Bill, an avid tech enthusiast, took on a Home Automation project.
He started off with upgrading a traditional ‘On/Off’ wall switch with a ‘smart’ UPB dimmable switch.
The latest model came with pigtails, all ready to be wired, once the old switch was removed.
Of course, this required powering off the circuit and removing the decorative faceplate and yanking the switch out of the electrical box…
The faceplate removed and the light switch pulled out, the switch box was uncovered.
What was looking from inside the wall was a rat’s nest of cables, splices, pigtails and wire nuts – all jammed together.
There did not seem to be much space left to accommodate the bigger size new dimmer switch.
It took some major pushing and shoving of the stiff pesky wires into the back corners of the outlet to make space for the new gadget piece.
As it turned out, the home and office outlet boxes were not very sturdy, nor designed to make things easy – quite the opposite.
As Bill worked the new dimmer switch into its place, the outlet box started shifting and challenged him to learn an artful skill of ‘precision fitting’ on the fly.
Fast forward half an hour – skill acquired, the switch finally wired up, shoved and forced into the position flush with the wall surface.
Well, there were yet another 35 outlets to go… and it only got worse with adding multi-gang outlets into the mix.
Bill spent a couple more days meticulously rewiring and refitting switches, receptacles, and light fixtures, while thinking the thoughts:
“There must be a better way!”
and
“Why is this happening???”,
A curious thought indeed.
So, let us take a closer look at the roots of this “Why”?
Electricity became a common utility over a century ago.
Since then, technologies, serving consumer segment, have advanced tremendously —
— and so have the ways we interact with electrically powered appliances and devices.
As the word ‘evolution’ hints, we have consistently got better at selecting things – deciding on which ones to keep to ourselves and which – to gift away.
The consumer technology products (‘the things’) have improved in terms of:
Scientific discoveries – both accidental and those claimed as intentional, lead us to generational break-throughs in creating consumer-oriented technologies and their application use-cases that just did not exist before.
We may attribute integration of:
into consumer tech products, as the biggest impacts on their evolution.
Why of course!
There is an ongoing progress in the development of consumer technology products, which require use of electricity, ranging from:
In the same period it took to develop technology for controlling a ‘light bulb’ with a smartphone app, there has been little progress in ways of delivering electrical power to its utilization points, aka ‘electrical outlets‘, or ‘power outlets‘.
Electrical outlet is an interface point for the two counterpart layers, which we may refer to as:
In this sense, the consumer end-use products would belong to the Client Layer and the power distribution systems, which energize the client devices would belong to the Host Layer.
Eh… So what is with this ‘there has been little progress’ claim now?
Let us address ‘the elephant in the room’, or more fittingly (get it?), ‘the monster in the wall’.
We surely have progressed in the ways of bringing electrical power to end-use devices, haven’t we? Just take the ‘smart’ outlets and switches as an example!
A familiar thought and yet – here is what a typical installation of the latest and greatest ‘smart’ device still looks like.
There is an obvious disparity between the ongoing evolution in the ‘Client Layer’ and what seems to be a covered up mess of outdated techniques that involve a lot of manual labor and unfriendly entanglement of stiff wires, or what we call, the ‘Host Layer’.
The Host Layer equipment is usually hidden on the other side of:
Thus, the status-quo has been to not worry about the Host Layer – for as long as the wiring is not visible and is on the ‘other side’…
Earlier, we looked at an illustration of how Consumer Technology Products have evolved for the ‘better’ over time – we went from a simple light bulb knob switch to a “smart” one.
We had a pretty simple use-case going for quite a while and then evolition happened:
This instance of a “Client Layer” seems to illustrate a competition of sorts – among mutually incompatible, proprietary client devices with mismatching voltages and interfaces, all trying to access the “Host Layer” infrastructure and its relic design.
That is the point though – the status-quo for the Client Layer devices is to keep adapting and to contrive intermediary means to enable usability with power distribution systems, designed a century ago.
We have reached a point of a technological gap between the ‘Client’ and ‘Host’ domains, rendering the legacy power infrastructures increasingly inadequate to serve the modern and forthcoming technological demands.
Products directly facing the Customer are most visible in the markets. These markets continually attract innovation, as evident from proliferation of applied technologies, brands, and use-cases of electrically powered devices in the Client Layer.
In contrast, the Host Layer is hidden “behind the wall”. It hardly reminds you of a bustling marketplace.
Terms like ‘power distribution equipment’, ‘wiring systems’, and ‘junction boxes’ have a high chance of making the Consumers wanna yawn and bring a blank “staring at a wall” look on their faces.
Somewhere, in the back of our minds we might have a vague idea of what function Host Layer serves – something to do with bringing electricity to the Client Layer utilization points.
Host Layer is a passive market segment. It is no wonder there is not much innovation happening on that front – or shall we say, “in the back”?
While R&D for end-use electrical devices is an ongoing norm, the platform that is supposed to power them up, is growing inadequate on all fronts of usability.
Here we are using a nanotechnology chip enabled gadget with the latest wireless charging pad from Apple, yet frantically looking for the right type of a dongle and a good ole’ outlet to plug the thing into.
Extrapolate this consumer technology development trend a bit into the future and you will see clearly how antique the Host Layer really is – limited visibility or not.
Infrastructure Equipment: physical architecture of wiring systems and a form factor of their hardware components have remained virtually unchanged:
Methodology: we continue to use century old methodology and tools to build and service electrical outlets:
Regulations: wiring systems in our homes are governed by codes and standards, which were developed in the last century – for legacy power distribution systems, also designed in the last century.
In other words, we have regulations in place that restrict Consumers from directly interacting with electrical outlets ‘behind’ the faceplate and dictate how we to do things from a place of the past.
Besides, why would anyone want to mess with an outlet, unless necessary? And even then, we’d just need to call an electrician? Right?
Regulations stipulate where you and your gadgets and appliances may interact with electricity around your house.
They do though.
It is instilled in our minds that functional purposes of electrical outlets are preassigned at time of construction and they are permanently installed in predetermined spots around your home.
You, the Consumer, show up to an already established (and regulated by code) layout.
We stick to the notion of preassigned outlets within the interiors – often configured with little or no regard to the preference of an end user.
Spoiler alert: Yes.
In a sense, we already interact with and alter functionality of power outlets, which come in all sorts of forms, such as a receptacle, a light switch, a ceiling fan installation box, an in-built overhead lamp holder, an AC system thermostat connection box, and so on:
However, we always seem to be limited on what is possible in the Client Layer by the inflexibility of the Host Layer architecture.
We challenge this status-quo.
Unintended consequences of only focusing on Client Layer innovations are becoming increasingly apparent in our daily lives. Here are some examples of the resulting pain points.
Infrastructure Perspective:
Consumer Tech Perspective:
Put simply, we observe the Problem brewing in both counter-part domains:
There is a need for modernizing physical architecture of power distribution infrastructures, improving safety practices, and setting new standards of interconnecting wiring system components, allowing to speed up adoption of new and upcoming technology solutions at consumer level.
Despite the impressive amount of R&D conducted to develop future-oriented host layer infrastructures over the last decades, none of the relevant inventions have been adopted by the industry – there is evidence that inventors consistently failed to commercialize their intellectual property.
Our hypothesis is that scaling of prior art solutions had failed due to isolated and non-convergent efforts.
We see a path forward, where the Host Layer innovations will achieve market success through a standardized modular interface solution that would allow Client Layer devices to seamlessly integrate with and have uniform access to the underlying wiring systems, irrespective of proprietary origin.
We resolved the issue of manual wiring nonsense and precision fitting for the outlets.
Portal Tex has developed a novel apparatus that delegates the otherwise manual tasks of splicing and interconnecting individual conductors of an outlet’s electrical circuit to a prebuilt bus set, which is compartmentalized inside an outlet assembly.
Our solution replaces outdated methodologies and allows to convert elements of traditional electrical wiring systems into independently configurable, mutually compatible and ready-to-go segmented units.
We designed auxiliary fixtures and tools to facilitate installing, servicing, replacing, and upgrading the electrical outlets and peripherals in a fast and reliable way.
We are developing a new platform for both Host and Client devices to allow fast and seamless deployment of the latest consumer oriented technologies.
This means you will have a complete control over the what your futuristic home looks like inside and out – in terms its relationships with electrically powered technologies that is.
Our innovation, based on a plug-and-play modularization approach, redefines outdated concepts of interior wiring and power outlet interconnections within residential and commercial structures.
We focus on modernizing physical architecture of traditional infrastructures by encapsulating key functionalities of the host and client segments of the envisioned platform into independently configurable units, allowing to deploy, upgrade and substitute client side devices without having to alter the underlying host components or the other way around.
We work on disrupting the status-quo of traditional systems and offer a lower cost, more robust and time-efficient alternative, enabling rapid engineering, construction, and commissioning of household and public infrastructure projects.
Our ultimate goal is to help industries adapt a new standard of foundational infrastructures – one that encourages a symbiosis between key players of intersecting industries: manufacturers of electrical hardware, construction builders, utility suppliers, and digital technology companies.
We realize that presenting novel concepts is done best by showing than wording – especially, when we use ‘made-up’ words!
Please proceed to the ‘Portals’ page, filled with illustrative description of the Host and Client assembly concepts.
Or, jump straight to the ‘Showcase’ page, where you will see these concepts working in various interior and exterior settings.
