Roofing contractor Bill Keith started tinkering with his idea for a solar-powered attic fan a decade ago, but he wasn’t on a crusade to save the environment.
“Green” wasn’t even in popular use yet as a name for products intended to be less harmful to the environment, Keith said.
He was just trying to design an attic fan that a roofer could install and walk away – no programming, no wires and no electricians.
But an idea that seemed obvious to a builder also became an elegantly simple way to save energy – and money, according to an Indianapolis business that sells the fans. Revenue from sales of the fans has jumped from $40,000 in 2002 – when they were first built in a Warsaw factory – to $4 million last year.
Many are touting green products as a way to save manufacturing jobs in the Midwest. Keith’s company, St. John-based SunRise Solar Inc., and its partner, Warsaw-based Indiana Vac-Form Inc., are showing such manufacturing can be profitable.
Attic fans are among several environmentally friendly products made by Indiana Vac-Form.
“For a recessionary period, we had a phenomenal year last year,” said Bret Wolf, the company’s director of sales and marketing.
But Keith said more needs to be done to push the U.S. to the forefront of green manufacturing.
“We could be a leader fairly easily,” Keith said. “We just need to step up to the plate.”
Roofer’s choice
By maintaining a constant flow through an attic, fans keep superheated air from accumulating and expanding into the living spaces below. They also slow the rate at which the sun cooks shingles, making them curl and peel, requiring expensive replacement.
Keith said installing electric attic fans requires electricians in addition to roofers. Instead of being powered by a solar panel mounted on top, an electric fan has to be wired into a home’s power source.
The sun seemed an obvious way to power a fan meant to mitigate the sun’s effects.
“I didn’t invent the concept,” Keith said, explaining that another solar-powered attic fan was on the market but was considered unwieldy and difficult to install.
That fan eventually was bought by another company and taken off the market, Keith said. With the rise of SunRise Solar, competitors are making their way into the market.
Keith wanted a fan that a roofer could take out of a box and install. No thermostats, no programming or other complications. Instead, the more brightly the sun shines, the harder Keith’s fan runs. When the sun disappears, the blades stop turning.
Saving energy – much less the planet – wasn’t his top priority. “It didn’t seem that installing electric fans was doing our customers any justice,” Keith said.
Keith said there are too many variables for him to make any specific claim of energy savings, although the company Web site says the fans can cut utility bills by up to 30 percent.
For example, he has customers in Wisconsin for whom the fans take enough of an edge off the hottest weeks that they don’t need air conditioning at all. In hotter, more humid climes, the savings are likely to be much greater, he said.
Terry Black co-owns Green Way Supply, an Indianapolis company that sells and installs environmentally friendly products. Almost since SunRise Solar started making its fans, Keith has been selling them and bringing in dealers in other parts of the country.
“People are seeing a 10 (percent) to 15 percent drop in their air-conditioning costs,” Black said.
Starting with a bang
As he developed the prototype for his first fan, Keith looked for an Indiana company that could make its plastic components.
“My business plan involved me just working in the state of Indiana,” Keith said.
A match was made with Indiana Vac-Form. Keith envisioned using the Warsaw company to make the fan’s plastic components as his business grew slowly. Then his first order came: 100 fans for a contractor in Hawaii.
“I’m thinking, ‘How am I going to build 100 of these things?’ ” Keith said. “I don’t have a loading dock or a lot of other things.”
So Indiana Vac-Form, then a mature, 25-year-old company, agreed to build, pack and ship the fans from Warsaw. Wolf won’t say how many jobs production of the fans created, but he said the work is important to his company and its 30 employees.
In the first seven years of production, sales of the fans have grown 100-fold, and the growth is showing no signs of abating, Keith said.
Even in a recession as other sectors struggled, the market for green products grew rapidly, Black said.
“We’ve been able to show that our products save you money,” Black said.
At $495, the SunRise Solar 850 fan retails for a lot more than the conventional electric attic fan price Keith listed at $129. But Keith said a 30 percent tax credit for the solar fans, coupled with electricity savings, means the fans represent a net savings within a year.
Green Way Supply in Indianapolis has seen recent annual revenue growth of 60 percent to 70 percent, Black said, adding that sales of SunRise Solar products have grown along with it.
The simplicity of the concept and the fact the fans are made in Indiana are key selling points.
“I found very early on that people got it,” Black said. “We sell a ton of them.”
Keith is an unabashed supporter of carbon cap-and-trade and other legislation that could make energy from fossil fuels more expensive. The innovation would push the U.S. to the forefront of what is now called green manufacturing, he said.
“You’d have all kinds of creative ideas come up,” Keith said. “If the consensus is we’re going to keep drilling oil, nobody’s going to innovate anything new.”
