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Many first-time tourists to Central Pennsylvania’s “Amish Country” believe they’ll encounter quaint villages where people toil their days away while feeding livestock, tending gardens, crafting heavy leather harnesses or clip-clopping around in horse-drawn buggies.

They might be surprised to know that Keystone Air Power, Lebanon County’s fastest-growing hardware store, is a robust Amish enterprise that’s chock full of surprises.

The new, fully modern facility is a marvel of self-sustaining and energy-efficient design. The sprawling, 52,000-square-foot building was constructed around a cutting-edge, off-grid mechanical and electrical system.

The Amish, it appears, know a thing or two about smart technology.

Horsepower, too

One of the things a first-time visitor to the store would see that sets it apart from, say, Home Depot, is that just an easy stone-throw from the main entrance, there’s a horse and carriage facility, sort of like an open barn. Exactly what you might expect to see in re-runs of “Little House on the Prairie.”

There, horses can be tethered for a quick bath, bite to eat, and watered — like drive-in fast food for the animal. Carriages have parking spaces under roof.

In winter, after seeing to the comfort of their horse, customers would make their way into the store across a snow-melted concrete slab. With a close look, they’d spot one of two embedded, shiny brass sensors that monitor temperature and moisture. Each of them send signals to a state-of-the-art tekmar 654 snowmelt control for full automation of hydronic heat to keep outside spaces free of winter precipitation.

Inside, there’s a veritable mountain of modern, lithium-powered tools — the envy of every power tool enthusiast — from chain saws, sanders, impact drivers, drills and carpentry saws, to nail guns and grinders. A shiny array of hand tools and components are meticulously arranged on shelves and in bins.

Then, the real surprise (from which the company gets its name): every imaginable air tool can be found there. That is — pressure equipment with tanks that create pneumatic power, a wide variety of hoses and connectors to transport pressurized air, and a broad selection of pneumatic tools — from cutters and leather-stitching components to needle valves, nailers, nibblers and nippers.

No distractions

The Amish see technology and the right mix of tools as ways to make life more productive, and never as a distraction from their beliefs.

Technology, applied properly, may also play an important role in their business, but rarely in their personal lives. Wireless phones and computers (when necessary) help them connect with customers and suppliers, allowing them to grow and thrive in the modern world. The key to their use of it is to have no dependence on outside infrastructure; no tether to grid power means no distraction from their faith. No TVs, no landlines in the home or Xbox for the kids, no Spotify or Apple watches — yet modern lives in many ways, while remaining true to their beliefs and traditions.

Keystone Air Power began in 1997 in Jonas Zook’s basement workshop. There, he fixed and sold tools and air compressors for local contractors, woodworking shops, farmers and homeowners. The next year, he moved to a larger building — a horse barn.

By 2002, DeWalt, Stanley and Black+Decker had recognized him as a dealer and repair center. A few years later, Zook — now with a growing number of employees — moved into a new, 18,000-square-foot facility.

Today, Keystone has a payroll with 25 full-time employees, a handful of part-timers, links to Porter Cable, Bosch, Milwaukee Tools, Bostitch, Hitachi and Makita, and a $5 million inventory. The rewards of good, honest work!

Two decades later, the steady growth of the business led to the need for a bigger, fully modern, off-grid facility. It’s an accomplishment borne of deliberate planning.

King-sized hydronics

There’s no surprise that Amish know and appreciate hydronic heat: the comfort of radiant warmth and even snow-melting is its natural outgrowth.

While planning the new, customized facility, Keystone’s managers chose Henry King, owner of Kirkwood, Pennsylvania-based Pleasant View Plumbing and Heating, to do the plumbing and hydronic systems. When King had a sense of the size and complexity of the project, he reached out to our rep firm (Millersville, Maryland-based ROI Marketing), with questions about equipment selection and system design. Those questions were right up the firm’s alley.

ROI Marketing is delighted that so many Amish and Mennonite customers call routinely for design help, materials and equipment.

“This was a large project for us, about equal in size to one other commercial facility that we completed a few years earlier — yet with some really neat differences, like the substantial snow-melt area and the provision of co-gen heat,” King says.

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 1

King was referring to the installation of two natural gas-powered electric generators housed in a lower portion of the facility. There, a 225 kW and 141 kW generator power-up, as needed, to supply energy to a bank of Schneider Electric inverters and batteries. Waste heat from the smaller generator is harvested by a plate-and-frame heat exchanger.

When the generator can’t provide sufficient heat for the facility, that responsibility shifts to equipment in the upstairs mechanical room. There, two stacked 800 MBH, natural gas-fired Alpine commercial boilers by U.S. Boiler Co. await a signal from tekmar controls and thermostats.

The up-to-97% AFUE, low NOx Alpine condensing boilers are equipped with advanced technologies to constantly monitor performance and match fuel consumption directly to heating demand. The Alpine incorporates outside temperature sensing technology that automatically adjusts the firing rate of the boiler based on the outside air temperature — and the availability of heat from the generator.

The boilers are also equipped with U.S. Boilers’ Sage 2.3 boiler control system, which includes a built-in sequencer for internal staging of up to eight Alpine boilers. The Alpine line offers 80 to 800 MBH in ten sizes, many of which may also be wall-hung.

When running, the generator provides up to 80,000 Btu as a free heat source for the building’s radiant heat system. Thermal energy (at a provision of 180° F) is transferred from the heat exchanger to the return loop where it’s mixed to much lower temperatures suitable for radiant comfort — delivered by more than seven miles of 3/4-inch oxygen-barrier PERT tubing in the high-mass floor slab.

That allows the generator to serve as the primary source of heat when running, but also to reduce the firing rate of the boilers if both systems are operating simultaneously. Combining the heat sources was accomplished without disrupting the typical 20-degree ∆T, maintaining the boilers’ ability to condense for highest operational efficiency.

Hajoca takes the stage

Hajoca Corp. in Lancaster brought the boilers to the site months earlier, along with pumps, radiant and snowmelt manifolds, components and fittings.

A bevy of Grundfos Magna1 ECM circulators were used for the hydronic system — most of them connected via press fittings to 1-inch and 1 1/2-inch copper.

Together, King and ROI Marketing selected tekmar 304P multi-switching relays for the in-floor radiant heat, while a tekmar 301P single-zone switching relay was used for the snowmelt.

King and Pleasant View Technicians Jim Mellot and Samuel Zook began their work in November 2022, and completed the job seven months later — providing radiant heat for most of the first floor, upstairs lunchroom, and 4,500 square feet of snowmelt outside.

“We’re delighted that we were chosen by Keystone to do this job,” King says. “We get a good feeling — that’s for sure — every time we come here to provide seasonal service for the equipment, or to buy tools. We’re among friends here.”