About
Named after the SpaceX engine. The Merlin powers the Falcon 9 to orbit and lands it back, and the story translates: a small team building the engine everyone else's product depends on. The wizard on the logo is a wink. The Merlin in the old stories made things work without showing his math.
Why Merlin exists
The fan array industry was built around the fans. Controls came along as a part you had to buy because the array needed one. Vendors integrated with one fan brand because that simplified their supply chain. The result: a generation of fan arrays where the controls were the weakest part of the product, every project was forced into someone else's fan catalog, and every retrofit had to either accept the old controls or rip out the bulkhead.
Merlin started from the other end. We built a controls package as a standalone product first (the brain) and let customers bring the rest. Multiple fan brands, multiple cabinet designs, multiple integration paths. The controls don't care; they're built to be agnostic.
That's the entire thesis. Everything on this website is what it looks like to take that thesis seriously: A2L compatibility built into the override architecture, two independent safety circuits, per-fan diagnostics across 15 categories, a five-book documentation system, and a selection software that lets engineers spec their own controls in minutes.
The team
Founder
Project engineer at MAS HVAC, where he founded the R&D department and developed an early PLC controls package for fan arrays. Eight years at Q-PAC after the spinoff, climbing from R&D engineer to Director of Business Development. SpaceX Hawthorne in between.
Partner
Owned the product roadmap for the Vision and Skyline AHU lines at Daikin Applied from 2022 to early 2026, two of the company's flagship platforms. Four years at Greenheck before Daikin, in product development and applications engineering. Nearly a decade across two of the industry's anchor brands, on both sides of the fan-array conversation: the OEM building the AHU and the fan brand inside it. Now consulting and building software for commercial HVAC.
[NEEDS INPUT: Dan White portrait]
Partner
Full stack developer specializing in commercial HVAC OEM selection software. The configurator tools that reps and engineers use to spec equipment, generate submittals, and ship documentation. Five years building them at Q-PAC, three more at MAS HVAC since 2023. A coding wizard, fittingly.
Manufacturing & location
Merlin Air is based in Green Cove Springs, Florida. Our factory handles assembly, testing, and commissioning of every Control Panel, QCB, and complete fan array system before shipment. Every order ships factory-tested with the five-book documentation set.
Engineering support is available directly. We don't route you through a call center.