Bender UK looks back on a busy year as it marks 75th anniversary

However, we can all understand how important it is to maintain a constant supply of power to vital life-giving medical equipment or technology controlling railway signals, where an outage could prove disastrous.

In 1946, Walther Hans Bender had the patent granted for the Isometer – the world’s first insulation monitoring device which can be used in critical electrical systems to keep them running in the event of power failures. The many products and solutions Bender developed following this original patent all fulfil a similar purpose; monitoring and maintaining power with a view to preventing shut-down when you simply cannot afford failure.

Walther began an engineering firm in 1946 in Grünberg, Germany, in the same year he received the patent and this year Bender – which is still run by his family four generations later – celebrated its 75th anniversary. Among those joining in the celebrations is Bender UK, which has a history going back to 1997 when its managing director John Murray began selling the technology into sectors such as oil and gas and marine.

Initially based at Barrow’s Trinity Enterprise Centre, the company now has its head office in a custom built premise at Ulverston’s Low Mill business park.

Over the last 20 years Bender UK has widened applications for its technology, initially under the auspices of Steve Mason, a former applications engineer who went onto become managing director between 2010 and 2016 and is now chief executive of Bender Inc, in Pennsylvania. Since 2016 Gareth Brunton, also a former Bender engineer, has been managing director of the company.

While Bender UK has maintained its work in oil, gas and marine, it has expanded into healthcare, rail and manufacturing sectors and works in emerging markets such as e-mobility and renewable energy. Its staff work across the UK, designing, installing and developing full theatre solutions, power, energy and condition monitoring equipment.

Expansion for Bender UK continues. At the start of 2021 a new business unit Bender Ireland was formed, serving the expanding clients in the north and the Republic, and in June Bender opened a southern office at St Ives, near Cambridge, in response to the level of demand from NHS and private hospital clients in London and the South of the UK.

Bender UK’s products are essential in Group 2 medical locations, where power loss could prove fatal and are in use in over 90 per cent of hospitals in the UK and Ireland.

“In a situation where someone is on dialysis or in a special care baby unit or intensive care unit or an operating theatre, all of those areas must be backed up by Bender medical IT power system,” says marketing communications manager Lisa Hudson.

“In healthcare in the last five years we’ve repositioned ourselves from a power monitoring company to offering a fully integrated range of theatre technology.

Our core healthcare strength was in medical power supplied with third party UPS battery systems – which act as resilient back up power in the event of mains failure.

We also manufacture theatre control panels, which clinicians use to manage the entire theatre environment, including temperature, lighting and humidity. In addition, for several years now we have been the sole UK distributors for Merivaara theatre products including surgical lights, tables and integrated theatre systems – all specified, installed and maintained 24/7 by our expert team.

Bender UK’s expertise in healthcare has made its work even more essential during the pandemic, with its teams providing critical care power systems for the emergency Nightingale hospitals set up across the country."

Lisa says the company does far more than simply installing and servicing technology developed by its parent company.

“It’s a very engineer-led process so we’re constantly innovating and designing new things and if there is a problem which hasn’t been solved yet then we will find a way of doing it,” she says.

“We will work the R&D team in Germany to develop new solutions.” Managing director Gareth Brunton says demand has continued to be strong in the healthcare sector as hospitals have responded by increasing capacity and resilience.

 “There was a big investment in the emergency departments,” he says.

“We had an awful lot of work to do in a short space of time and those Nightingale hospitals were literally going up over a weekend and we needed to have people working many hours. It was a brilliant effort and I think that’s a great credit to the team. “Last year was actually the best year we’ve had by some way and for the first six months of this year we’re ahead of where we were last year.”

He says that while some of its work in the clinical arena – providing equipment for theatres – was shelved during the pandemic this has now come back strongly. Activity in the oil and gas and rail sectors also stalled slightly during the pandemic but this is now buoyant as operators seek to extend the life of as many oil fields as they can. Gareth says some of the work in oil and gas is coming via new submersible remote operated vehicles being used for decommissioning platforms, exploratory work or for laying telecommunications cables.

In the rail sector he says the company is benefiting from Network Rail’s five-year programme of investment to make it more reliable, safer and increase capacity. “They are really looking to improve all the mainline signal systems and digitalise the whole of the network,” he says.

“Historically, we’ve only really dealt with signal power monitoring. We see it now as an opportunity to offer remote condition monitoring, servicing and remote managed services.”

He says this involves an increased focus on using technology to diagnose or predict faults without having to send technicians to a site.

The strong performance over the last 18 months has also seen the company take on 16 staff with more new appointments planned before the end of this year. Gareth says it is likely to increase the total number of staff to 80 next year to keep track with the growth and restructures in the business. “We’ve always been quite a lean company,” he says.

“But we want to try and create a bit more time for people to take on development opportunities and training. We want to create that because we know the future of the company is good people and we’ve got to invest in them to make sure they are delivering the right solutions.”