On the first day of VIV Utrecht in the Netherlands, the aviNews team had the opportunity to welcome Jens Dybdahl to its booth. Representing DACS, a family-owned company based in Denmark, Dybdahl shared insights about the company’s activities and its role within the poultry industry during one of the sector’s most important international events.
Please introduce your company and start with a nice description of the impact that you are already having on more than 80 countries.
Thank you so much and thanks for having me. The company is, as you said already, a family-owned company. It’s me and my two brothers. So we are three brothers who own the company and we are part of the daily management team also. I’m in charge of the fan development, which is what we’ll be speaking about today. One brother in charge of sales, one brother in charge of all the electronics and electricals. So that’s how we split the company. We’ve been working together for 25 years and before that we were also hands-on. We’re still hands-on. We still go out and do installations ourselves to get feedback from people out in the field. And that’s how we run our business. And as you said, we’re represented in about 80 countries now.
Well, very good. I think that it’s a company developing better fans all the time and now you are going to the 50-inch fans. Why develop a large fan? What are the benefits of those fans?
Well, the 50-inch fan is interesting for reasons primarily retrofitting. A lot of houses worldwide use this standard size frame, European 140 by 140, American 55 by 55 inches roughly. hat means you can take out existing fans, put in these new fans and create either much higher capacity or a much higher energy efficiency. And we saw a segment here which was underdeveloped in our opinion. And we decided to go for it and build this fan.
Yeah, how long did it take you to develop these big fans, the Mags? It’s called the Mag Fan Big 50, right?
Big 50, yes. That’s a reference to an American Buffalo rifle in fact. We started; we made a prototype in steel. So steel, riveted together steel and 3D printing. We did that in October last year. We finished the mold drawings in January. And now we have the fan ready for sale.
I understand that one of the traits of these fans is the high-power efficiency and also the performance that they may have. So please tell us, because it’s very interesting for the whole agricultural industry. Of course, you were mentioning that you are very well placed in the dairy industry, at least in the U.S. But definitely the poultry industry needs this kind of fans.
You’re absolutely right. In the U.S. we are strong on the dairy side. We do a little in poultry, but not nearly as much as we do in dairy. One of the reasons why we got into dairy is that in a large modern dairy facility, you move an awful lot of air. A lot of those facilities are placed out in the countryside, obviously. And sometimes they need to run a hundred-kilometer power line to just get power to their farms. And if you can save 50-60% on power consumption, that means your whole investment in that facility becomes much, much smaller. Because of your transformers, your power lines, everything can be downsized. So that’s how we got into that business. But we are poultry people by origin. And we’ve been working in the poultry industry for four decades.
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And Best Lab is recognized as a level playing field. We have our own wind tunnel. So, we test at our own facility also during the development process.
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But to get the blue stamp on our performance, we go to Best Lab, like pretty much everybody else in the industry. And we got back a week ago after very successful testing over there. And in principle, what you’ll find is that we developed one fan, which can be set with two different impellers to create either extreme performance or extreme efficiency.
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So, for the replacement industry, you can replace your existing fans with our new fan and cut your electricity bill in half, at least. And this is with a conventional motor. So many people use permanent magnet motors.
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We also have a permanent magnet version. But this one with the conventional outperforms in terms of airflow, outperforms everything else in that same size segment. And also, in terms of energy efficiency, we’re way ahead of the others.
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And these big fans are an on-off system, or you have variable speed, VFD, because that is important in some systems to keep also and improve energy efficiency as well.
Yeah, exactly. Well, we deliberately chose a conventional motor for this fan. So, you can either operate it as an on-off fan like any old-fashioned fan, but with a much higher energy efficiency. Or you can take any kind of variable frequency drive, fit it to the motor and run it as a variable speed fan. So, the simplicity of this is what we think is a key point in the development of the fan.
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Keep it simple. Many people, as I said, have permanent magnet motors. Many people love them, but there are some who don’t like them and they think they’re too complicated.
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They’re worried about having to always have a variable frequency drive and a dedicated frequency drive. Whereas with this one, you can choose any drive you want, or you can run it on-off and you will still get extreme efficiency. Very good.