1. Introduction and Guest Background:
   • Kevin Shannon’s extensive experience in the power and controls industry.
   • Transition to full-time role at Kearsarge Power.
2. Career Path and Industry Experience:
   • Various roles at major companies like Schneider Electric and Warner Power.
   • Insights into product marketing and business management.
3. Establishing Kearsarge Power:
   • The motivation behind starting Kearsarge Power.
   • Initial challenges and success stories.
4. Focus on Transformers and Power Solutions:
   • Importance of specialized knowledge in power controls.
   • Addressing industry-specific challenges, particularly in demanding environments.
5. Future of Industrial Power Controls:
   • Technological advancements and their impact.
   • The role of AI and data in enhancing operational efficiency.
6. Personal Anecdotes and Industry Stories:
   • Kevin’s personal journey, family involvement, and hobbies.
   • Memorable moments and learning experiences in the industry.

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:23:23
Welcome to In the Loop, a New England Temperature Solutions podcast. In today’s episode, Net’s president Dominic DeLuca will be joined by Kevin Shannon from Kearsarge Power and Controls to talk shop about Transformers, power solutions and the future of industrial power controls. Kevin has been in the industry for decades and has extensive technical knowledge as well as substantial experience in product marketing and business management.

00:00:23:25 – 00:00:27:21
Without further ado, here’s Dom and Kevin helping you get in the loop.

00:00:27:21 – 00:00:47:11
Hello. We want to thank you for joining us today for our podcast. I’m here with Kevin Shannon, from Kearsarge. It’s, it’s actually your first day at Kearsarge, which, my first, first official full day. Full day. We’ve been working the business for a couple of years now.

00:00:47:13 – 00:01:03:20
Between my partner, Tom McGee and I on the side in other things. But. So we’ve we’ve been doing it for about two years now, and things been going really well and just was the right time to, take it on full, full time now. So today is my first full time day. Full time day. And you chose to spend with us.

00:01:03:21 – 00:01:29:16
We are honored. let’s start with who you are personally. Family, hobbies, that kind of stuff. personally. So I grew up in Vermont. been in grew up in New England. lived around a lot of places. So I got out of college, went to Clarkson, up in upstate New York. First job was working at a motor, rewind, drives distributor in Goulburn.

00:01:29:19 – 00:01:55:09
Then I ended up working for a company called Magnet Tech, which became. You scour big drives in motor company. Okay. my next big job was my next job was down at Squirty, which became Schneider Electric, of course, spent about 15 years there, then in North Carolina, then got transferred up to Ohio doing product marketing, business management stuff, all the different electrical distribution products, automation products.

00:01:55:12 – 00:02:19:16
It’s kind of been the industry I’ve been in most of my career. then, made my way back up to New England. We’re looking to move back up this way. We were in Ohio at the time. my wife’s from Connecticut, and we’re just seeing that time move back up to New England. And so find an opportunity at Warner Power, which is a company in Warner, New Hampshire.

00:02:19:18 – 00:02:48:07
just it was a perfect fit. I was heading up the marketing and sales team. There was a previous transformer and power supply manufacturer. Very similar to what Kearsarge is now. they had some ownership changes, and, I was talking to, a customer of ours. material resource furnaces and, it just worked out that, end up going to work for those guys for about three years, which was very interesting.

00:02:48:08 – 00:03:17:19
You know, I’ve always sold Transformers power supplies and been in the heat trading industry as one of them, working for all these guys as my customers. And now working on that side of it was it was a lot of learning. There’s a lot of cool stuff that goes on. Some great customers that we work with. And, but as I mentioned, Tom and I had discussed getting Kearsarge started up two years previously, and, we had done it on the side and, and been making it work.

00:03:17:19 – 00:03:34:21
And it got to the point where we had enough business and we moved into a new facility and things were just right. So I decided to, take that step. And yesterday was my last day at materials research furnaces. And today is my first full day at, Kearsarge Power. Okay. And I know your wife works with you.

00:03:34:23 – 00:03:54:15
She does a little bit of work with us. So does my daughter and my son. same with Tom. How long you been married? 30, 31 years. We. We shouldn’t have had to pry. No, no, it. Like I say, it’s tough to be 31 in, a month or so. Okay. In August. So. August what? 13th? Oh, I’ll be 41 on August 13th.

00:03:54:17 – 00:04:18:08
You know, you’re the. You know, the third person I know that was, what year? 83. Oh, so mine was 93. Yeah. Right. Ten years later. Yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s cool, you know. What about you live in New Hampshire? what hobbies? What do you do any. Yeah. So when we moved up that up there, it was, I did feel that my my son kids were probably middle school this time frame, so was a little difficult.

00:04:18:08 – 00:04:39:16
But after being there about six months, they’re like, well, we live in Vacationland, so we we like to ski and rock climb and hike a lot. I started getting back into golf. Although working with Kearsarge Power in MRF had last couple of years haven’t had a lot of time to play. But oh. So off. Okay. Yeah, it’s funny because I have, I have a, I have a thing I do, I see every sales meeting.

00:04:39:16 – 00:04:56:25
I want to have a golf tournament. There we go. And you fire the two winners. There you go. Because if they if they have enough to win, they’re probably stretching a little bit. So I just lost the golf, audience here. I’m sorry, but, so. So do you live in curse or where do you live? I live in New London.

00:04:56:25 – 00:05:17:20
So curse those powers. our new facility, all of our facilities have been in Grantham, which is, if you’re familiar with, about halfway between Concord and Hanover, if that makes sense for anybody. Right. By the Lake Sunapee in that general area. So. Okay. Great area. worked out well for both Tom and I both live up that way.

00:05:17:20 – 00:05:39:28
And the town has been great. We, like I said, we moved into a new facility, I’ll say a month ago. Went through the the town board and everything like that. And, they’re very supportive of, what we’re doing. And there’s not a lot of companies coming in that are looking to do industrial manufacturing. So we do a complete design build test.

00:05:40:00 – 00:06:00:04
And, you know, one of the things that Tom, when I talked about that we wanted to achieve, and I’m sure we’ll talk about some of these other things, but is I’m building up the trades and so working with some of the local trade schools to help, you know, get it, get some of the kids coming out to have some cool jobs that, you know, colleges and for everybody.

00:06:00:04 – 00:06:18:01
Right, right. It worked for me and Tom and and others. But so we have, electrical apprentices, assembly guys. we’ve got some folks that are working with us that had worked at Warner Power, had done that type of job for a number of years with a great career. And so we’re kind of Tom and I joke, we’re we’re the old guys, the old goats.

00:06:18:01 – 00:06:49:07
Right? And the folks that are working with us, we’ve worked with for years in various capacities, and it’s just this great knowledge base that we’re looking to kind of share down to the next generation kind of being up to so we can maybe golfer for some time off. But, right. it’s that was one of the objectives when we, when we set forth is like there’s this great knowledge base we’ve got to transfer it to some folks because when, Warner got shut down and moved out to Michigan and we’re like, all these folks that are doing this are so good at what they do.

00:06:49:10 – 00:07:14:17
Right? And so our goal is to build it back up and then kind of feed it down the road. Nice. So so Grantham is the guy called Kearsarge because there’s a Kearsarge State Park there or Mountain Hill fishing mountain. It’s funny thing because I live on the other side, I have a place on the other side of New Hampshire because I cross-country ski in Jackson, New Hampshire, and in my back yard there’s Mount Bartlett, and then on the other side is Mount Kearsarge.

00:07:14:19 – 00:07:35:01
And, there’s two Kearsarge, and apparently there’s 100 Kearsarge, because Kearsarge was a famous ship. So the, the, the story, as I understand it, is the Kearsarge ship was named after lumber that was taken off the Kearsarge mount and then Warner, I believe. Okay. So it was it was the ship was built off of lumber from one of the Kearsarge Mountains.

00:07:35:07 – 00:07:50:11
I’m not sure if it’s the one in Warner or the one up north, but I believe that’s how that ship got its name. And there’s a lot of the name. There’s a lot of use of that name. Kearsarge, throughout New Hampshire. And they have two mountains called Kearsarge. It’s kind of funny because I’m like, wait a minute, that’s my mom.

00:07:50:13 – 00:08:09:03
I’m driving three hours away. It’s about three hours, I think, to you from my from North Conway, because it’s all backroads. It’s funny, my son, I like to back country ski and, so Saint Patrick’s Day we were up on. We were going up Turkmens and come back down Rainier. Yeah. And, Arthur Jackson, there’s a place called Shannon’s Door.

00:08:09:04 – 00:08:30:07
Right? And so I and I saw it and we’ve seen a number of times we saw it on Saint Patrick’s Day. We got to stop in. And so we stopped in there real quickly on the way back. Crazy. It was it was pretty early. We were there before lunch time. We got up early and got our run in and came back down and, but yeah, so we stopped and had one beer there and hit it up, headed back down.

00:08:30:08 – 00:08:45:19
It’s a cool place. We we go there on a, on a Sunday night. Well pre-COVID you go there on a Sunday night, you know, Sunday night up in that area you can almost hear people exhale because everybody’s left. Right. Otherwise you would be coming and leaving your money. But go home now. But but then Covid hit and nobody left.

00:08:45:22 – 00:09:05:01
It was like the craziest thing is just people stayed. And the times we’d have up there during the week were was normally quiet. It was just packed and and then you didn’t have help. So restaurants were were not were either open and people were, you know, they weren’t they would actually take turns up there. And they all got together and said, okay, we’re going to close on Monday.

00:09:05:01 – 00:09:28:25
We’re going to close on Tuesday because they share a lot of the help. But it’s a great area. So, let’s transition a little bit into, you gave us, your work experience, a little bit of it. You want to fill that in, you get. Well, I think there’s not a whole lot more. But, you know, I’ve been in the electrical industry pretty much my whole career, you know, sales, product management, business management, whatever you want to call it.

00:09:28:25 – 00:09:53:12
Okay. From very big companies like Magnet Tech and then Schneider Electric, which is multibillion dollar company we used to be representing and, to smaller companies like a Warner powered and certainly know Kearsarge, which is it’s been a great gamut. You know, I love all that. You learn some cool stuff from big companies, you learn to implement it and work on the fly and smaller companies.

00:09:53:12 – 00:10:30:04
And right now, the smaller company thing is really the challenge I was looking for. And the whole team at Kearsarge. Cool, cool. So now tell me a little bit about Kearsarge power. So Kearsarge is, as I mentioned, it was it was started as a brainchild of my partner Tom. And I, as Warner Power got bought and they moved their manufacturing facility out to Michigan and we said, you know, look, there’s there’s going to be a there’s going to be a hole in the heat treatment industry or the magnetic industry as a whole for building transformers, not just for heat treatment.

00:10:30:04 – 00:10:57:10
Guys, but a bunch of others. And we’re like, wow, there’s so many people here that are this knowledge base is great. And so there’s a great opportunity. And, as I mentioned, we talked to a couple of customers and they all said, look, if you can get this back going, there’s definitely a definitely a need. So, our our focus is on transformers and close transformer and close transformers with SEO controls and power switching devices.

00:10:57:13 – 00:11:26:14
And then the one you saw the other day up at the shop is a transformer, disconnect stuff. So it controls PLCs. And so we’ve got the whole gamut. And, the team at Kearsarge between Tom and I, and then we’ve got, a couple other guys. One was a 20 year electrical engineer at, at a furnace company, one was a 35 year, lead engineer at Warner Power in other places.

00:11:26:17 – 00:11:47:10
So we’ve got this, these guys that can do a little bit of everything, and we’ve got other folks that work with us to do programing. so combi in there, you know, we’ve got this great source that, we can do. We’re vertically integrated. We make our own enclosures, we design them, get the steel we worked with UNHCR and some other places to cut the steel.

00:11:47:12 – 00:12:10:20
We have metal bending equipment and mills at our place where we sometimes outsource it. We do outsource all the painting. It’s just something we haven’t brought in yet. But I think we’ll probably keep outsourcing that. we’re going to be manufacturing our own transformers. We certainly buy circuit breakers this year. Controls and others. But then we assemble all of them, wire them, test them.

00:12:10:22 – 00:12:28:16
so when a customer calls us, whether we need just a transformer, transformer box, he’s going to put stuff in, or if he just wants a turnkey solution that says, hey, I need this. To do that, I need 17V and 13V and 15V and they need it about right there. We say, okay, how much footprint we got and we give it to them there.

00:12:28:16 – 00:12:52:22
And it shows up on them, the three wires in, three wires out and away they go. So I’m going to ask you what problems which you started to answer, what problems you see in the industry. I mean, you’re sitting here because I saw a problem as a sales guy when when Warner Power left the state and then went on, I guess they went out of business for a year or two after they, you know, we see there’s no options for Transformers in New England.

00:12:52:22 – 00:13:12:25
And we customers buy transformers a thousand miles away and spend $10,000 to get them here. And and and that. And the other thing is we’ve we’ve dealt with some panel, you know, people in the past, but they’re not as much of an expert on our process as you appear to be. You know, they’re good at PLCs, are good at panels, are good at taking somebody’s drawing and replicating it.

00:13:12:25 – 00:13:37:07
But there is, at least we see it with nets. our application experience in our markets is what sets us apart from a just a classic distributor who’s just doing. And it seems to be the case with you. So what problem are you are you seeing in the industry and how are you solving it. So there’s there’s a there’s the number one was the geographic thing with the company leaving that can be filled I think.

00:13:37:07 – 00:14:08:10
But the, the challenges that most transformer manufacturers don’t live and breathe in this environment. That’s your controls maybe is your controls in difficult environments like we were talking, powdered metal or graphite places creates different issues. You know, we understand why is that core reactor might be better in a graphite plant, or understanding why you would need to enclose the controls with positive ventilation and air water heat exchanger.

00:14:08:12 – 00:14:29:20
Our guys have designed hot zones and heating elements for furnaces for many years, so they understand you know, it’s called power to process. But you know, the power comes out of the wall. You guys don’t the customers don’t care. What they want is they want uniform heat in their vacuum furnace that they can control very tightly. minimal harmonics in, in reliability.

00:14:29:28 – 00:14:51:04
So our team really understands that. So we can go you can give me a call. You know, I told you a couple times, hey, can you come take a look at this? You know, come down there myself, or I go down with some other guys and just say, what are your problems? We really, truly understand as well or better than a lot of the folks what could be going on in that electrical power chain.

00:14:51:10 – 00:15:31:22
And that’s that’s really the value that we bring. But that’s the problem solving thing because they don’t want to be down you. Unplanned downtime is critical, right? Companies now want to be able to monitor and and communicate better with their supervisory system without having somebody to help them do that handshake. They can’t get that the information they need to make those decisions, like, maybe I need a new hot zone, or maybe I need to clean this so we can help them get that data and understand what that data is, meaning, to keep their processes efficient up and running and, and reliable.

00:15:32:00 – 00:15:49:23
And you’ve got the experience of, of all the machinery that went into it and their whole process. So that’s very powerful and, and similar. I mean, my I’d say the value we add here is everyone, Bob and I are both in field service. So we we knew what it was like to replace a controller. You know, I hang in the panel, I open it up.

00:15:49:23 – 00:16:07:19
Okay. You’re missing wires here. Why aren’t there wires here? So that’s the value we bring in. Sounds very much similar. You know how the things put together. You know what pieces to put and where are they going to get value? No. You said something you I want to pick up on, because it’s the age old question. I’ve always thought that was never a good time for a reactor.

00:16:07:19 – 00:16:28:26
You said no. When to you know. So there. In the early days and you know, you’re talking with Danny Bender the other day and, and I think he might even agree. But 20, 30 years ago, I mean, was around forever, but they were discrete boards, and they’re open to the environment. And graphite plants, parameterized plants that we were talking about.

00:16:28:26 – 00:16:50:12
Some folks out in Saint Mary’s, PA, that was a very difficult environment for any type of electronics. Okay. And searchable, searchable core reactors, a very minimal electronics, you know, big chunks of got it, a magnetics that control it. And you had a small little 90 volt DC signal that’s saturating the core to control the heat. It’s bomb proof.

00:16:50:14 – 00:17:26:16
Is it as efficient? No. Does it hold the tightest holds? No. But in a lot of applications, it’s okay. It requires a bigger footprint. But until they started coming out with conformal coated boards and self-contained systems like the control concepts series, you would have a lot of failures. When an SDR goes, it’s not a pretty sight, right? And so that’s why I’m saying we’ve got a lot of customers that one of used to in high end customers building silicon carbide crystals used that, surgical correctors for many years because of their reliability.

00:17:26:16 – 00:17:44:15
And they didn’t want to change. Now they’re looking at, hey, how do I improve my process? I’m worried about reliability. Well, we can show you why that’s going to help it, but you’re going to minimize your footprint. You can put more furnaces on a floor. You can improve the efficiency. Your temperature tolerances are a little bit less. You know, they’re they’re tighter.

00:17:44:18 – 00:18:02:09
it’s just moving forward. And so that’s one of our biggest opportunities. We’ve replaced two. So far in the customers. Like thank you. This is great. The old one was great. But it’s 30 years old I can’t get I can’t get the driver amps for it. I can’t get the parts that are needed. And I’m really worried if something goes down I’m not going to able to get it back up right.

00:18:02:10 – 00:18:28:22
So we’ve now move them into, current components and they and they’re very happy and they get all the data off of it. Exactly. Digital get into the PLC or control system and yeah. So yeah, exactly. Because as customers, you know, everybody talks about AI and data gathering, but it’s real. You know, you just start seeing trends. You can tell when you’re furnaces doing things that shouldn’t be doing or when you might need to do some maintenance.

00:18:28:22 – 00:18:49:01
And, that goes a long way to keep them up and running reliably. So we were talking earlier about powdered metal and even brought up a customer. And I may have been where this happened when I was I started in 83, didn’t know what I was doing. I remember going to a party metal company and wanting to touch the part and not realizing that it would have fallen apart.

00:18:49:01 – 00:19:07:16
And the guy goes, no, don’t touch that. And it may have been the customer you were just talking about who will leave. Leave, leave anonymous here. But, so, yeah. Do you have any, funny stories like that of something you may have done or something that you’ve seen that was like, wow, that was pretty cool. well, I mean, it’s there’s been some.

00:19:07:18 – 00:19:31:09
We’ve both been customers, right? Forever. You know, you go into plants that used to do a lot with the paper in film, foil and they plastic coating usually we talked about extruding. Ever seen go into there and people’s doing they’re winding up plastic filament like a couple thousand feet a minute and the all snaps and stuff fills up a whole room for product because somebody adjusted it wrong and they hit the wrong button.

00:19:31:09 – 00:19:48:01
And like, powder metal plants is the classic. They get people in there they don’t realize can tell you you haven’t been in a powder metal plant. You’re going in there with a white shirt and yeah, you don’t have boots on and you come back out and you’ve got black fingerprints on your face and your clothes because you touch something and.

00:19:48:04 – 00:20:08:19
Right. But, it’s just it’s been in front of customers like we’ve talked about before. That’s, that’s the fun part of this. And so you always seen cool stuff, right? Yeah. I mean, I’ve been in places where I’ve gotten dirty. Real dirty. We have one here where a guy was, our guy Bob, when our service calling, he was at a fish processing company, and he literally had to take his clothes off and put it in the trunk.

00:20:08:19 – 00:20:23:16
I mean, I think the second time he planned it so that he. He had something else to wear. I don’t know what he did the first time, but, Well, well, Kevin, this is great. Would you like to, before we stop, would you like to say anything else or given you can tell us your website. Oh, yeah.

00:20:23:19 – 00:20:46:24
And we’re just getting ready to is up and just up and running, as said, is Kearsarge Parade.com spelled that for us? Please. You’re good. Thank you. K e r s a r g e p o w e r all. Kearsarge. Kearsarge. Power. Oh. One word, if you will. And we’ll have that coming too. But but. Yeah. And so what I’d like to leave you guys.

00:20:46:29 – 00:21:04:20
Thank you I appreciate it. You know we’ve we’ve kind of been dancing around for a number of years in the industry. I think the opportunity for us to work together is going to be really fun. I think, we can continue to help our customers solve problems. They’ll be successful, we’ll be successful. We’ll have some fun.

00:21:04:22 – 00:21:26:04
And, I really looking forward to the next up in my career and really getting Kearsarge power off the ground, working with you guys. Well, thanks for coming down here. Your first day, full time on on the job. I know you’re busy. Yep. And have been busy. And we will, like, like Kevin said, we’ll be promoting this product throughout New England and assisting customers with with some of these problems and, and hopefully be able to solve it.

00:21:26:04 – 00:21:42:27
So thank you. we we appreciate your time and watching us. And, if, you need any more information, just there’s a probably a box on the email you can click or, respond to. And we can certainly get you more information. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks again.

00:21:42:27 – 00:22:15:18
Thank you for getting in the loop with us. We hope this podcast was informative and if you need any assistance on anything in the thermal process industry, please feel free to reach out to us at 800 848 nets. That’s (800) 848-6387 or visit our website at W dot and hyphen Inc.com to fill out a request for information form. If there are any topics regarding thermal processes that you would like to hear on a future podcast, please send us a comment.

00:22:15:20 – 00:22:18:03
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