hi i'm mandy pryor and welcome to fight on pittsburgh spotlight on pittsburgh is a program about pittsburgh most fascinating people and what they do to make pittsburgh an amazing place to live and work when we return i'll introduce you to our first guest frank fans our family was drifting apart until we found the connection you have the power to change your child's life the boys town national hotline can help hi frank thanks so much for coming on the show i mean we thank you for the invite so what can you tell me can you tell me a little bit about what you what you do i'm a scientist my background is both chemistry and physics which is kind of interesting because  there are little opposing kind of technologies it's still the same science but chemistry deals with one area and physics is a very different areas so having the expertise of both lets me solve problems that might slip by other people so in my business i try to find solutions were people may not even know there's a problem or they might be searching for the solution to a symptom of a problem so what i'm good at is to get in and find out what the real problem is unsolvable and for all in ninety three i decided to be self employed and be a little more entrepreneurial and expand my my science arisings so i was doing primarily polymers work so i developed polymers for the automotive industry that's on many vehicles today the facial materials in the front and rear that allow you to bump another vehicle up to five miles an hour not crack and fall to pieces and it's indistinguishable from the metal parts of the cars i was very key and in the develop of a lot of those products and speaking of entrepreneurial where you featured in the last return i have i was on the front page of the wall street journal for nuclear fusion i do research and mentor young young people that usually go on to be physicists or and engineers in the nuclear areas so yes i have a little nuclear fusion not fission reactor that i do some of my research on and i was featured on wall street journal but i've been quoted in everything from wired to the washington post quote quite a few large large publications and i've been published in scientific journals and you do some product development as well i do my clients today i think of it as reverse consulting that is i find a deficiency or a need someplace and i do all the background work and develop everything then approach a potential client sign a non disclosure agreement and the handoff technology to them and quite often it gets implemented and so is there anything that and our day to day lives we would see that you've worked  on one of one of my patents i have quite a few patterns is with musical instruments specifically acoustic guitars somewhere in middle age i decided to learn acoustic guitar i had not played musical instruments but those new stringed instruments and the first thing i noticed was there's two identical good tars on the wall not inexpensive guitars the exact same model but they solved a totally different and as a scientist that's unacceptable to me that that was probably like the whole thing had to take it home and figure it out so i've developed a process that many musicians that you would know and many recordings that are out there send me their acoustic guitars are pretty good waiting list i do this process on them that make them essentially bring out all that these instruments whatever bring out in thirty or forty years and return it back to them two weeks later with an aged instrument that is just a theory and so old guitar hand me down but then you know how special the more aged guitars are that's what i've heard so that's very interesting and so he do you also some work in energy that that people should people frequent and do i mean the first electric solar house in in the ninety's in southwestern pennsylvania the power company duquesne light didn't even know how to how i should do the intertie had to do all of the design of the the components i purchased but the put them together and i actually have a solar power house i think i'm number one in southwestern pennsylvania so i get one hundred percent of my electricity from my house from the sun i see my cell phone is charged from an all white computer axis and everything else that goes on is solar so solar does work in southwestern pennsylvania people would see again with all the rain in the gray skies solar word sunlight not necessarily sunlight so on a day that it's cloudy admittedly you don't have the light that you would have on a bright sunny day but there's still two thirds of that amount of light coming through the clouds and it's enough to this is sustained i get money back each year i get a check for between a hundred one hundred fifty dollars in energy excess energy that i've produced for my neighbors from my solar panels especially during the peak times of need summer time noon when the sun is highest in th sky and the air conditioners running the hardest that's the time that i'm producing the most and would you save save money because they've been absolutely absolutely since the ninety's that system has paid for itself it's more than paid for itself and for the rest of my life i won't have an electric bill but i know a lot of people has it takes it's a little more expensive to install but then you know you do if you plan on moving in three to five years that probably doesn't make sense for you but if you're thinking the environment if you put it in that benefit will go with any people that will purchase that property afterwards and that that environmental impact will positive environmental impact will be there for fifty years so it's a good choice and so with all the solar i mean i once lived in florida which is very sunny and very solar in comparison i think with western pennsylvania i think it's not as much as you might think growing up and coming or it's more travel and now than it  is the weather as far as the amount of sun that reaches the ground in florida versus pittsburgh is actually not quite as different as you you might think solar panels also don't perform as well when they're very hot so even though florida may have a little more sun the higher temperature means they're not quite as efficient and this is a great time or days right probably not and one of the other things which i know your next guest adam has electric bikes in this is very important for energy because we're all looking for the government or someone to solve the energy equation well we have this bucket and we keep pouring water in and we're saying we need more energy we need more energy the problem is there is no bottom to the bucket ok we don't really throttle back our energy usage and i think as a society we need to be more cognizant of the debris that we're throwing out in trash each week plastic bottles things that really are not good for the environment everyone can make a difference what about recycling you know i've heard both sides of the spectrum saying that because it's almost as much energy to it is recycle as it is i recycle the point is you do not want any of the plastic bottles to make it to the environment because they're contaminating wildlife so the idea of gathering it back up and not land filling it either reusing or or incinerating makes sense the only product that really really makes sense to recycle is aluminum cans that's something that is really a clear winner so aluminum cans recycle it all cost the rest of it try to try to use less don't use recycle try to just not have and so is there any resources that you think that people could utilize to learn more about this you know sometimes people just don't know where to look and they've heard things that they should learn and just haven't my websites in science dot com talks about like traffic flow like why do we have so many traffic lights the traffic light system was the same that we had in the fifty's when we had literally one fifth the number of vehicles so today when a car comes to the side street it's not a one for one you have thirty cars that have stop to let one car out of the side street so you want the traffic to start flowing and continue to flow and not stop at a traffic light for example from the west liberty tunnels to south wales village their arch thirty one traffic light thirty one in that five and a half miles what should be a nine minute travel time trip is twenty five minutes not even in rush hour so there's plenty of solutions if we  public meetings traffic meetings to try to improve traffic flow so i am involved in the community in those and i'm willing if somebody has a good cause i donate my time to try to help those causes of education environment and energy well thank you so much for coming on we're going to bring you back out with adam in a little bit great thanks for the invite thank you to learn more about fan science and energy specialist please visit sand science dot com after this short break will be will bring back adam rasi from adam ride sometimes it's hard to see where you're going but you have the power to change your problems all it takes is courage your electric vehicles electric toys boards which carry all kinds of electric skateboards the one wheel the golf board and it sort of came out of our our solar company adam solar resources where you know making all this solar energy  addition to just you know power your house relies compare a lot of vehicles to how did you get into solar energy actually it was my dad's cousin who's an artist really wanted solar my dad was an electrical contractor so we actually started doing solar one of our bigger installs about ten years ago up on the hill across from the high school here is pretty pretty nice even a drain to peter's county in the theaters and i remember building it thinking you know someday i'll be married and have kids in my my kid might go that high school and energy you can provide all of your own clean energy i mean people just used to always have to be paying for their electricity from someone else that's made some where else maybe not environmentally friendly way and now you know you have the power to put solar panels on your roof and provide all of your own clean energy for your home for your transportation needs we definitely learned that and i have at least forty lights in our living room that were not even service and you can do test rides there but we opened a second shop this past year in station square in downtown pittsburgh and we offer tours of the whole city so you can come down with up to ten your friends and family we take you out for that you know between two to four hour tour all around the city of pittsburgh and you don't go about getting tired you've got the assist what makes what how does it work like what is an electric bike for people who probably have been peddling their whole ride so that's not a problem here started give an idea because people you know the hardest thing is until you ride it you really just don't get that sensation so there's a lithium ion battery that provides a shift to a motor so you're stuck on most of the bike you're still pedaling the bike and it's a pedal assist that you can control the level how much help you want so you put on one or two you know it's going to feel like there's a light when it's your back or that small grade feels flat you crank it up all the way to ride from town up to mt washington you know feel like you're peddling on flat ground and it's very efficient you know these are almost two three thousand mile per gallon equivalent vehicles is one of the most efficient ways to get around expression he's a solar panel to to charge and you and you have a shop and station square correct correct that's our tour shop as we refer to it we do tours and rentals out of there too so we've had a lot of people this year come to ride the gap trail you can go from the point of downtown pittsburgh all the way to washington d c on the great allegheny passage trail see we're just so connected d c how long does that take we work with another outfit called  bike the gap and they help set up how long you want to ride for and they set up all your being or your bread back to stay so you know most people would say take seven eight nine i mean ask if you had to like you know be in a tent every night and i think  mean you can camp the whole way but i'd say most people around our bikes are doing it all first class enjoying the trip and how many people came from across the country i mean i thought of the local people flying from california to ride a bike down the gap trail and it's older folks are normally cut and so i have you know seventy five seventy seven year olds that they're doing a three mile bike ride because then the system here that i'll use over sneakers and underneath it out there you can ride your bike all up mount washington or to washington  the store itself he can purchase these in the store so we have a full line of actually five different lines we carry boldy bikes which is what we have here is it electric raleigh electric d h easy motion and high bike so there's about you know probably access to  it with your feet yeah it's like that on steroids i mean it's they go twenty miles an hour they just came out with a new model the x r that goes eighteen miles on one charge and there's people in cities that they're ditching their car for these personal letter transporters you know got pay to park you can have the sad tragic that to make it make you very good that's very costly specially in the cities have yeah i mean that's the thing with the like you can enjoy your commute ride along the river trails free parking wherever you are there whenever you're work out so it says go straight from station square like right at the hell is that how you i don't know where you go from the station where it's where we go all around the city so i mean the point we stop at the north shore we go to hers island sometimes the stuff on the island take off i mean just every year our sales grow more and more people are finding that it you know it just it gets them out it gets unhealthy and allows them to just ride farther and explore more i think people think of it as the tours that they never really thought of it's like oh i ride my bike i mean i keep my family they ride their bike into pittsburgh every day and with the new bike lanes in all of that that would be a great addition and you can show up to work you know it's what i used to park downtown so i mean it still makes me cringe to think how much i spent on just parking in a you what you're going to continue to do another thing which you started selling to the local police department so here peters they just got a fleet of electric bikes that's been really good for community policing for the officers to get out in the community and then they don't get tired when they're out there and they got th go so twenty miles an hour on almost all of them some are considered a speed pet aleck which will go up to twenty eight miles an hour and actually i helped get legislation passed for pennsylvania back in twenty fourteen  r one fifty four which classifies a definition of an electric bicycle as a bicycle so it's legal as a bicycle to ride anywhere don't need a license you don't need insurance and registration because i mean some of the bikes do have throttles to wear if you can't pedal for some reason  don't want to you can also twist a thrall to go we've a lot of people's medical issues that will get our bikes or who can't get a driver's license for some reason will use any bike to get around well great well thank you so much for coming on i'm going to have you back here in just a second we're going to take quick break thank you so much you're welcome thank you adam for joining us today find out more about adam seller rides by visiting his bedside at adam silver rides dot com when we come back from break i have a quick interview with both of our guests today on our solar minded you something we bet you didn't know nearly half of all cancers can be prevented mostly by making changes in your diet controlling your weight and of course by not smoking does it prevent fifty dot org and get a free thirty day planner filled with tips recipes and more wonderful and so you both kind of have this like minded hillary fashioned hope for the world i guess you know is there anything that you would like to tell our audience out there about solar energy that that we didn't touch on so would just go with the fish and see that just being efficient be be mindful of what you're using in you know how much garbage you're taking the trash every day like frank was saying how many how many bottles are thrown it's going to landfill ever since i became a dad and i have two young boys now all the all the things the state sustainability really hitting home with me and just the fun factor of it too it's it's fun to have solar panels on your roof that are charging your electric car that doesn't need any maintenance and goes super fast and you know there's a cool factor along with the responsibility for the planet factor i agree with that when i put my panels in it's like how fast can i spin the meter backwards and early on they didn't even have a strategy to deal with solar so i called the duquesne light company and was trying to explain that there's a problem because i'm not getting credit and i says i'm spinning my meter backwards the lady that was answering is like that's fraud i need to send you to the fraud would you tell me again that you're spending your meter backwards it's like yes but i'm you i'm not stealing energy i'm putting energy back in it was like wait you're giving it literally was for four or five years later i was contacted by a supervisor says mr sands we understand your solar each month i'm signing a fraud report because we know you're not stealing electricity but we didn't know how to handle you on our system this is true this was coming out of the ninety's i think credit he asked to come out  at the system and talk to me and everything got on board and i have the proper meter and get the proper credits and we move forward so yeah early days of solar in pittsburgh what do you think the easiest simplest adjustment set up that a family can make on a daily basis if you want to see where your money's going look how many trash cans you have out each week how much recycle and how much trash you've paid money for that product to be produced transported to your house you then consumed it and discarded it that's a huge load for greenhouse gases a huge load for consuming natural resources and now you're going to landfill t it's horrible i've seen signs they put on some of the garbage his says landfill ten miles that way next or cycling but just to change people's minds or even just throwing it always in the garbage of you're just shoveling it down the street from yourself right right i know is every person starts to get that mindset it adds up exponentially very quickly and everyone's pointing at big business and the government that once regulations but my question to them is what they are who is the customer that is that is creating that need and it's we are it's all about so if we want to change the environment if we want to change energy and greenhouse gases and everything we're the we're the consumers so if we wanted to change we need to change we can't just look for  fancy regulation where the lights would go off so it's us it's us well both of you i hope at least there was a little impact today on some of our viewers out there to maybe just think about what what they're putting back into the earth thank you both so and join us next time when we shine the spotlight on two new g