Superior Radiant Products is Red Hot

When the weather last year turned unseasonably cold, and temperatures plunged below 40 degrees in the southern United States, the owners of many unheated manufacturing facilities and factories turned to Canada for warmth. They needed the infrared heating solutions of Superior Radiant Products Ltd. to keep their employees warm and their heating bills as manageable as possible.

"All of a sudden, our switchboard lit up," recalls Tom Delp, national sales manager for Superior Radiant Products, of the cold snap that left many employers scrambling to heat their facilities so their employees could stay on the job. "Our high-efficiency, gas-fired infrared heaters were an easy solution so they could put heaters in those spaces and put the workers back in place."

That Superior Radiant Products received so many calls demonstrated two things: Infrared heating has become an accepted and well-established choice for heat, and Superior Radiant Products is fast becoming the go-to company for heating solutions.

Kevin Merritt, president of Superior Radiant Products, founded the company in 1995 with two other partners. The idea behind Superior Radiant was to put technology into the forefront of its infrared heating products. Its engineers developed a reflector design that they found to be the most efficient method for tube heat. Today, Superior Radiant's 10-sided reflector is the only one of its kind among infrared heating manufacturers. Such a multifaceted configuration reflects virtually 100 percent of the infrared energy out and away from the emitter tubes and spreads the heat evenly wherever the customer needs it. This means greater fuel savings and enhanced comfort.

With this technology, Superior Radiant built a basic product line of infrared heaters and has expanded that line over the years to meet the needs of a wider customer base, including residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural as well as sports facilities and the hospitality industry. Today, Superior Radiant boasts a broad range of products, from the basic tube heater to various configurations that are suitable in any kind of environment.

The future of heating is in infrared radiant products, say Merritt and Delp, emphasizing that Superior Radiant invests heavily in research and development. "We want to be at the forefront of this," Delp says. This year, Superior Radiant entered into a strategic alliance with a prominent German company, GoGaS Goch GmbH, to introduce European heating technology with reduced emissions to the North American market. "We're going to get the best of both worlds," Merritt says. "Both companies are very excited about the collaboration in research and development and the opportunities this brings worldwide with future harmonization of product lines."

With so many items that are scalable to different sizes, Superior Radiant products are found in a wide variety of applications — from ice arenas and gymnasiums to airplane hangars and cargo facilities. Car washes are also a popular niche for Superior Radiant heaters because the heat can be directed to keep floors dry and prevent ice from building up on the brushes during winter.

From its inception, Superior Radiant also recognized that energy efficiency would be critical in the design and marketing of its products. Even before "energy efficiency" and "green" became buzzwords that manufacturers in virtually every industry have since latched onto, Superior Radiant was already there. So much so that Superior Radiant has always built its burners with housings that are painted the color green. "Fifteen years ago, we decided that we wanted the boxes to be green so our products could be seen as green," Merritt says. "And that was before the 'green' movement."