Fredericton Scientific Instrument Company Grows Facility and Expands Product Line
FREDERICTON — Fredericton thermal instrument company Thermtest has just expanded its headquarters into a new, 15,000 square-foot facility and has its eye on opportunities in the “new economy”.
The new location, on Millenium Drive in Hanwell, “will give us the space to grow for years to come” says president and CEO Dale Hume.
The 18-year-old company is an international leader in thermal conductivity testing and equipment, with customers like DuPont, Shell, Dow Chemical, 3M, and NASA.
Hume got his start at Fredericton’s Mathis Instruments and liked it so much he decided to make the city home.
“I went out on my own and started to grow the company organically through testing services and invested the money back in,” Hume says of the early days.
Thermtest’s initial product, a portable meter used to measure thermal conductivity and resistivity of soil, rock, concrete, and polymers, was a success. It led to an ever-growing catalogue of meters and lab instruments being produced at the Fredericton company today.
“We use the money to develop small, easy-to-manage projects, and then reinvest the money and get to more complex projects and products,” he says. “It’s very much a scaled, controlled approach to business. But at the same time, we’ve been in New Brunswick and Fredericton all that time, employing people and growing.”
That growth had the company bursting at the seams at its old location.
“We had 35 people in 5,500 square feet. If a room had two doors we’d close that door and put a desk behind it,” Hume jokes.
That led to working with ACOA, which recently invested over $800,000 in the company with funding for the purchase and production machinery, as well as to make improvements to the new building.
“There’s not a lot of industry like ours in Fredericton, so we struggled to find something that just wasn’t an office,” he says.
The unique structure is insulated concrete forms, or ICF, construction. It holds the heat very well, something that someone in the thermal conductivity business can appreciate.
“Everything is designed and made here,” he says of the facility, which includes a machine shop to manufacture the unique components of Thermtest’s products. He says having the power to control the creation of the components of the products is a huge advantage.
Hume says the money from ACOA was really needed during the Covid supply chain disruptions to keep production on track.
“You had to buy 1,000 things, even if you just needed 10 of them,” he says of the inventory challenges. “It was just amazingly complex to do what used to be easy.”
Now, with hubs in Sweden and Taiwan to access the European and Asian markets, Thermtest is poised for success in a very niche industry. But it’s also an industry that’s seeing growth and new opportunities as conserving heat and energy becomes increasingly important.
“One of the largest uses of energy is heating and cooling our buildings,” he says. “There’s no single one thing that is as big as that in terms of use of energy and potential for improvement.”
He says many Thermtest products are aimed at providing tools for laboratories to develop new, energy-efficient materials for buildings.
And he hinted at an even bigger “new economy” product around the corner.
“We’ll be heading to Build Green Atlantic in Halifax [in March],” Hume says. “We’ll be talking about a project… one particular project that has a much more significant potential impact on that industry.”
Alex Graham is a Huddle reporter in Saint John. Send her your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].