Cruiser RV destratifies air, keeps employees comfortable with HTHV

Since 1988, the family-owned Cruiser RV, headquartered in Howe, IN, has manufactured affordable, lightweight laminated travel trailers for families just getting into camping or seasoned RVers looking for a more robust cross-country adventure.

Their mantra is, “We build each product as if we were making it for ourselves. We’re not a suit and tie type of company. We’re hard working, extremely efficient, and very lean. We don’t have meetings about having meetings, we get everyone together to talk it out and then we go execute. We’re focused, and we keep things as simple as we can.”

As a growing company, they had reached a point where they needed to address the working environment of the main Cruiser RV production facility in Northern Indiana. The key considerations before making any investment included improving employee comfort on the production floor, reducing ongoing utility expenses long term, and minimizing the number of additional exterior wall and roof cutouts that would compromise the facility itself. As a business founded on an impeccable family work ethic, one of their guiding principles is that every worker is critical to the overall success of their company and should be treated as such. So, making sure the hand-picked team of craftsmen and women were happy and the positive company culture was maintained was extremely important to the Cruiser RV leadership group.

One of the main reasons Cruiser RV chose Cambridge Engineering’s HTHV technology to heat their building was the equipment’s ability to destratify the air within their facility without any additional destratification equipment. This kept the initial equipment costs as well as the overall installation costs at a minimum.

To prove HTHV’s destratification capabilities at Cruiser’s facility, they allowed Cambridge Engineering to install data loggers to collect the necessary information needed to demonstrate minimal temperature differences between the ceiling and the floor.

The 200,000-sq-ft high-bay facility, which operates 24 hours a day and seven days a week, has 28-ft ceilings, an R-19 roof with R-13 walls, and a total of 34 active dock doors. Three data loggers were placed at 2 ft and three were placed at 5 ft, and temperature readings were recorded every 30 minutes. The design temperature was 63°F @ -2°F, and the average building temperature, during the study period of January 1, 2018 to February 19, 2018, was 64°F with the coldest recorded outside temperature during the study being -15°F on January 1, 2018.

Although the outside temperatures radically spiked throughout this eight-week evaluation period from a record-setting -15°F to an unseasonably high 59°F in mid-January, the overall internal temperature did not vary more than five degrees up or down. It remained within a comfortable and constant 65°F to 70°F range. As a result, the production line was much more efficient because the workforce focus was on superior craftsmanship and not the thermostat.

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