_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ From high-end home installations in North Carolina to gigawatts of modular cooling for some of the world’ s biggest data center clients, Environmental Air Systems( EAS) has spent decades bringing every part of the job under one roof. As a complete mechanical, electrical, and plumbing( MEP) solutions provider, the business delivers building services, controls, and engineered modular solutions, occupying an unusual position as both a manufacturer and a contractor.
While most of the company’ s clients today are Fortune 500 companies, EAS has modest roots dating to 1953. To learn more about how EAS has evolved, we sit down with Bill Bullock, Senior VP, Strategic Business Solutions.“ We got our start doing residential-type installations for highend homes, installing some of the first air conditioning and heating in the Greensboro area of North Carolina,” Bill opens.“ As we grew, the textile industry came to the Southeast, and we engineered many of the systems that supported it, including custom air handling units and air washers. That work gave rise to our manufacturing division, and we became a sheet metal powerhouse able to do really anything made from sheet metal.
“ When that market began to decline and jobs moved first to Mexico and then to China, EAS looked elsewhere,” he continues.“ We moved to the pharmaceutical industry and built one of the first buildings in North Carolina’ s Research Triangle Park for Glaxo Wellcome, now GlaxoSmithKline. In the 1980s, we formed Envirotrol, our controls and building automation business unit.”
The next major shift was between 2010 and 2015 when EAS was purchased by Comfort Systems USA. Comfort Systems,
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