New Warehouse Fills Up With Texas ACs

Texas-built air conditioners are stacked high inside of a new 42,000 square-foot warehouse off of East Street — thanks to an international HVAC giant’s lease of a newly built emblem of New Haven’s delivery economy.

Those boxes and many more shelves and stacks of contractor-ready home heating and cooling equipment are now in place in Building A at a new two-warehouse development at 50 Ives Pl.

That nearly 4.4‑acre property — which was once home to the H.B. Ives manufacturing plant — is bounded by East Street, Chapel Street, South Wallace Street, and Ives Place. 

It’s owned by Richard Cuomo of the North Haven-based Elm City Industrial Properties. His company bought the then-long-vacant industrial land for $750,000 in May 2020 and subsequently built two new ​“high-bay” storage warehouses and an asphalt expanse for trucks coming off the nearby I‑91 highway and looking to load up on consumer goods in need of transit.

As of April 1, the 42,000 square-foot Building A at 50 Ives Pl. has its first tenant: Daikin Comfort Technologies, an affiliate of the Japanese multinational conglomerate that is the world’s largest maker of air conditioners and that has a massive manufacturing plant and stateside hub in Waller, Texas.

These are ​“the most modern warehouse buildings in New Haven County,” Cuomo said with pride on Friday afternoon while standing in the truck lot outside of Building A alongside the development’s architect, Jim Reilly. 

He and Reilly described the pre-cast warehouses’ 30-foot-plus ceilings, multiple loading docks, ​“early suppression and fast response” fire protection systems, ​“high pile storage” capacities, large areas for trucks and easy access to the I‑91 highway, and soon-to-come solar panels for the buildings’ roofs as all making these two warehouse buildings unique.

While supply-chain-delayed switch gears prevented the buildings from taking in tenants as soon as construction was finished in January, Cuomo said, ​“there’s a lot of demand” for warehouses like these — as evidenced by the multi-year lease he recently inked with the Daikin affiliate. (Building B does not yet have a tenant signed up.)

Also gathered in the early afternoon sunshine were city Deputy Economic Development Administrator Steve Fontana, city Director of Arts, Culture and Tourism Adriane Jefferson, and Laura Clarke and Jolyne Brown of the local public art nonprofit Site Projects.

Fontana, Jefferson, Clarke, and Brown were on scene primarily to talk with Cuomo and Reilly about a new mural Site Projects has planned for the Chapel Street side and, potentially, the East Street side of Building A’s large street-facing concrete walls-turned-canvasses.

While the group gathered indoors in Building A’s conference room to hash through the artist and design details, this reporter meandered through the cavernous warehouse space with the HVAC-equipment-deciphering help of Tim Winosky, a territory sales manager based out of the East Hartford offices of Goodman Manufacturing, another affiliate of Daikin.

Winosky explained that Daikin and its affiliates manufacture a wide range of heating and cooling equipment, including gas furnaces and energy-efficient heat pumps and outdoor air conditioning units and air handlers, at its plant in Texas.

The company then sends 53-foot trucks to trek up to ​“supply houses” like its newly leased New Haven warehouse on Ives Place, where licensed contractors can then come to buy and pick up such equipment, which is then delivered and installed directly in customers’ homes. Homeowners get a ​“turnkey job” from their hired licensed contractors with this equipment, he said, while ​“we’re just the distributors.”

But before the contractors pick the goods up and bring it to their customers, those HVAC supplies sit in place on the shelves, and on the floors, of the 50 Ives Pl. warehouse.

Winosky pointed out that hundreds of boxes of outdoor air conditioning units currently piled high in the newly leased New Haven warehouse have been brought up from Texas to New England en masse thanks in large part to a change in federal energy efficiency regulations that recently went into effect.

As of Jan. 1, the federal Department of Energy has put in place new rules governing the allowable seasonal energy efficiency ratio, or SEER, of residential and commercial air conditioning and heat pump products.

While air conditioners manufactured at a lower SEER level can still be installed in the North region, where Connecticut is, such products that do not now meet the higher SEER2 energy efficiency level can no longer be installed in the South and Southwest regions, where Texas is.

The upshot: Lots and lots of air conditioners that were not built to the new higher energy efficiency standard now required for products installed in the South and Southwest have made their way North to places like Connecticut where the feds still allow them to be sold and used.

Thus the boxes upon boxes of older SEER-level Texas-built air conditioners that have been trucked to New Haven and are currently sitting in the 50 Ives Pl. warehouse.

Winosky pointed out that these are fully legal to install in Connecticut, still. And he thinks there will be plenty of customers for them because of their lower price point. ​“We’ll be able to sell them,” he predicted.

Cuomo told the Independent he thinks the new Daikin lease should result in five to ten jobs created at Ives Place Building A warehouse building. He said that the tenant is using the property not just for the storage and distribution of HVAC products, but also for on-site training of licensed contractors on how to use these materials.

While there weren’t any trucks parked in one of 50 Ives’s bays on Friday, truck driver Dennis Brown was in the lot with his vehicle backed up to Building A on Monday morning.

Brown, who lives in South Carolina, said he had driven this haul of Daikin-made products up from Orlando, Florida, starting on Friday. He said he had plenty of time to make the trip by Monday morning.

He didn’t know what products exactly were in the back of the truck he drove from south to north. What he did know: that he’d be heading on the road soon after drop off Monday morning, likely heading back to Florida, or South Carolina.

Brown said he’s been a truck driver for 38 years. How does he like it? ​“It used to be fun,” he said with a tired smile. Now it’s just ​“a job.”