Fabdec Limited

PLAYING WITH THE FULL DECK

Fabdec Limited was incorporated in 1960 and is recognised as a market leader. The company manufactures high-quality innovative stainless steel heat transfer products and continuously invests in the creation of new products and services to stay ahead of the curve. With 105 employees, including a design team dedicated to a program of continual research and development, Managing Director Chris Powell explained how the company is setting industry standards. Report by Phil Nicholls and Hannah Barnett.

Fabdec’s headquarters are at its man ufacturing site in Ellesmere, Shropshire, where it has a 60,000 square foot fac tory and a 16,000 square foot warehouse. But it is something of an international oper ation. It recently opened new offices and a warehouse in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

The company designs, manufactures, and supplies energy-efficient milk cooling systems, brewery & process vessels, heat recovery systems and high-quality stainless steel unvented water heaters for use around the world. It currently reports a turnover of £15 million, with a 50/50 split between the domestic and export markets. Both ware houses serve Fabdec’s large aftersales market for spares & consumables.

Warming up by staying cool

It is the innovation across its product range that really makes the company stand out. Fabdec’s heat recovery prod ucts are some of its most distinctive. The SPAR-HEAT Plus heats water at a third of the traditional water heating costs associated with a conventional boiler. It works by recovering the heat gained from the refrigeration process.

On an average dairy farm, water is nor mally heated using an electric immersion heater, while hot air is effectively wasted during the milk cooling process. With a heat recovery system, water can be pre-heated to 55°C at no cost. This sustainable process can also be applied anywhere refrigeration

is used and hot water is required for heating, cleaning or washing down, such as in the brewery and food processing industries.

“We are currently receiving a lot of interest, both in home and export markets, from dairy farms, wishing to use solar PV with our Kool-Pak ice builder to cool their milk,” said Managing Director Chris Powell. “They use the electricity generated from the PV to cool the milk from the cow.”

Using sustainable energy generated from solar panels is now a big part of the Fabdec operation. “On the manufacturing plant roof, we have 908 solar PV panels, which generate the electricity required for our production,” explained Mr Powell.

He went on to describe the other ways the company is becoming more sustain able: “We have installed LED lighting and temperature controls on the factory doors

to close automatically to save energy and the heating shuts down for a set period before close of shift, all saving us energy. The new facility that we built in Germany also has solar PV, LED lighting, and the heating with air source heat pumps.”

The cutting edge

Another innovation Fabdec is particularly proud of is the work it is doing with its Pillowplate laser welder, the only such machine in the UK. The state-of-the-art system allows the company to increase capacity and manufacture both standard and bespoke heat exchanger plates up to 2 metres wide by 7 metres long ‘for the best heat transfer.’

The efficiency of the machine was explained by Mr Powell: “It is a good quality product, and it allows us to manufacture

much larger plates than we used to, and in any configuration. If we're making a vessel with a cone bottom, we can make a plate that's an irregular shape that will fit onto the bottom, to give more heat transfer.”

Mr Powell revealed one of the most recent, interesting, and arguably unexpected ways these laser welded heat exchange plates have been utilised: “The plates have been installed in the Roman baths in Bath and they're going to be used with water source heat pumps to heat the visitors area.”

“It’s all an extension of our thermal transfer products and utilising the investment we put into the laser welder technology. A similar project has recently been com pleted at Bath Abbey, where plates have been installed into the drains and will be used to heat the abbey.”

And the company keeps on innovating. According to Mr Powell “we are working on another heat pump plate project at the moment, looking to heat a Thames barge by taking the heat from the river water.”

Fabdec on top

There is no doubt that the last few years have been a challenging time for any business, especially one trying to operate internationally. The Brexit referendum, Covid pandemic and most recently the war in Ukraine, all brought their own obstacles and complications, as Mr Powell elaborated: “We've had to cope with material shortages, material delays, increased costs and lack of personnel at all skill levels, while still growing the business and introducing new products. We have continued to do that, but obviously

it has been more difficult in the last couple of years.”

Like any successful company, Fabdec has found ways to overcome the worst of this adversity. While expansion may seem a counterintuitive move during a difficult period, Mr Powell explained that the new German site has actually helped the com pany ease some of the delays experienced since Brexit by having stock close to the market, thus facilitating shorter delivery times to better serve customers.

Fabdec has been thriving for over sixty years for a reason. One of these is clearly its innovative approach. Another seems to be its ability to overcome obstacles. A third may well be in its relationship with its net work of business partners “We have over 1,200 returning customers,” Mr Powell reported, “we build long lasting partner ships. It's a two-way process, as it is with our strategic supplier partners. We feel that working together with both suppliers and customers is very important.”

Despite the turbulence of recent years across so many industries Mr Powell

remained confident that demand for the company’s services is not about to change. As he said: “We've had a chal lenging last couple of years, but we are very optimistic. We’ve come through it; we’ve expanded the business and we see a growing need in the future for our products in the sectors that we operate in. We are helping to provide milk, beer and hot water, whilst saving energy.” n