Jennings-Dill keeps its cool after 75 years behind the scenes

Jennings-Dill has been a legacy company leaving its mark on the Upstate for the past 75 years, but you’ll be forgiven for not knowing who they are or even noticing their work.

“The stuff we do, no one sees,” said Dave Doser, executive vice president with Jennings-Dill.

But that’s not to say Upstate residents haven’t experienced the company’s work. From schools to churches to major industrial plants, the company’s work can be felt all over. As a mechanical constructor specializing in design, installation and maintenance of industrial and commercial air conditioning, heating, process piping, insulation, plumbing and more, Jennings-Dill works behind the scenes — behind the walls, in a literal sense — to ensure massive building projects can function as livable, workable spaces.

“When you walk into a building, I think most people pay attention to the architecture and what the space looks like. But the stuff we really do is make the building work,” Doser said. “You can make a building as pretty as you want, But if you can’t keep it 70 degrees, no one wants to be in there.”

In this regard, Jennings-Dill operates in a realm in which no praise is good praise — in which people tend only to notice their work when things go wrong: when temperatures spike or drop; when the perfectly calibrated ecosystem within a building is off by even the slightest degree.

Which is why they’ve been perfecting the art of ensuring nothing goes wrong since 1947, according to Jennings-Dill president Bruce Henson.

“We try to hide everything,” Henson said. “We want to make people comfortable without knowing why they’re comfortable.”

That’s no easy task when dealing with some of the projects Jennings-Dill has tackled. Take your average industrial plant. It’s not as simple as heating or cooling the plant’s floor.

“Inside of an industrial plant you’re going both have a lot of different distant areas — warehouse, offices, labs for testing in some instances, the manufacturing floor that is either conditioned or not. It’s a very diverse type of building that you have a lot of different styles — shipping, receiving, etc — and every one of them needs to be accounted for.”

Theirs is also a realm of constant learning. Are you aware of variable refrigerant flow? Likely not, but it’s something to which Jennings-Dill has been highly attuned, knowing that the technology behind the inner-workings of cooling and heating shift frequently as the years go by. What kept your food cool in your refrigerator ten years ago is not the same technology that keeps it cool now, nor with that technology be the same that keeps it cool ten years from now. Multiple that to the scale of a massive industrial plant, and those technology updates require serious mastery.

Advancements in energy and cost efficiency mean Jennings-Dill’s team must be constantly re-educating themselves, much in the same way doctors have to keep up on the latest medical advancements.

But that’s nothing new, according to Henson.

“Recently I went through and dug into all the minutes from the company going all the way back to the start I the 1940s,” he said. “Just flipping through those pages, you watch the ebb and flow of the business and the struggles and successes they had. But the one constant was ensuring they always had money and focus put on modernizing, changing, always adapting, and that’s what we keep up today. That, I’d say, is why we’re still going strong.”