Two seemingly unrelated companies found they shared a home city—Lexington, Kentucky—so it made sense for them to collaborate using IoT.
Turns out, IoT technology by printer pioneer Lexmark was just what Big Ass Fans needed at the core of its automated system CommandSense that, paired with its “comfort” products, can help keep warehouse floors to loading docks to maintenance bays worldwide warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
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Lexington-based Big Ass Fans is perfectly named because its signature products, hundreds of thousands of them, are large overhead fans that keep the air moving in workplaces in 120 countries. In fact, it’s the largest manufacturer of HVLS (high volume, low speed) overhead fans.
In addition, the company bills itself as a provider of comfort solutions for complex spaces, so not only does it manufacture “big ass fans” but it also makes cooling and heating units.
Along came Lexmark, which supplied the IoT technology, dubbed Optra, at the edge and in the cloud at the heart of the new Big Ass Fans product, CommandSense, Demetrios Karathanasis, Lexmark’s IoT portfolio director, said in an interview this month with Smart Industry.
According to Karathanasis, this is how it works: Data from devices and wireless sensors gathers information on indoor and outdoor conditions that is then passed through a Lexmark “protocol translator application” and processed and acted upon by Big Ass Fans’ CommandSense, which runs commands back through the protocol translator to comfort devices, all at the edge.
The two companies bill CommandSense as the first-ever IoT cooling system.
“It’s much like how we use the technology to manage 1.5 million printers around the world—but Big Ass Fans is applying the technology to manage their comfort solutions,” Karathanasis said.
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CommandSense was deployed and proven in Big Ass Fans’ manufacturing and distribution facility in Lexington before it was deployed with select customers that piloted the product, David Rose, global product manager, HVLS Fans + SpecLab, at Big Ass Fans, told SI. CommandSense is in production and will be available in April 2025.
There is real-world deployment of this, all the production-level IIoT is in the real world,” Rose said, adding that CommandSense has been in the test phase for about a year, with “big outcomes: zero heat stress incidents this summer.” He added: “That’s a big win for us,” as is the 20% to 30% energy reduction, thanks to CommandSense controls using data from indoor and outdoor sensors.
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Karathanasis said: “As two Lexington-based companies, we’ve naturally been on each other’s radars for a while. When Lexmark decided to commercialize our in-house expertise into a solution that we could offer other manufacturers, we didn’t have to look far. We knew Big Ass Fans could be a great partner. Their background in climate control for industrial settings was a natural application for IoT. By partnering locally, we can better elevate our community and bring those rewards back home.”
Rose added: “It was really straightforward to come to this decision to partner together. There is an alignment of goals.”
He continued: “CommandSense is for a certain type of customer, for ones that don’t have means for a full mechanical cooling system for their company. And the first release was just the start, there’s a pretty long roadmap for deployment.
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“We’ll use all this data we’re collecting to determine maintenance intervals. There are potential AI applications … changing fans or locations depending on what someone is doing in a certain location, for example. And we will help our customers through design to deployment.”
