A Colorado company’s product is a de facto standard for large cold-storage facilities

Rebound Technologies IcePoint system works by dehumidifying a facility, allowing for “agile cooling,” and offering thermal storage

Eric Peterson //December 20, 2021//

A Colorado company’s product is a de facto standard for large cold-storage facilities

Rebound Technologies IcePoint system works by dehumidifying a facility, allowing for “agile cooling,” and offering thermal storage

Eric Peterson //December 20, 2021//

Rebound Technologies | Commerce City | Product: Energy & Environment

CEO John Fox envisions Rebound Technologies IcePoint system becoming a de facto standard for large cold-storage facilities. 

Co-founder and CTO Russell Goldfarbmuren invented IcePoint and started Rebound about a decade ago. “He started out in solar and wanted to move into storage in an effort to support renewables coming onto the grid,” Fox says. “That’s how he started to think about ice and thermal storage as a battery, versus just a battery for a battery’s sake.” 

The technology works by dehumidifying a facility, allowing for “agile cooling,” and offering thermal storage, Fox says. Essentially, the system’s patented icemaker freezes water when it’s most economical, then injects salt into the ice as a freeze suppressant. The resulting -25 degrees Fahrenheit brine pulls unwanted heat from the freezers at the facilities. 

IcePoint operates more efficiently than legacy cold-storage technology and reduces waste by freezing food faster. When shipments arrive and doors open for the trucks, cold-storage facilities “get overly taxed and it’s not set up for those peak demands,” Fox says.  

The dehumidification capability is a big selling point, he adds. “We actually do an air-to-brine heat exchange where the brine is actually in contact with the facility’s air. We’re actually taking the worst, most humid air off the docks, sucking that into our machine, removing water, and then putting it back into the freezer, very cold and very dry. We can remove 20 or 30 gallons of water an hour from the facility.” 

The nine-employee company manufactures in-house. Rebound is now able to build two IcePoint units simultaneously at its 10,000-square-foot facility in Commerce City. “We’re doing everything ourselves,” Fox says. “We have a small manufacturing crew.” 

The initial system is running at the company’s space as it builds out the next ones for large cold-storage facilities on the Front Range in early 2022. “Our first customer is warehousing and distribution, but we can move up the food chain into the processing world,” Fox says.

This article is part of the 2021 Made in Colorado feature. To learn more about the Colorado companies changing manufacturing in the state, click here