United States ThermoAmp Inc. was Incorporated in 1983 by Bill Bernardi (still President and CEO) after his former employer, EUS laid off all employees in 1982. Mr. Bernardi had been the pool heat pump product developement manager at EUS.

 

A Penn State 1971 graduate - Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering, he also attended University of Pittsburgh graduate school of Mechanical Engineering in the masters degree program and was (and is) a Licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Pennsylvania.

United States ThermoAmp, Inc.'s original stockholders were Bill Bernardi and his two lab technicians at EUS Inc. John Kopec and Mike Tucciarone - Together the three of them made up the swimming pool heat pump product design team at EUS Inc.

 

From late 1982, after the EUS layoff through to the spring of 1983 they worked in the basement of his residence in Monroeville, Pa (see picture to the right)

 

Bill Bernardi , Mike and John fabricated the first tooling which would be required to bend the large fragile aluminum finned tubing evaporator.

 

They actually bent the first one in the basement as the 2nd snapshot captures them right after the event, standing just behind the white door in the picture above it.

 

In addition they needed molds to get production plastic cabinets, so they took 2 inch thick foot wide planks of solid cherry wood, glued them together with high temperature epoxy cement and with little more than a belt sander and a router, they fabricated three molds (one for the top, the backpanel and the basepan).

 

Bill knew a vacuum-former in Pittsburgh, Kenson Plastics, who he had worked with while at EUS and took the molds to him asking that he pull a set of parts from them. With almost no modifications they worked.

 

With the first cabinet parts and the evaporator formed, they then needed the water side heat exchanger, so they made a three wheel tube bending machiine to coil cupronickel tubing.

 

Back then all pool heaters used copper for their heat exchanger tubes and they hadn't yet discovered just how severeand how rapidly high chlorine pool water could corrode even cupronickel which they chose as an improvement over gas heaters.

 

Now they turned to the fan motor and mounting. Bill designed a very low noise motor mount and they visited another vendor he knew in Cleveland to fabricate the mounts out of thick wire.

 

Tooling would be required for the fan mounting parts, but they could not make it themselves and were low on working capital. So Bill talked the vendor into making the tooling and amortising it's cost over the first 1000 pieces to avoid the up front expense.

 

With the first samples of these parts, they built the first Heat Siphon total cost, cash-$3500 Bill had saved, labor- months of evenings in the basement.

 

 

1991 - First Pure Titanium Tube Heat Exchanger Tubing in a pool heat pump

1992 - First and still the ONLY electrically isolated water-side Heat Exchanger.

1992 - First scroll compressor equipped Pool Heat Pump

1997 - First 12 Heat Siphon Installation on the Cranberry Twp Community Pool

1999 - First Green Gas Pool Heat Pump Shipped

2005 - First Digital Player Controller

 

 

STAY TUNED . . . check back as the story continues