Stulz USA has been manufacturing customized air conditioners, dehumidification systems for data centers and other climate control units for 40 years. They’ve recently realized that there was a need for their products in an unexpected industry and began producing atmosphere control units for medical cannabis grow facilities. Stulz USA’s headquarters are located Frederick, MD.
“We fell into it,” Stulz’s applications engineer manager, David Meadows, told the Frederick News Post.
“After we fell into it, we decided, well, we’re going to go ahead and attack this as a vertical market and see what kind of traction we get with this,” Meadows said.
The company actually started selling the climate control systems to grow facilities back in 2014, but has been getting more notoriety for doing so as of late. The customized units are specifically designed to help control the unique grow cycle of the cannabis plant. Stulz has already sold five of such climate control units to cannabis grow facilities located in Colorado, Ohio, Nevada and Canada. More demand for their products could be seen as more states finally legalize medical and recreational cannabis, although company officials speculate that demand for their products could stall as grow facilities face difficult regulatory hurdles to get their businesses up and running.
The climate control systems Stulz provided to grow facilities featured temperature control, a CO2 monitor, and light control. The cooling systems they manufacture for data centers control temperature within a 2-degree band and humidity, Meadows told the Frederick News Post.
“We were already coming to market with a unit that was very precise in its operation,” Meadows continued. “If some of these [data center] facilities go down, millions of dollars are lost per minute. The equipment has to be extremely robust. Redundancy has to be built in, so the equipment can continue to run.”
Stulz company executives said that despite expanding into manufacturing cooling systems designed specifically for the cannabis industry, the majority of their business is still going to be working with climate control units for data centers. Meadows and his colleague, product/ marketing manager Aaron Sabino, credit the flexibility of their engineering team and production facility for setting them apart from their competitors in this space.
“It’s something that sets us apart,” Sabino said. “Not every air conditioning manufacturer would be able to enter this market as quickly as we did or to address the needs of those types of customers. We’re uniquely suited for that, and it’s really been a pretty neat experience.”
In addition to getting into the medical cannabis industry, Stulz is interested in expanding into cooling systems for agricultural fruit ripening, which they see as another vertical market. Stulz’s story is just another great example of how the cannabis industry can create jobs and promote technological innovation.
