Family Made In Oley, PA
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Most HVLS fan companies started in a factory. AmeriWind started in a calf barn. Kevin Hoover grew up on a Pennsylvania dairy farm, taught himself electronics, and built his first ventilation controller for his family’s barn. More than 25 years and 30,000 control systems later, that same farm-first thinking shapes every fan AmeriWind builds.
A Farm Family Saving for a Farm
In the early 1980s, Kevin’s parents were renting the farm they worked, and they wanted one of their own. They started with 30 dairy cows at a time when interest rates sat at 15%. Within a year, their herd’s production ranked in the top 5% in the county.
Money was tight because every spare dollar was going toward buying a farm. Kevin remembers a childhood with plenty of family time and not much extra cash. That habit of spending carefully stuck with him, and it still shows in how he runs the business.
A Hard Turn Toward Electronics
When Kevin was 14, his older brother drowned in a farm pond. In the years that followed, Kevin found an interest in ham radio, and his parents helped him get the study books. He cared less about talking on the radio than about the electronics behind it.
A year later, a neighbor threw out a pile of electronic learning kits, books and test equipment. Kevin carried most of it home. Around the same time, he was diagnosed with severe flat feet, which made a lifetime of physical farm work a harder road. Each setback pushed him a little further toward the work he does today.
The Calf Barn That Started It All
In 2000, the family built a new calf barn. Like most barns then, its curtains were opened and closed by hand. Kevin wanted them automated, but he didn’t have the authority to buy a controller.
So he set out to build one. He signed up for a programming class at a local vocational school, and it was canceled for low enrollment. He waited a year and signed up again. It was canceled again. He bought a small controller and taught himself instead.
Within several months, the barn had a working automated curtain system, and his dad was impressed. It wasn’t perfect: there was no screen for changing temperature settings, so every adjustment took a laptop. Kevin kept going, moved on to harder embedded controls, and spent three months just getting a set of LED lights to blink. Then the rest started to click.
From Side Project to AutoVent
Other dairy farmers wanted what Kevin had built. For three years, he made ventilation controls for them on the side while still working on the family dairy. AutoVent officially launched in 2008.
Growth brought a hard lesson. One customer made up half of the company’s sales. Kevin was attached to his own design and missed the problems they were running into. On a service call, he found out they had spent two years building their own replacement. “I’d had my head in the sand the whole time,” he wrote. He fixed the problems, but the customer was gone.
He took that lesson to heart. Twelve years after starting from nothing, the company had built 20,000 control systems. Today AutoVent has built more than 30,000 for dairy barns and greenhouses.
How a Controls Company Started Building Fans
Large HVLS fans were already common in dairy barns, and Kevin’s team spent years servicing and maintaining name-brand fans in livestock buildings. Those barns are hard on equipment. Fans in open, windy buildings had a habit of destroying themselves in storms, and typical warehouse fans weren’t designed for those conditions.
Kevin’s first answer was a control system that monitors the wind and stops the fans automatically. Those systems went into barns across the country. AmeriWind still offers wind shutdown today through the CCA1 wind sensor.
His second answer was to build the fan himself. Demand was growing outside of dairy, and supplying the whole fan took little extra work for a team already building the controls. So AmeriWind set out to build heavy-duty fans with the ag community in mind first, not as an afterthought. The result was the T-Series.
What a Farmer’s Background Means for the Fans
Kevin’s years in barns show up across the lineup. T-Series fans run from 18 to 30 ft and are built to withstand crosswinds in large agricultural and industrial buildings. The E-Series covers 12 to 18 ft for smaller spaces, and the Compact line fits shops and parlors at 8 and 10 ft. These main lines are direct drive, with no gearbox or belt to service.
For farms watching every dollar, the 20 ft belt drive livestock cooling fan is the lower-cost option. Every AmeriWind fan ships free to the contiguous US and carries a 3-year warranty. The fans are built and supported in Pennsylvania, which you can read more about in how AmeriWind builds its fans in Pennsylvania.
Still Solving Farm Problems
Kevin runs AmeriWind and AutoVent from Oley, in Berks County, not far from the Lancaster dairy community where his roots are. The core purpose hasn’t changed since that first calf barn: help customers eliminate stale air with equipment built to last and priced for real operations. He tells the longer version of his story, including what each setback taught him, in his chapter of the Amazon bestseller Persistence, Pivots and Game Changers.
See It on Video
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