Alexa Kalandiak
Alexa Kalandiak become involved in the HVACR industry in what she said is a “sort of roundabout way.” In college, she majored in mechanical engineering with a focus on mechanical and product design. She’d always been interested in building things and the process of making a physical product, “beyond all the academic math and whatnot you study at school,” she said. But she wasn’t sure just where to apply that drive.
“That’s where my minor in Environmental and Energy studies came in,” Kalandiak said. “Much of my additional coursework was spent looking at things like carbon accounting and industrial ecology (looking at products and materials from a lifecycle and systems perspective). And I realized that yes, I wanted to work in product development, but I wanted that development to have a purpose and a higher aim, rather than just being another widget in an Amazon storefront.”
So she started looking at jobs in product development with companies that had an environmental/energy efficiency focus. She found PassiveLogic.
“I had the opportunity to design innovative hardware and its physical enclosures, but it was the software our hardware was facilitating that was going to be the real difference maker,” Kalandiak said. “I’d learned in school how inefficient the built environment could be, but we hadn’t done a lot of examination about what a solution looked like, and here was a company addressing that head-on.”
One of Kalandiak’s accomplishments in the industry thus far happened a few years ago when PassiveLogic was at a point in their development cycle where they had made a handful of prototypes, so the proof of concept was working and investors had bought-in.
There was, however, one big problem — said prototypes were manufacturable in a small batch (a one-off manner), but they weren’t manufacturable on a large scale. So Kalandiak spearheaded an effort between herself and a couple other design engineers to rebuild their entire set of files, this time with manufacturability at the focus.
“That was a months-long effort, but it’s had a huge payoff,” Kalandiak said. “We now have some of our hardware coming off the factory line, and we can support scaling up as demand for our products continues to grow.”
Another bright point in Kalandiak’s career is having a part in rethinking and redesigning how PassiveLogic gathers building data.
“At PassiveLogic, so much of our work happens within a team context that it can be difficult to pinpoint accomplishments that belong uniquely to me,” Kalandiak said. “But I also think that’s the best sort of environment for this work to happen within — the idea of the solo, mad-genius inventor should’ve died a long time ago — and it’s a privilege to be able to design and develop products alongside such a smart group of people.”
