EVAPCO Brand Guidelines: The Employee-Owned Cooling Tower Maker Begun in Baltimore in 1976

A condenser company that planned to stay small.

EVAPCO began in Baltimore on 14 June 1976. Its 50th-anniversary release, issued in 2026, names Wilson E. Bradley and William E. Kahlert as founders and describes a refrigeration business with about five employees and a single product line: evaporative condensers using ammonia as a refrigerant. The Australian trade magazine Climate Control News, in a July 2012 profile, adds a third name to the early leadership, the financial adviser John A. Luetkemeyer, and gives Kahlert and Bradley 46 years of industrial experience between them.

Kahlert came from the company’s older Maryland neighbour. Climate Control News says he joined Baltimore Aircoil in 1955 and rose to chief design engineer; the International Directory of Company Histories, in a 2004 entry, records him as that company’s president from 1966 and chief executive from 1970, and says he left in 1976 to co-found EVAPCO. The two Maryland companies share that history.

The small plan did not last. “When we started the company, we really planned to stay just in the refrigeration business, which meant a smaller company just making evaporative condensers,” Bradley says in the anniversary release. “These condensers — they were well received right from the start, and we quickly realized there was a need to broaden the product line.” Climate Control News describes a plaque at the company’s headquarters showing Bradley at a makeshift desk in his garage, a door laid across two filing cabinets, where he drew the first range.

Within three years of its founding, the same magazine says, EVAPCO had opened a facility in California and signed a licence with CCT in Italy, which later became a wholly owned operation. A licence in Sydney with F. Muller followed in 1985.

From ammonia condensers to the full tower range.

EVAPCO says it formally became employee owned and operated in 1984, and it credits Kahlert with the belief that it would always succeed if led by dedicated, capable employees. Climate Control News described it as privately owned, with most of the North American stock held by employees through equity sharing. The 2026 release uses the phrase “employee-owners” throughout.

The headquarters moved out of the city to Carroll County. Climate Control News says the move from Baltimore to Taneytown had happened by 1990, while the Maryland Department of Commerce said in July 2016 that EVAPCO had been based there since 1991. The research centre sits at the same site, with environmental test chambers for towers, closed-circuit coolers and condensers, plus an ice coil test tank and a fan test wind tunnel, the magazine says. In March 2024 Refindustry reported a second expansion of the Taneytown operations within a decade, adding 45,000 square feet of offices.

The product line widened in steps. Climate Control News dates the induced-draft, counterflow AT cooling tower to 1986, with the design later carried into the ATC condenser and ATW cooler models. It dates the field-erected division Evap-Tech to 2005, which took the company into power and water markets, and the full purchase of Flex Coil, a Danish supplier of air-cooled equipment, to 2009. In November 2017 Mechanical Business reported that EVAPCO had bought Alcoil USA of York, Pennsylvania, a maker of micro-channel heat exchangers, to form Evapco Alcoil, Inc.

In 2016 Maryland Commerce singled out two products, describing Pulse~Pure as a water treatment product that uses pulsed electric fields rather than chemicals, and Extra-Pak ice coils as equipment that builds ice on the coils’ tubes at night, when energy rates are lower, and uses that stored energy for cooling during the day.

Cases, towers and cut-aways.

Refrigeration is a trade that sells equipment most people only half notice, and its makers tend to picture it where it works. Supermarket case makers show long runs of cabinets, glass doors catching the aisle lights and the shelves stretching away down the frame. Cooling tower makers go up to the roof and shoot their steel boxes against open sky.

Compressor makers work closer in. Their catalogues favour the cut-away: a casing sliced open with the copper, windings and pistons labelled, part engineering drawing and part sales picture. Coil makers go closer still, with condensate beading on fins and tubes in tight rows. Beverage cooler makers have a different job, because the cabinet is also an advertisement, so the photograph often sits on a shop floor with a drink brand’s name on the door.

Much of the category’s public life happens at trade fairs. Chillventa in Nuremberg is the refrigeration industry’s own show, EuroShop in Düsseldorf is where retail fittings meet retail design, AHR Expo moves between American cities for the heating, cooling and refrigeration trades, and Mostra Convegno Expocomfort in Milan covers heating, plumbing and cooling. At these shows the stand does the work of the brand book: a unit opened up, a logo at full height, model names on the panels.

That naming is a habit worth noticing. Ranges are usually identified by letters and numbers, written for engineers who read specification sheets, so a memorable product name or a founding story stands out. The guides here set out what can be checked about each one: who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made.

“More than a company name.”

EVAPCO’s own numbers depend on the page. The 2026 release gives 34 global locations in 14 countries, including 28 factories in 11 countries, with 178 sales offices and more than 500 active patents; its company page says products are engineered and manufactured in 36 locations in 14 countries, with more than 200 sales offices. Both are the company’s own figures. The portfolio it lists runs from factory-assembled and field-erected cooling towers to closed-circuit coolers, evaporative condensers and air-cooled equipment, with water treatment systems and large equipment for power plants and data centres. In 2016 Maryland Commerce counted 450 employees at Taneytown in a global workforce of more than 3,000, and said the company also manufactured at two other American facilities.

The company page talks about people. It says EVAPCO is “more than a company name — it is the team you can count on for a lifetime,” and its engineering line is “Technology for the Future, Available Today!” It writes its own name in capitals; trade titles often set it as Evapco.

Its parts and service centres trade as Mr. GoodTower, a registered name with the promise “any Part, any Manufacturer, any Time.” The website’s code sets a dark teal as its browser theme colour, a web setting rather than a published brand standard.

For a design guide, EVAPCO shows how a company can make its ownership structure the centre of its identity. Compare Baltimore Aircoil, the older Maryland firm it grew out of, and Kelvion, another heat exchanger maker. For this guide we use a tower teal and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep EVAPCO’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.