Sonic Fire Tech recently announced the commercial rollout of its Sonic Home Defense system, a wildfire defense system in California that extinguishes fires using inaudible, infrasound technology instead of water or chemicals.
The product has personal significance for Remington Hotchkis, chief commercialization officer at Sonic Fire Tech, whose family home in Altadena burned down in January 2025.
In January, Hotchkis, a serial entrepreneur, had recently sold his previous business and was contemplating his next career move. A week before he was set to attend a program at MIT, the Eaton Fire broke out.
“My mother-in-law first called me, and I could see the background when she FaceTimed that the fires and flames were just right behind her house. To hear that trauma and that scaredness in her voice, my heart dropped, and I said, ‘You know, leave everything. Everything’s replaceable, save your life, get out of there,” he recounted.
Shortly after the fire, Hotchkis joined Sonic Fire Tech, which had spent the past several years developing the technology behind the home defense system. It’s the first system on the market to use low-frequency sound waves to extinguish fires. While it may sound like a crazy concept to the uninitiated, it works — and there are a few benefits.
The Eaton fire spread rapidly due to high winds that carried embers far distances, in some cases more than a mile. Traditional home fire defense systems don’t put out embers before a fire breaks out, but the Sonic Fire Tech system can, with a detection capability extending 1,500 yards.
“When those embers come into the home’s environment and accumulate, the system prevents the ignition of whatever’s flammable around where those embers land,” Hotchkis said.
The Sonic system doesn’t use water, an important feature in a dry state like California. Sadly, water quickly ran out and wasn’t available to many homeowners affected by the Los Angeles fires, leaving traditional defense systems ineffective.
The traditional systems that use water and chemicals can also cause great damage to the interior of a home once they go off.
“When you deploy those water sprinklers, now you’re dealing with mold remediation. Now you’re dealing with total destruction of personal property, and the situation just gets even worse,” Hotchkis explained.
The Sonic Home Defense system is installed on both the exterior and interior of a home. On the interior, there is a “sprinkler” system that floods a room with inaudible sound waves when a fire threat is detected.
“We sense it. We detect it. We deploy it. There’s no wasted water, no collateral damage, and you go back to living your life,” Hotchkis explained.
The commercial rollout is still fresh, but the goal is to have the Sonic Home Defense system cost about 1% to 2% of a home’s value. The technology could also extend in the future to other states and other building types, such as data centers, while local fire departments have expressed interest in utilizing the technology as a water-saving measure.