Farmer’s Cool Invention Turns Profitable
When the air conditioner caught fire three years ago, Kate Khosla thought it was time to pull the plug — literally — on her husband Ron’s efforts to invent a better compressor-condensor-evaporator.
Ron and Kate Khosla are farmers, and it had always bothered them that it could cost $3,000 or more to have such a huge and heavy contraption installed to create a walk-in cooler room, cool enough to store their harvest in.
Khosla’s idea was simple: he thought he could build a gizmo that would allow an ordinary air conditioner to take a room’s temperature down as low as 32 degrees. Not all of his prototypes blew up, but neither did any of his early models last long enough to get the job done.
Last week, you could find Khosla juggling about a dozen small boxes at the New Paltz post office, sending his patent-pending CoolBot to farmers like himself. With next to no publicity or marketing, the CoolBot is becoming a very hot item. And it’s poised to go more places than the farm. He’s sold about 80 units at $250 a pop and has placed material orders that will allow him to build another 500.
Photo by Ken Bizzigotti.
Barbara Carey on May 4th, 2007 7:07 am
Ron and Kate – don’t lose hope!! I am a fellow inventor and it took several iterations before I got my first invention “right.” I have been fortunate to have experienced fantastic success. Keep at it!
David Stoker on May 6th, 2007 3:30 pm
Would this invention have any implicaations for the developing world and farmers in rural areas? What is required for it to be successful?
Leave a Reply