Can Sound Waves Stop a Wildfire? Inside Sonic Fire Tech’s Infrasound Home Defense System

A conversation with Remington Bixby Hotchkis, Chief Commercialization Officer of Sonic Fire Tech, on how NASA-inspired acoustic technology is being tested as a new tool against embers, home fires, and, eventually, wildfires.

By the time the Palisades and Altadena fires stopped burning in January 2025, the assumptions that have guided California wildfire defense for a century looked shaky. Everywhere people looked, hydrants ran dry, the transformers exploded and embers, not walls of flame, took down entire blocks of homes. Out of that failure, a small Cleveland-based startup with roots in NASA aerospace research is pitching an entirely new category of fire suppression: low-frequency sound waves that vibrate oxygen fast enough to break the chemical reaction of combustion, no water, no chemicals, no foam.

The company is Sonic Fire Tech, and its Chief Commercialization Officer is Remington Bixby Hotchkis, a California native who watched his former Altadena home burn down and then joined the company to bring the technology to market. In an extended interview with FireLitigation.org, Hotchkis walked through how the system works, what the independent testing actually shows, what it costs, and what still has to be proven before homeowners, insurers, regulators, and fire officials should trust acoustic suppression as a real wildfire defense tool.

The short version: the physics are real, the interior-of-the-home application is close to certified, and the wildfire application is still a research problem. In Hotchkis’ own words, this is a “crawl before we run” story.

---

What Sonic Fire Tech actually is

Asked to describe the company in one paragraph, Hotchkis went straight to the physics.

“We have produced an acoustic generator that produces sound waves that are below the audible range that frankly disrupt the fire triangle by oscillating oxygen at a rate that fire can’t consume it, so it breaks that chemical reaction.”

He noted that Sonic Fire Tech did not invent the underlying science.

“We are not the first to do this. The science and physics have been proven for a long time. DARPA, Army Research Lab, and two George Mason students, engineering students, basically miniaturized the work that Army Research Lab and DARPA had done, and they showed they could suppress a pan fire from about a foot away.”

The problem earlier researchers hit, he said, was efficiency: turning electricity into acoustic wattage powerful enough to suppress a real fire had always been “so inefficient” that the technology was written off as unscalable. Sonic Fire Tech’s breakthrough came from an unlikely place: Venus.

“Our former NASA engineers were developing systems for the Venus rover that were producing infrasound very efficiently. So a few of those, or Geoff Bruder, our founder and CEO, took that know-how and focused on finding fires, or putting out fires, with the sound waves. And we learned our efficiency is significantly above where anyone else had been. We were putting out fires at about 16-foot distance.”

The second breakthrough, he said, was distribution. Instead of pointing a single acoustic emitter at a flame, Sonic Fire Tech runs the sound waves through a ducting network, much like the water pipes, gas lines, and chemical manifolds used in traditional suppression systems. That, according to Hotchkis, is what makes the system deployable at building scale rather than as a lab demo.

How it Works When Sound Meets Fire

Fire needs oxygen “in a certain state” to sustain itself. The Sonic Fire Tech system attacks that state directly.

“If you have flame, our acoustics vibrate oxygen around that flame at a rate that breaks the chemical reaction. So fire needs oxygen in a certain state to consume it, to burn. We disrupt that state the oxygen is in so it can’t burn, and we do so without removing oxygen from the environment. So we simply vibrate.”

That “without removing oxygen” point is central to how Hotchkis positions the technology against legacy chemical and gas systems, which suppress fire by displacing the oxygen in a room, a mechanism that has, historically, killed people.

The behavior against airborne embers is different, and, for a site focused on wildfire risk, more interesting.

“We saw that when embers enter our acoustic range, our acoustic field, they actually decay rapidly. So without transferring an ignition to another ignitable property. For example, we can land an ember in a bunch of grass and rapidly consume that ember without that ember transferring ignition to the grass.”

The Altadena Fire That Started This

Hotchkis was raised in Southern California and, in his words, has been evacuating friends and family from fires “more times than I can count.” The January 2025 Los Angeles fires were something else.

“To watch the ember cast devastate that community of Altadena, as well as Palisades in the same day, so rapidly, to me was next level, that I had really seen before. Folks in Napa saw it, folks in Sonoma saw it. This has happened routinely, but not at the scale we experienced.”

What crystallized his thinking, he said, was watching two of California’s core wildfire assumptions fail in real time.

“When we ran out of water pressure, water was not going to meet this threat. And when the transformers were exploding in those high-wind events, it was clear power wasn’t going to be available. So in that moment I thought, all right, we can’t depend on water, we can’t depend on power going forward to combat wildfires entering our communities and burning down our homes. But it wasn’t the fire that was burning down our homes, it was the embers and the ember cast.”

Two months after the LA fires, Hotchkis approached Sonic Fire Tech’s founder, Jeff Bruder, who at that point was focused on commercializing the technology for a very different market: commercial-kitchen grease fires.

“We put a bunch of sticks on the stove and it put that fire out. I said, oh, holy smokes. All right, this is amazing. And this is exactly what that vision was.”

Independent Testing, What it Does and Does Not Cover Today

Hotchkis was direct about what has been validated and what has not. Here is the full picture he laid out, and it matters for readers trying to distinguish acoustic suppression as an interior product from acoustic suppression as a wildfire solution.

What is Validated

• Interior residential fire suppression. Three independent third-party fire protection engineers have validated the system as “equivalent to, or performing better than, an interior water sprinkler system,” measured against NFPA 13D, the standard for residential sprinklers.
• Kitchen fire suppression. Sonic Fire Tech’s first UL-certified product is being submitted under the UL 300 series, the standard governing fire testing of pre-engineered fire-extinguishing systems for protection of restaurant cooking equipment. (Hotchkis referenced the standard number verbally during our interview; UL 300 is the recognized citation.) Hotchkis noted that “50% of the fires in residential start in a home kitchen,” and has publicly argued that “a water sprinkler system is highly ineffective at putting out a grease fire”, a category where acoustic suppression appears to outperform the legacy mandated system.
• Ember decay in a controlled acoustic field. Sonic Fire Tech has demonstrated at small scale that embers landing inside its acoustic field decay rapidly without transferring ignition to grass or other connective fuels.

What is Not Validated

• Real wildfire conditions. Asked directly whether the system has been tested in wildfire or wildfire-adjacent conditions, Hotchkis was blunt: “Not yet. Aside from just, you know, putting out burning bushes.”
• Whole-structure exterior protection under wind, radiant heat, and multiple ignition points. The company is not selling for that use case today. “We don’t have the evidence that our system is going to protect a whole structure from all of those variables we mentioned. We believe it can, we show promise, but we’re not actively selling in that space.”
• Large-scale wildfire suppression from vehicles, drones, or helicopters. Hotchkis called these future use cases that “we have to figure out.”

Why the Wildfire Testing is so Hard

“It’s hard to mimic a wildfire scenario. That’s the greater challenge that we are experiencing. This is what drones are having a problem doing. You know, you haven’t thrown a drone into a real 80-mile-an-hour wind with smoke density and chaos, right? But yet drones are gonna be the solution for us.”

The list of variables he ran through is a good summary of why wildfire testing lags behind interior testing: density of the urban environment, distance between homes, connective fuel types, propagation direction of embers, wind speed averages by community, fuel density (forest versus sagebrush desert), and the specific building materials of each home. Sonic Fire Tech’s next major exterior test will be at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) research facility, “where they had a home that they throw a bunch of embers at, and we’re gonna put our system on one of those homes and prevent it from burning down.”

Has it Protected a Home During a Real Wildfire?

No. Hotchkis was straightforward that the technology has not been deployed during an actual wildfire event. What Sonic Fire Tech does have in the field are:

• 20 installed systems across residential, industrial, and commercial applications and with fire service partners, with a goal of 50 installations by year-end.
• The Sonic Backpack. A portable, firefighter-carried acoustic extinguisher that CAL FIRE and other California fire agencies are beginning to evaluate on brush fires, grass fires, homeless-encampment fires, fuel fires, auto fires, and lithium-ion battery fire tests. The company is running a campaign to place 100 backpack units into fire-service hands for real-world evaluation.

The pitch to firefighters, Hotchkis said, is often self-executing.

“I’ve seen a hundred times now, doing these demos with thousands of people, you go from a skeptic to an advocate immediately. I mean, we light every type, bush fires, gasoline fires, wood fires, and they put them out with the sound waves. They’ve worked. And they know how difficult those different types of fires are to fight.”

The Technology’s Limits, in Hotchkis’ Own Words

Asked to name the current limits of the system, Hotchkis framed the ceiling as one of data, not of physics.

“The limitations of the technology or the physics are well known given where we are operating. It was understood by DARPA and Army Research Labs’ research that sound waves could put out fires. They spent a lot of money figuring that out and deploying it, but we’re emitting velocities of the sound waves that are 10x more efficient than they were in the optimal infrasonic range. So we’re creating new data around the physics of what acoustics are doing at greater ranges, greater velocities, different frequencies, all these things.”

The limitation, in other words, is that the company is generating a brand-new body of evidence about how infrasound behaves across every category of fuel, embers, brush, flammable liquids, electrical fires, and that work is only beginning. Sonic Fire Tech recently raised funding specifically to run that testing through third-party fire protection engineers and independent labs.

He also drew a hard line around what the system is not.

“We can’t solve those problems today”, referring to fighting an active wildfire and suppressing a lithium-ion battery fire, which he called “the two greatest challenges” the fire industry currently faces.

Where Regulation and Certification Stand

Sonic Fire Tech is walking into a fire code that literally does not have a category for what the product does.

“FM Global, UL, and NFPA have all recognized there are two camps of fire suppression: there’s chemical / gas-based, and there’s water-based. There is no acoustic-based suppression category. So they don’t know where to put us. They all arrived at, ‘You know, we’ve known this technology exists. We didn’t think it was scalable, and now a new category of fire protection needs to be created.’”

Each of those bodies has, according to Hotchkis, are stating they will need to author new codes for acoustic based suppression based on their independent evaluation of the technology. Those code sycles run on tree-year timelines.

In the meantime, the company’s regulatory roadmap looks like this:

• Today: Kitchen fire suppression certification under UL 300 as the first commercial product.
• Mid-2027: Deploy the interior system as a California-code-compliant alternative to water sprinklers for new construction, retrofits, and multifamily units.
• Exterior / wildfire: Not being sold today. Continued IBHS-lab testing, CAL FIRE backpack evaluation, and third-party engineer work will inform when, and whether, the exterior use case is offered commercially.

On the question of whether homeowners should treat the system as a replacement for defensible space, home hardening, and sprinklers or as a supplement, Hotchkis’s answer is unambiguous: it is a supplement, and for now the company is deliberately staying inside the interior-suppression lane where the evidence is strongest. As he put it: “We believe in our approach of being an answer and a piece of the puzzle, not the silver bullet by any means.”

Feedback From Firefighters, Engineers, and Agencies

Hotchkis said feedback from professional users has been consistent enough that the company built its go-to-market strategy around it.

“The greatest way to take this technology out of the lab and to the market, for me, was to put it right in the hands of fire service. So we built this backpack, put it on their backs, lit a bunch of fires, and got their feedback.”

That approach has yielded partnerships with CAL FIRE, fire marshals across California, the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District, electric utilities including PG&E and Southern California Edison, and conversations with insurers, home builders, and IBHS. Hotchkis pointed to two features that consistently get engineers’ attention:

1. The system is its own suppressant. “We’re the only technology that creates its own fire suppressant. So the hose doesn’t run out, right? A chem-based hand extinguisher runs out. The fire is still going. Our system was running as long as you’re deploying.”
2. No collateral damage and no oxygen displacement. “There’s no recharging of the system, and there’s no collateral damage from deploying the chemical. And then there’s no health risks that we know of. A chem or a gas system, you deploy it and you remove the oxygen from the environment, and that’s killed people. We don’t have that piece to it.”

And a paradigm shift on detection timing:

“All codes are written around latent detection in mind. They want to make sure there’s a fire, and then that fire is big enough to set off the system, and that there’s enough time for life safety to evacuate before that system deploys. It’s typically two to three minutes that the fire is growing. Our system could detect in milliseconds, for spot in seconds, and typically we’re putting out the fires in the incipient stage before one of those legacy systems would ever go off.”

What it costs, and who can afford it

Sonic Fire Tech is currently selling systems “north of $25,000 per unit installed,” Hotchkis said. That is expensive on its face, but he was quick to point out that the more meaningful comparison is not to nothing but to California’s already-mandated sprinkler system, which he said runs $10,000–$15,000 for a typical 3,000-square-foot home in Altadena, plus a hidden cost most homeowners do not discover until they start rebuilding.

“Most of the homes that burned didn’t have interior fire sprinklers in them. They have one-inch lines going to their house, which is a standard household line that needs to be upgraded to one-and-a-half-inch or two-inch line. And most of the time needs to be a separate dedicated line to feed their fire suppression system. That typically is costing $10,000 to $20,000 depending on what district you’re in. So that’s not cheap. For the people that are rebuilding, they know that’s been the surprise. They have to upgrade their water main to meet the sprinkler requirement, and that is an extra $35,000, $40,000 grand on their rebuild bill. So that’s the price point we’re targeting.”

Because the acoustic system does not need pressurized water infrastructure, Sonic Fire Tech’s price target is to reach parity with the all-in cost of a mandated sprinkler retrofit, a number many homeowners underestimate.

On affordability for lower-income and higher-risk communities, Hotchkis reframed the question as a mortgage-and-insurance problem rather than a consumer-electronics problem.

“Lives are being threatened by the affordability issue, but it’s really a mortgage crisis in my mind at the end of the day, right? The bank holds all the risk here. That’s financial, not emotional. Folks lost their homes in the LA fires, those homes burned down. A lot of those folks are not going to recover, aren’t recovering, or [are] choosing to sell. Builders are coming in and purchasing those at a discount.”

His proposed path is a cost-share model that pulls in lenders and insurers.

“How do you create the financial mechanism for homeowners to protect their assets to reduce a lender’s risk and therefore be rewarded by insurers? It’s a bigger economic issue than an individual homeowner’s expense.”

He also noted a systemic irony that any Californian who lived through the January 2025 fires will recognize.

“It’s strange to me that we’re mandating something that we can’t actually provide in an emergency. We didn’t have water pressure for our fire service, how are we going to have water pressure for our community? The system is designed for one house being on fire at one time.”

What Still Has to be Proven

The final question, what evidence Sonic Fire Tech still needs to produce before homeowners, regulators, insurers, and fire officials should trust the technology as a meaningful wildfire-protection tool, drew the most candid answer of the interview.

“Extensive testing performed by a variety of third-party officials. The complexity of a wildfire is just that. I mean, it’s the most complex situation you can imagine. That’s what I’ve learned from fire service.”

Hotchkis broke the outstanding research into a set of specific, testable questions:

• Ember decay at community scale. Can Sonic Fire Tech decay embers on their way into a community, not just in a controlled acoustic field? “We can answer that question with ember testing.”
• Preventing ignition of connective fuels. Can the system stop embers from igniting vulnerable materials around a home or connected fuels like a wood fence or Zone Zero landscaping? “We had the testing protocols and have demonstrated on a small level that we’re effective there. A lot more testing needs to be done, and that lab is with IBHS.”
• Fully engulfed structures and EVs. How does acoustic suppression perform against a fully engulfed home or a fully engulfed electric vehicle? Open question.
• Airborne and robotic deployment. How does the system work from a drone or mounted on a helicopter as a containment tool? Open question.

The umbrella answer, he said, is a combination of continued work with UL, FM Global, NFPA, and ground-level fire service to “gather the data on how sound is putting out fires effectively, what conditions is putting out fires effectively in, and then how does that scale with real-life challenges.”
Why this matters for California wildfire policy

Hotchkis’s closing framing is worth quoting at length, because it is the argument insurers, regulators, and plaintiffs’ attorneys will be listening to over the next several years as acoustic suppression moves from novelty to potential building-code alternative.

“We’re still using water to fight the majority of fires, even though it’s not the most effective tool. And that’s been the case for hundreds of years. This is really a paradigm-shifting technology in the fire suppression industry. The latent detection [and] the collateral damage piece, those are two huge components that we answer immediately. Everyone’s recognized this is a paradigm-shifting, next-generation technology. And that’s how it should be positioned. We’re going to learn a lot in the near future, but this is showing a lot of promise to meet these challenges.”

For homeowners in wildfire-prone zones, the practical takeaway is narrower than the headlines: as of today, Sonic Fire Tech is a promising interior suppression system with an emerging exterior ember-defense product that has not yet been proven in wildfire conditions and is not being sold for that use case. That is a very different claim than “sound waves can stop wildfires.” Hotchkis, to his credit, is the first to draw that line.

The bigger question the interview surfaces is not whether infrasound can suppress a controlled fire, the physics and the third-party engineering both say it can, but whether the certification bodies, insurers, and California regulators can build a new suppression category quickly enough to matter for the next fire season. That is a policy question as much as a technology question. And it is one that residents of Altadena, Pacific Palisades, and every wildland-urban interface community in California have an immediate stake in.

About This Interview

This article is based on a recorded video interview between Joe Marchelewski of AIJ Communications and Remington Bixby Hotchkis, Chief Commercialization Officer of Sonic Fire Tech. Quotations are drawn from a transcript of that interview and lightly edited for readability without changing meaning. Additional background on Sonic Fire Tech is drawn from the company’s public statements and reporting by International Fire and Safety Journal, CBS News Los Angeles, CBS 8 San Diego, TechCrunch, and Sonic Fire Tech’s own newsroom.

If you or your family lost a home in a California wildfire and want to understand your legal options, contact an attorney listed on FireLitigation.org for a free consultation.