single time. Then the other thing about this box. So you see this little belly right here. So sometimes, like if this box is in the head of a frame, and I want to fish through this box and carry on, like, maybe, to go up above ceiling, through this box, and carry on, like, maybe, to go up above ceiling. So we tell you how to connect the ports. The short port, this is the long port, this is a short port. We have two models. The other one is a smaller model, but it still has a short port and a long port. And we tell you, the short ports are how you connect boxes within the frame. You never touch these until you get on the job site and attach to take a conduit away from the frame and up to above ceiling so you tie your boxes together with the short ports, these are for going above ceiling.
Speaker 4:So now, as I'm going around the frame and I hit this port, this little belly here forces the fish tape across and over to this port over here. So whether I'm coming in here or I'm coming in here, it doesn't matter. I know I'm going to hit this port and that's important because you want to know where you're going as you're fishing through, because you can't see anything Once this is all installed and all everything's swallowed up. This is all invisible. But because now we have a controlled method of running that fish tape through this box, I know where I'm going at all times. If I want to come back in here to go around the frame, all I got to do is stick my finger in that frame, push that fish tape this way. Here we go, push that fish tape a little bit above this little wall right here, tuck it right behind here and it'll carry on. And again, we'll do this in a full-frame demonstration as well. It's very seamless.
Speaker 1:For those of you listening on the podcast, you don't see what we're demonstrating, so you might want to go to the YouTube channel and watch this, because this thing's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. I got some pictures. I'm going to pull them. Can you just describe what we're looking at on the picture? Let's do the first one there. What's this?
Speaker 4:Okay. So that that is a shot of two boxes on a double. A double door. It's got a center mullion door. It's got a center mullion. Actually, I don't even think it does have a center mullion, it's just a pair of doors and those are door position switches at the head of the frame and you can see the boxes are welded into the frame. We like the welding installation at a hollow metal shop. We think that's where these boxes should be installed, although we also have a field installation option that uses wing tabs that we can show you as well. But because this is being installed in the shop, those two boxes swallow up two separate door position switches and we have two conduits that connect those. So no matter which side you whatever, whichever side your, your fish tape comes into, you know you can get to the other box as well.
Speaker 5:DPS, if you want a door position switch, what did I say? Well, you did, but he's got the Ackerman game.
Speaker 1:So when you, when you first told me that they weld this to the door, and then when you shipped me the sample to look at, I was like this is plastic. You don't weld plastic. But then I realized it had these little metal things that come with it, right? So that's what you weld to the door and this kind of holds that in place, right? Exactly, gotcha, gotcha, yep. So what is this picture here?
Speaker 4:Gotcha, gotcha. So what is this picture here? Again, that's that same frame, now a little further back, but you now see the box on the jam side and on that particular door you can see on the far side of that frame that big opening that is for your EPT, your electric power transfer. So this particular door is going to have an electrified lock on one or both leaves, I'm not sure, but we can now have power to either one of those doors that can go to a lock that's on that door that is fed through that EPT. And so that's the far side. You see the hole on the inside of the frame and on the nearer side here you see the box, the same box, behind that hole. So it's a mirror image of each other.
Speaker 5:It could also be an electric latch retracted panic hardware Right Gotcha.
Speaker 1:And this is just, I guess, some door frames that already have them already installed. So obviously this is going to be more beneficial to have these things installed before the construction. That's where the architect comes in and all the coordinating you were talking about earlier.
Speaker 4:The architect, the construction manager, everybody has to be on board with this. The hollow metal supplier yeah, and again, it can be done in the field. Like, let's say, you know, and we've had some projects where they've discovered at the last minute that the frame didn't have any pathway to it. They want to put an electric lock but they don't have a pathway, and they've bought our box but they're using the wing tab feature which allows you to connect it. If you think you've got it on the back of your, your back, your table there, chuck, with those plastic wing tabs, as those plastic flowers. Yes, those things, I was wondering what those were. Yes, those are used for field installation.
Speaker 5:Now you would break that all off, except the first one in a five and three-quarter frame, and the reason that's longer. It'll go up to what?
Speaker 4:So this is a small model. It's sitting in a frame, and that little. If you want to install this in the field, you don't want to bring a welder out to the field. So you use that little wing tab and it attaches to this hinge hole and then it just reaches across and when you turn that screw it locks itself behind the hem of this frame. But that wing tab is a lot longer because a lot of times frames are a lot deeper, different sizes. You need a longer wing tab and you just break off what you don't need.
Speaker 3:Gotcha.
Speaker 1:The last picture I want to kind of look at is this picture here and I guess this picture here is showing us the benefit. I like the fact that this shows the completed unit. So you see the frame frog at the top, the frame frog down there by the EPT. Did I get that?
Speaker 4:right. Yes, well, which slide are you looking at?
Speaker 1:the one on the picture on the right, the completed unit with the frame frogs.
Speaker 4:Uh, that one that's. That's a smaller box, so that would be for an electric strike.
Speaker 1:The ept is on the other side of that frame gotcha, gotcha, and so the picture on the left is just showing, uh, I guess, just the potential hazards if you don't use the assistant.
Speaker 5:Well, all of those are supposedly ready to ship out to a job, and you can see that ours is fully contained within the frame. There's nothing sticking out past the frame, so you can stack them, slide them, lean them against the wall, whatever the other pictures are Defects.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Well, they will be. The ones on the left are defects or potential problems, and they just don't hold up.
Speaker 4:Well, you can see the center picture, the bottom red stop sign. That is a piece of conduit that's attached to a back box but it's broken. There's a connector there, but the connector snapped off and is now dropped down into that box and somebody is going to need to fix that thing, because the reason it's broken is because it was hanging off of the frame and not tied to anything, like ours is. Ours is all again self-contained. You can see the conduits on the upper side of that same frame. Those are two different frames in the same shot and those two conduits are just hanging there and nothing is supporting that.
Speaker 4:And the one on the right, the connector broke and it dropped down inside. And then the shot on the left. There was nothing provided on that box and so now you have the electrician trying to figure something out in the field and he's using a braided, jacketed flex cable. That may or may not get the job done, but that's not an easy thing to fish a fish tape through. You got all that friction because of the braids and you know, if that thing is installed in the wall and it's looped in a knot, you're never going to get a fish tape through there.
Speaker 5:If you don't keep up with it, they don't get above ceiling. We were at a job a month or two ago and the guy said I've spent hours. He said the thing's lost inside the wall. I can't find it. We're out on the tailgate with our little demonstration frame and the guy calls his office.
Speaker 4:This is a low voltage guy.
Speaker 5:Yeah, he says he calls his office. He said a second grader could do this. I don't know why we're not doing this every time.
Speaker 1:I can tell you right now I've fished hollow walls. I've fished hollow walls. I've fished insulated walls. I've fished conduit. I've fished BX.
Speaker 4:I would much rather fish through a smooth wall conduit than that BX that you showed on those pictures on the left. Every time we show what we want to do, the first words that come out of somebody's mouth are can I use flex, can I use Smurf tube, can I use this, can I use that? Yeah, they all want to do what they want to do and we're like no, do what we want you to do.
Speaker 5:We've tried all this. Now don't get me wrong. I mean, if somebody's got a better idea, I'd be happy to hear it, but they don't so far.
Speaker 1:I understand you guys have a demo. You can show us just how easy it is to fish this.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna be doing this kind of backwards because I want you to be able to see what we're doing, but what we have here is a frame with three preps in it. I have a electric strike prep over here, which you can see now, with a box behind it. I have the EPT that we've talked about over here with a box behind it, and then I also have another box at the head over here for a door position switch, and so those pictures that you saw from the job site have this same setup. We have three boxes that are tied together with conduit and all that can be done at the shop, and it all remains swallowed up in the throat of the frame. Nothing's hanging off. You can lay them on their sides, lay them on their top, and you're not going to damage any of this.
Speaker 5:These are the electrician tie-ins. That would be for a card reader. This one would be headed above ceiling.
Speaker 4:Right. So this is all done in the field. The electrician shows up after the frame has stood up. He pops off whatever cap he wants to tie into, doesn't matter which one, because once you're in the system it's an entirely loop system, but he can connect wherever he wants and take it above ceiling. But that's what this one is here over here, and then if this happened to have a card reader, we would use this one, jump out there.
Speaker 4:So now, now that I've got this fully looped, I'm going to demonstrate how the fish, to how easy it is to fish this thing right from the frame, which, again, I don't know how a lot of you got. Your guys do it, but I suspect a lot of them have to go up on the ceiling and fish down to the frame, because a lot of the stuff you can't. If you have a small hole, like for an electric hinge, you just have a small hole, you can't really fish in there with these metal boxes, and so they're probably coming down and then using a coat hanger to pull that out of that box.
Speaker 5:And they're probably three different runs. So when they're above ceiling they don't know which one they're going to be getting into until they push it out.
Speaker 4:That's the other thing that we're doing is we're having a completed loop so that all this can be tied together with one run that runs above the ceiling, as opposed to three separate home runs. So basically, I've got this box here, I'm going to fish on the strike side and if I lean this fish tape to the right and I push it in, it's going to pop right out over here at the card reader. That's easy. I'm going to lean this to the back and now I'm going to go into the conduit that's coming up around this frame and it's going to go through this box up here at the head. But I'm just going to keep on pushing because I know where I'm going and it's going to go across that box and now it's already popped out of the ceiling so a low voltage contractor can come in here and he can fish.
Speaker 4:I've fished this frame on a job site, 10 feet up into the air and 15 feet across the ceiling into the next room, and had that fish tank just drop down on the ground. So you can pull all your wire to the frame as opposed to pulling the wire into the frame and up across the ceiling. So you know, I don't know that you need to be on a ladder to do this wiring anymore. So now, let's say I want to go from here and I want to come across and down to this box. All I do is back it up until I get to this box, and I demonstrated that earlier. I pull this back to where I can now tuck it behind that little divider wall, and now I'm on the other side of that box. Now I'm going to come over here and it's that simple.
Speaker 1:That is pretty slick.
Speaker 4:We're pretty excited about it.
Speaker 1:You should be. That's a huge time saver. It's going to take some pre-planning, I would imagine.
Speaker 4:It takes a long time to get the word out to people to understand it. Everybody's going a mile a minute doing their own thing and we're figuring it out on the job site. We're figuring something out and they're on to the next job. I believe this will save a lot of time.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely, love it, love it. We're figuring something out and they're on to the next job. I believe this will save a lot of time for everybody. Absolutely, absolutely, love it, love it. So if somebody wanted more information on this system, who should they contact? Should they contact you? Where are you guys located? What numbers?
Speaker 4:We have been in distribution for a couple of years on the hollow metal industry side. We're just now entering your industry, the ICT industry, and so we have a product. We have a manufacturer's rep that covers about a five-state area in Ohio, kentucky, indiana. It's PC Telecom is the name of that company, but that's about it. It's only about five or six states. We're still looking for other representation. So anything outside outside of those five or six states, contact me direct. We'll get you. We'll get you hooked up and as we move forward looking for more manufacturers reps that we can, that will help us get the word out.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll put your contact information in the comments down below. I'm assuming the email that you and I have been communicating through is the email.
Speaker 4:Actually not. We've just updated that to a brand new email. I'll send it to you. It's basically ron at framefrogus. Okay, the website is wwwframefrogus Perfect.
Speaker 1:What do you want me to do with these frame frogs that you sent me for the show, for demos? You want me to send them back, or?
Speaker 5:should. I give them to some contract, show them to everybody.
Speaker 4:Yes, spread the word All righty. Spread the word.
Speaker 1:All righty.
Speaker 4:You can hang on to those. Keep them on your table there for the rest of your podcast.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know about. For the rest of the podcast, that area kind of gets flipped out quite often.
Speaker 4:Oh, I'm sure I get it, but no, spread the word. If you know somebody that wants to give them a try, you know, let them have them and full disclosure, they're not paying me for this.
Speaker 1:I just you know we got to talking and I realized that this is a you know me. When I make shows, I like problems, that I mean, I like solutions that fix a problem, and this fixes a huge problem for a lot of people.
Speaker 4:So that's what this is all about. And, Chuck, we really appreciate it, Cause that's that's all we've been trying to do. I mean, you know we're trying to make a buck here, but we're. You know, we started this mission trying to solve a problem and it's taken a long time to get us to where we are.
Speaker 1:Gary Ron, I appreciate you guys coming on the show and you might have to have you guys on this show in the future.
Speaker 4:We would love to we would love to, we would love to.
Speaker 1:That is a time-saving device, and time is money. You should really look into it if you're doing that kind of access control and electrified openings. Until next time, knowledge is power.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to let's Talk Cabling, the award-winning podcast where knowledge is power and the low-voltage industry connects. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with your crew. Got questions or ideas for the show? Chuck wants to hear from you. Stay connected, stay informed and always aim for excellence. Connected, stay informed and always aim for excellence. Until next time. Keep those cables clean, your standards high and your future bright. Let's Talk Cabling empowering the industry, one connection at a time.
