Kurt Shafer here, to chronicle this design for helpers all over the US. The purpose here is to show how easy it is to present a new rooftop to a building design engineer and how easy it was for me to get my first design in 2015.

I met with James Shwe of Maroko Shwe in Glendale California in 2015. I set the meeting by telling him I wanted to show him a new approach to rooftop ventilators that had been taken by engineers in Australia.

I showed him this picture cross section – to the right of it is my improvement I made later. You can see that the original design uses a motor to turn the top and louvers to pull air with power. I added a larger motor and a propeller to vastly improve the air flow.

James was very impressed by the fact that this Australian design offers both gravity air flow and powered air flow in one package. He immediately embraced the concept and put it into his design he was doing for a new gymnasium at the recreation center in the Los Angeles suburb Studio City. Here is a look at that center. This graphic was acquired long after the initial design so you will see that the Invisco Tornado rooftops are the only ones on the drawing. That is because in 2020 when the Los Angeles engineers reviewed the design they saw that the Edmonds rooftops were much lower performance than the Invisco rooftops so they deleted Edmonds as a source.

Here is another graphic that shows how much better the performance is than two of the top suppliers in America.