When Chris and Michelle Michael founded Meaco in 1991, the goal was to specialize in monitoring and control equipment for museums and art galleries. In 1992, Meaco developed the world's first radio environmental monitoring system in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This gave Meaco a much higher profile and over the next 10 years Meaco established itself as one of the most important suppliers of humidity monitoring and control equipment to museums across Europe.

In 1999, Meaco approached Mitsubishi Electric to become their exclusive UK distributor for their range of portable dehumidifiers. That was the beginning of a successful relationship that flourished for the next 20 years.

In 2005, Chris and Michelle sold the museum part of the business to focus their efforts on the rapidly growing home dehumidifier business.

In 2009, expansion continued and Meaco became a dehumidifier manufacturer, using the experience gained from working in museums, distributing Mitsubishi Electric and listening to customers to ensure that each and every dehumidifier not only solves a problem, but also improves the user's quality of life.

Meaco is now internationally regarded as a major player in the industry, selling to 20+ countries across Europe, North America and South Africa. Exports account for 50% of the business and create a growing number of jobs here in the UK.

Suppliers, customers and competitors consider Meaco as a measure of quality and development. We have been pushing the industry to reduce the energy consumption of dehumidifiers and it has been pleasing to see the way many of our competitors have followed our lead in this area and now customers can benefit from lower electricity bills.

Another for us was noise and this is an area where we made huge gains in 2018 and we continue to strive to reduce the noise level of our products without compromising low power consumption.

In 2019, we removed all plastic hoses from our dehumidifiers, reducing the amount of plastic going to waste by 75,000 meters. In 2020, it increased to 130,000 meters. We continue to call on other manufacturers to follow suit so that between us we can reduce the amount of plastic that is wasted around the world by the millions each year.

In 2020, we replaced several hundred thousand pieces of polystyrene in our packaging with recyclable cardboard. This costs us more and reduces profits, but it is an important step forward in reducing the burden on the planet and again, something that all manufacturers should focus on.

We are very proud to have won all the awards for our products from Which?, Good Housekeeping, QuietMark and Stiftung Warentest to name but a few, but we are still proud of the great feedback we receive from customers on a daily basis. how much they value the support of our dedicated customer support team and how our products help them in their everyday lives.

As a company we have supported youth sports locally for many years, particularly rugby and swimming, and are now delighted to be working closely with the local David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation (DSWF) to support their elephant orphanage in Zambia.