Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 20, 1994 TAG: 9403220008
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NATURAL BRIDGE STATION LENGTH: Long
Des Champs Laboratories Inc. - a designer and manufacturer of equipment for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems - moved into a 92,000-square-foot building in the Rockbridge County industrial park three years ago. Already the company has plans to build a 25,000-square-foot research and testing building on its 15-acre site. The expansion, scheduled for later this year, also should increase its 110-person work force by about 40 people over the next two years.
Over its 20-year history , the company has specialized in heat exchangers that capture the heat from stale air being piped out of a building and use it to warm fresh outdoor air being pumped inside.
It's a relatively new product called the Wringer, though, that company founder Nicholas Des Champs says "could put Rockbridge County and Des Champs Labs on the map."
The first version of the Wringer was custom-designed four years ago by Des Champs Labs to fix a humidity problem in a newly remodeled Longwood College science building.
Ralph Whitus, the assistant manager of building maintenance at the college, said that after the initial bugs were worked out the system has been working well.
The equipment replaces indoor air in a building with fresh outdoor air at the engineering standard of 15 to 35 cubic feet per minute for each occupant. But the Wringer's advantage is that it can dehumidify the incoming outdoor air without also lowering the temperature, making the building too cold as would a standard air-conditioning unit. The fresh air provided by the Wringer is dehumidified and enters the building at the same temperature as the outdoor air, Des Champs explained.
Five years ago the demand for Des Champs products came from customers who wanted to save on energy costs by recouping the heat being lost through ventilation systems. The demand for those products was limited, Des Champs said.
A concern about "sick" air-tight buildings has led the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers to adopt a higher standard aimed at controlling pollution and improving air quality in buildings. As the states adopt that standard into their building codes, demand for products like the Wringer should escalate. Des Champs estimates a billion-dollar market ahead for the equipment he manufactures.
Many older buildings are being retrofitted with new air-conditioning and air-handling systems because of both the need for better circulation of air for health reasons and the desire to replace old ozone-threatening air-conditioning systems, said Ed Dooley, a director of communications for the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute in Arlington.
Des Champs' equipment and that of the company's competitors is becoming more and more popular with the demand for more fresh air circulation in buildings, said Calvin Witt, an engineer with Hayes Seay Mattern & Mattern, a Roanoke architectural and engineering firm.
"From my standpoint, I think they have good equipment," he said.
The company sees markets developing for other new products for use in electric generating plants and telephone switching stations.
Most of Des Champs heat exchangers have air-to-air heat transfer chambers made from dimpled aluminum or stainless steel sheet metal. A new product the company is making to preheat the air entering the combustion chambers of electric-power plants uses a heat-pipe technology.
The finned heat pipes, which are filled with freon gas, can conduct heat 2,000 times faster than copper pipe, Des Champs said. Their advantage is that heat exchangers made with them are smaller.
Des Champs is a Richmond native who received a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech in 1967. He founded Des Champs Labs in Livingston, N.J., in 1973. He started the company with his own money after the New York patent-licensing firm that he worked for went out of business.
The company's first product was a heat exchanger to cool the cockpit of the F-16 fighter plane. "In the process of developing that heat exchanger I came up with the commercial heat exchanger that was the core for this business," Des Champs said.
By 1979, the company's sales in the heat-recovery market were $2 million annually, said Des Champs, who owns the business without any partners. But in the mid-1980s oil prices fell and people became less concerned with saving on energy. The result was that his company's sales were relatively flat until about two years ago, he said.
In 1993, the company did nearly $10 million in sales, a 40 percent increase from a year earlier. Next year, Des Champs said, he expects sales to top $20 million. Roughly half of the company's sales are custom-designed products and 25 percent are exported. The company has 60 sales representatives across the country.
Still the company is considered a relatively small player in a highly segmented industry of heating and air-conditioning equipment manufacturers, said Paul Beck, editor of Consulting Specifying Engineer magazine, a trade journal.
Des Champs said he might consider selling stock in the company sometime in the future but, he added, the company itself is not for sale. "There was a time when we'd get offers all the time," he said. "Now they go into the circular file."
Des Champs moved the company from New Jersey to Rockbridge County in 1990 after concluding it he couldn't keep it in its old location and remain competitive. Des Champs looked at sites in Maryland and Pennsylvania and in Lynchburg, Roanoke and Staunton before a state Department of Economic Development representative told him about the Rockbridge County site.
One reason he chose the area, Des Champs said, is that four or five other companies in the same business - such as Aerofin in Lynchburg - have plants in the region. That meant there was a pool of employee talent and parts suppliers here too.
H.S. Williams Co. of Marion was contractor for the company's new plant, which was completed in August 1990 and won an award for excellence in design and construction from the System Builders' Association. The location is a good one, 40 miles north of Roanoke and close to interstate highways, Des Champs said.
Five employees of the New Jersey plant, including plant manager Howard McGrath, moved to Virginia with Des Champs. The company now has an annual payroll of about $4 million, Des Champs said.
The average wage in the plant is approximately $9.70 an hour with a range of $5.50 an hour for entry level positions to $12 per hour for welders. The company also has a profit-sharing program, which, last year, provided 8 percent of employee income.
A dozen company employees are graduate engineers, some of whom are part of the company's sales force. The company also employs 10 designers who have associate degrees. They do their work on a Hewlett-Packard computer-assisted drafting system.
The Virginia Employment Commission conducted a training program for employees when the plant opened and will hold another training program for the expansion, McGrath said. In addition, Dabney Lancaster Community College in Clifton Forge has developed a degree program in heating and air-conditioning specifically for company employees.
When things go properly in the business employees are rewarded, Des Champs said.
"We try to get across to employees that we're all in this together," he said. "The object is to have everybody on the same wavelength."
But employees have a lot of freedom to make mistakes, Des Champs said. "We don't restrict the way people operate around here."
The company also tries to promote from within, McGrath said. The quality control, service and purchasing managers and supervisors and foremen all came up through the ranks. McGrath himself started on the shop floor in New Jersey.
by CNB