After 65 years in business, how does a business owner enter a new arena of commerce? For Frank Falatyn, the answer is to create a subsidiary making use of technologies being brought to the area in a burgeoning solar industry.
Falatyn, president of Fala Technologies, found necessity led not only to invention, but to opportunity. And now, among its other established business niches, the high-tech design and manufacturing company is also the parent company of PVI Solar, the national leader in creating solar powered LED signs and other off-grid solar power applications.
“In 2007, seeing a lot of manufacturing going to Asia, we had to find innovative new technology,” said Falatyn, whose father Frank Sr. founded the original company in 1955 as Ulster Tool and Die company and which had produced an array of semiconductor products during the halcyon years of IBM in Ulster County. “At the time I knew nothing about solar power but knew that we have done other new product development, so we figured this would be a good investment.”
Falatyn, who was awarded the New York State Small Businessperson of the year award in 2005, has shown a knack for developing partnerships and was among the founders of The Solar Energy Consortium, (TSEC) a non-profit public private partnership aimed at creating a cluster of solar energy and renewable energy businesses in the Hudson Valley and New York.
Falatyn said that as a partner in the endeavor, he did not want to compete in markets other TSEC companies were entering. “We didn”™t want to get into the solar panel business or solar cell business, those are commodities and also put us in competition with companies being attracted by TSEC. We asked what could we do to be a user of these new solar panels or solar cells?”
He said “it became pretty obvious pretty fast” lighting is an efficient way of using solar energy, but said the normal mode of taking direct current from a solar panel and transferring it to an inverter to create alternating current useful to the grid was already a crowded field.
“We took a different approach,” Falatyn said. “We design solar appliances or solar applications where you take solar energy and do a task.”
That led to creation of PVI Solar, a subsidiary of Fala Technologies. PVI expresses the equation power equals volts multiplied by amps. The company invented PowerLine, a patented technology that Falatyn calls, “A very sophisticated control system that collects power in a battery and knows when to turn it on,” even under varying hours of daylight.
An obvious marriage of technologies, he said, was combining solar power with LED lighting. “A new technology just coming into affordability,” Falatyn said and which as a semiconductor based lighting system, is showing rapid gains in brightness and flexibility.
And that created an opportunity. “We are a technical development company, we are engineers and scientists but we are not sales people,” said Falatyn. “So we worked with sales people and started the new company, PVI Solar.”
“We are not inventing panels, not inventing LEDs, but putting them together with our control and management system,” Falatyn said. The result is now seen locally at Benedictine Hospital and nationally from Massachusetts to Missouri to Texas. “We are the only company that makes this kind of sign.”
He said the technology is more expensive than conventional signs, but pays for itself through eliminating costs of electricity to operate the sign and said that the components are long lasting and extremely reliable. Currently, he said, the technology is immediately beneficial to the bottom line in places where companies don”™t want to run wires to a grid, but want to light a remote sign.
And he said PVI Solar is being recognized as the leading company in the field and is being asked to hold training sessions for other manufacturer”™s seeking to enter the field.
Solar power is fast being used for more and more applications. We are excited about all the different products we offer at Yonofoco Solar Store.