Pecan Engineering

Pecan Engineering was first registered as a business name in 1970. The first products were manufacturing equipment for the fiberglass industry. In 1978, Pecan Engineering opened a retail outlet at Crafers in the Adelaide Hills selling wood heaters, ceiling fans, insulation and solar water heaters, whilst still offering design and building services. The shop was called the Natural Energy Centre. Retailing quickly expanded to three shops and in January 1982 a heater wholesaling business was purchased and Pecan took over the employment of its local sales manager, Richard Mitchell (our present Marketing Director). We continued to design our own heaters initially having them manufactured by an outside contractor. We set up to manufacture ourselves in early 1983 and our first welder was Scott Cutting, who started in February 1983 and still is part of our team. The name Nectre was chosen being a derivative of Natural Energy CenTRE. At this time we moved manufacturing and the warehouse to Brompton but then in early 1984 we took over Thermalux stoves. We redesigned the large Thermalux cooking stove and employed their tradesman, Mike Maidment (our present Production Director). As the business grew we moved to our own new factory around the corner in Brompton. In 1990 we purchased our present factory at Acorn Road Dry Creek. We have steadily expanded both by building on the factory and acquiring adjacent properties. In this time we have steadily improved our stove designs as well as production techniques with steel now being laser cut and formed with computer controlled presses. We have recently built a calorific test room and dilution tunnel in order to test to the Australian standard for emissions, output and efficiency of wood heaters. With this facility we are developing the next generation in efficient, low emission wood heaters.