Sidney-based Emerson Climate Technologies initially plans to hire six or seven high-level engineers for the facility, which will employ up to 35 full-time workers by its fifth year of operation, said Rajan Rajendran, vice president, System Innovation Center and Sustainability.
The company is seeking highly skilled engineers with innovative, creative thinking capabilities, who are familiar with a range of residential and commercial structures, as well as the equipment they contain.
“We are looking for people with a very broad range of skills,” Rajendran said.
Those jobs will have an average annual salary of $80,000, according to city of Dayton documents.
Emerson Climate engineers will serve as facilitators for the up to 100 people expected to use the center on a daily basis, including company employees, customers, industry representatives and university researchers, Rajendran said.
The Helix will benefit not just Emerson Climate, but area hotels, businesses, universities and students with internships and co-ops at the center.
“We expect to bring conferences into the area, so all of that will be a good turn for the economy,” he said.
Construction is on schedule for completion in mid-October, with a grand opening event planned for December.
Emerson Climate Technologies manufactures technology and services that allow homeowners and businesses to better manage their heating, air conditioning and refrigeration systems for improved control and lower energy costs. The company, a division of St. Louis-based Emerson Electric Co., had sales revenues of $4.1 billion in 2014 and employs 17,000 workers globally, including 1,700 in the greater Sidney area.
The Helix will feature five “modules” that focus on HVACR industry markets, including supermarket refrigeration, food service operations, residential connected homes, data center cooling and light commercial buildings.
The residential module is a 2,000-square-foot, two-story home that will serve as a working laboratory to test the company’s future innovations in comfort, energy savings and connected home concepts. It will feature three bedrooms, a family room, one and a half bathrooms, a kitchen with appliances, laundry room, water heater, home theater, home audio and security, plus an attic, roof and crawl space.
Ambient controls will allow researchers to simulate a range of exterior weather conditions ranging from -20 to 120 degrees, and also adjust humidity.
“The purpose of this is to not just study the home from an air conditioning and heating point of view, but from a total connected comfort point of view. This has to do with the energy efficiency, how energy is being used in different parts of the house and the comfort of the persons living in the house,” including temperature, humidity, allergens and lighting, Rajendran said.
Emerson Climate’s goal is “peace of mind” for the homeowner, ensuring that every piece of equipment in the house is working at peak efficiency at all times with no issues, he said.
While research is conducted on individual structures at locations such as the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratories, The Helix is the first facility in the world to bring them all together under one roof.
“In many ways, we are replicating a micro-city,” with living, working, shopping and eating places, Rajendran said.
“It enables us to look at all of them in a holistic way. That is the beauty of this place. You don’t have to look at the commercial building one day and the residential home the next day. I can study all of them and the interactions of how these things all work together,” he said.
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