AboutElectro Industries, Inc
Electro Industries was started in 1973 with one product, a gas-fired air make-up heater for confinement buildings with one customer, Aerovent Fan and Equipment of Lansing, Michigan. Bill Seefeldt used his engineering experience to bring that product to maturity and then decided that diversification needed to be the next priority. From prior contacts with the rural electric utilities he began developing a comprehensive line of products for load management applications. Thus, Bill and Merrlyn Seefeldt founded Electro Industries and it became incorporated on January 1st, 1974.
In 1976 we began working with Minnkota Power Cooperative of Grand Forks, North Dakota as they introduced their new load management system and dual heat rates. We originally anticipated this application would be handled with storage heat and began developing a central ETS storage furnace. This design actually was patterned after Saskatchewan Power Corporation and Otter Tail Power Corporation prototype furnaces. However, later the Minnkota people felt their load control heating application would be much better handled with simple dual electric and fossil fuel furnace system. On January 8th, 1978 Bill delivered the first small trailer load of Electroil dual forced air furnaces.
From there things started to move rather quickly and we were well on our way to becoming the experts in the heating control world. At this time we introduced the Electro-Mate® plenum heater and the Electro-Boiler®, a dual heat conversion electric boiler. Electro now has the only electric plenum heater manufactured in the USA.
In the 1980’s we cast the vision of being “The Connect To People”. We considered radio receivers, line carrier receivers and/or TOU (Time of Use) meters as the load management communication device, but in order for the power company to further implement their load management program, these devices need to “connect to” the hardware which actually does the work. This is something we could develop and we became very successful at it.
As our experience and reputation grew in the Upper Midwest we developed a full line of load interrupt relay and sub-metering controls called Peak Interrupters. These quickly became a fast-growing product line throughout the 80’s.
In 1991 we introduced a microprocessor product family under the Electro-Tech name. This includes programmable seasonable time clocks, electronic sub-metering, remote metering, commercial demand controllers, wireless control transceivers, etc. In 1995 this was extended to a smart heat pump controller called WarmFlo®.
