09/09/2026
The HUG Father
Paul Hunt: Always the mad scientist.
As a child, he fixed his school’s AV equipment.
As a teenager, he blew up his parents’ kitchen
His natural abilities to repair and design electronics led him to roles at Arvig and Consolidated Telephone Services in Brainerd, MN. Then he started his own electronics design firm, from a front room in the family home. He designed hundreds of things, including 911 and elevator control systems. Then he found out there were strong abilities in slow communication known as ultra-narrow bandwidth on noisy power lines, and the Turtle Automatic meters readers were hatched. Hunt Technologies grew and then sold.
The money made from this sale launched an older passion in Lynn and Paul Hunt, and they turned their creative brains to Resilient Buildings and green living. On land they purchased in Pine River, MN, they built a campus to research resilient living, renewable living, and green building. They have a straw ball building, a manifesting building shop, and a handful of homes that use very little energy to heat or cool themselves. In Paul’s home on campus, he has a functioning greenhouse full of plants through which he recycles his grey water.
While working on resilient homes, Paul saw the need to make it easy. And one of the challenges in high-performance resident living homes was the in-floor heating systems. The traditional way in-floor heating systems work is with a wall of plumbing parts. Each of these parts can leak, break, or need to be replaced. (Which can take up to a day or 2 for just 1 bad pump). Paul Hunt and his team of HUG engineers designed a better way. Using new technology pumps that can be in a tank of water and a control board, the HUG system can be installed in an hour and be repaired (should something go wrong) in under 5 minutes, often requiring no tools or plumbing knowledge.
Of course, this was not good enough. Now he is in the final design phases of the product that will change the whole small area game, the HUG Mini, with a heater inside of it can literally be plugged into a wall and hooked up to the PEX pipes in minutes.
My favorite part about Paul is not his inventions, but his unfailing kindness, patience, compassion, and fair play. Children and animals love to be around him as his innate curiosity matches theirs. His 3 children, 19 grandchildren, and 1 great-grandchild would definitely agree that he is the HUG Father!
