We’d been to Intellihot’s corporate office in the Chicago suburb of Vernon Hills a couple of times. Once to take a look at its 40-foot-long mobile training vehicle (tinyurl.com/3akep674) and another time to take apart the Legionator (tinyurl.com/4nvu9xe3).

But the company HQ is only a couple of years old. In the meantime, 200 miles away in Galesburg, Illinois, sits the factory that helped get the company going and remains the site of the only U.S.-based manufacturing of gas-fired condensing tankless water heater systems.

After a few years of R&D from company co-founders Sridhar Deivasigamani, CEO, and Sivaprasad Akasam, chief technical officer, while the two worked their regular jobs, Intellihot originally leased space in a former Carhartt clothing center back in 2011.

“We started out with a very small area,” said Dennis Marquith, strategic facilities planning manager, and one of the first employees who helped build out the factory.

Back then Intellihot shared space in the building just outside the town of around 32,000 people, with, to name a couple, a business that made plastic tubing for soil samples and no less than a salmon processor.

A welder by trade, Marquith crafted the jackets for the first units that rolled off the assembly line.

“That’s how our first 90 units went out,” he added. “We were new so I did a lot of other steps in the building process along the way. And for a time, I was also quality control and HR. I was everything at that point. So we’ve come a long way since then.”

Slowly but surely, the other tenants moved out and Intellihot expanded its own footprint.

“We just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Marquith said.

Intellihot originally opened the factory in a collaborative effort with the city and Human Links Foundation, a nonprofit that works to establish healthy and sustainable agricultural communities through funding, education and community-focused programs. 

Thanks to steady growth ever since, Intellihot engineered more models, established itself as a national brand and eventually bought the building in 2022, increasing production and staff at the factory.

“When we set up our factory in Galesburg, the vision was to bring high-tech sustainable jobs to the Midwest,” Deivasigamani said. “With this expansion, we are in for the long haul, and we expect to put Galesburg at the center of the clean technology revolution in helping to fight climate change.”

With more than 100 patents, Intellihot has been innovating, manufacturing and selling tankless water heaters for large commercial applications such as hotels and multifamily properties since 2009.

Currently, Intellihot employs more than 100 people, with half in Galesburg; about 30% in Vernon Hills and the remaining 20% in offices throughout the country.

While Intellihot started with about 9,600 square feet of production space in Galesburg, the eventual purchase of the building now gives the company 100,000 square feet of production and distribution space.

Tour

 “The first thing we have to do on any of our products is to assemble our heat exchanger for all our products,” said Robert Svidron, Intellihot’s lead corporate trainer and applications engineer, who led our recent tour. “So if you followed this line all the way down, it’s series of steps to build the heat exchanger. That’s really the heart of all of our products; it’s the same heat exchanger and same components, although there are some minor differences depending on which cabinet it goes into.”

The heat exchanger is as good as any point to start talking about the company. If you were to look “under the hood” of many of Intellihot’s floor-standing models, you’d find multiple heat exchangers, each with its own dedicated controller. 

Inside the heat exchangers is a single-fin stainless steel coil that is designed to float freely. This unique feature allows for rapid thermal cycles by allowing the coil to expand or contract as needed. Cold water enters the coil at the bottom and is heated precisely to the set temperature before emerging at the top ready for use.

The modulating premixed burner fires radially outwards to precisely match the load. Flue gases move downwards to the bottom casting while water flows up in the opposite direction, absorbing maximum heat along the way. By condensing the flue gases, an additional 12% heat is absorbed. The condensate flows downwards in the same direction as the flue gases, thereby preventing any gas side fouling.

“Our heat exchangers also have the unique feature of being self-descaling,” Svidron pointed out. “Our patented vibration and turbulent flow technology keeps limescale in suspension, thus ensuring years of like-new operation.”

A mechanical engineering graduate from Bradley University, Svidron contributed towards helping engineers and contractors apply Intellihot’s ultra-efficient systems.

“The technology we designed is not only less wasteful, but also easier and more cost-friendly for industry professionals who work with it every day,” he added. “However, it is vital to demonstrate these advances in action to plumbing professionals who have been disappointed far too often by poorly realized innovative products that turn out to be finnicky and challenging for everyday use.”

 While the company is well-known today for its focus on commercial water heating products, both gas and electric heat pumps, the company actually started out developing wall-hung residential units.

Anyone who’s talked with Deivasigamani before knows how he came home from work one day from Caterpillar, the well-known construction equipment maker based in Peoria, to discover a water heater leak had flooded his basement. Deivasigamani eventually got together with his Caterpillar colleague Akasam and the two mechanical engineers started developing tankless water heaters in their spare time before formally launching their business with its focus on the commercial market.

“As a small manufacturer,” said Amy Turner, vice president of marketing, “we have to focus our energy. The residential market is very saturated with a multitude of manufacturers that provide all great products that do the job. There was nothing that we thought we could do to make a better residential product, but we had so much to offer on the commercial side.”