FROM A SMALL WORKSHOP TO THE TOP OF EUROPE: 50 YEARS OF KRONOTERM INNOVATION

The company in today’s sense of the word was born in 1990. Together with his wife Cvetka, Rudi Kronovšek founded Termo-tehnika in a fifty-square-metre sheet-metal workshop beside a farm with two cows and a pigsty. It was Cvetka who persuaded him to set out on his own.

The beginnings were modest and resourceful. “Spray cans were our paint shop, and tree branches our hangers for the parts,” the founder recalls of those days. Out of that improvisation grew something lasting: the habit of finding a solution through your own knowledge and persistence.

In the early years, the heat pump still had to be brought closer to people, so the team devised ingenious answers to very concrete problems. One device cooled a farmer’s milk and heated domestic hot water for showering at the same time; another cooled a cellar while preparing hot water. That very habit, of the heat pump solving a tangible problem, has remained at the foundation of the company.

The decisive steps followed slowly but surely. In 2003, the company began the serial production of domestic hot water heat pumps and so grew from a workshop into a manufacturer. It earned its customers’ trust with something that was rare at the time: testing every single unit in-house.

In 2013, with the forty-thousandth heat pump built, the company presented itself under a new brand, KRONOTERM. Two years later it moved into modern production premises with its own development laboratory, just a stone’s throw from where it all began.

The recent years have been packed with milestones more densely than all those before them. The central milestone of this period was the launch of the ADAPT heat pump in 2019, which radically changed how a heat pump is perceived as a device. It was the first with a distinctive design language, honoured by the profession with the international Archiproducts award, and at the same time so quiet that it greatly widened the possibilities for placing it in the immediate living space. In 2023, KRONOTERM presented the geothermal ETERA with a service life of up to thirty years; in 2024, the modular commercial ADAPT MAX, which turned demanding projects into child’s play; and in 2025, the domestic hot water ESSENTA for economical hot water preparation.

The peak of this development arrives precisely in the anniversary year. In 2026, KRONOTERM presented ADAPT 2, a new generation of its most recognisable heat pump, which builds on the quietness, efficiency and design of the first ADAPT and adds smarter, connected operation.

Fifty years after that first device, KRONOTERM employs more than 110 experts and brings development, production and service together under one roof. In 2026 it opened one of the most advanced service and support centres for heat pumps in Europe, from which it monitors the operation of more than 110,000 systems in real time, often detecting a possible fault before the user even notices it.

Through all fifty years, the same thread has run unbroken: a family company that passed its leadership from Rudi to his son Bogdan Kronovšek in 2010, and the conviction that it must be the best in everything it does. Everything, from development to the very last day a unit operates, stays at home, made in Slovenia.

“Fifty years is not a destination, but a stop along the way,” they say at the company. Behind every milestone stand the people who placed their trust in it: customers, partners and the team. It is to them that the thanks on this anniversary are dedicated. The rise that began in a small workshop goes on, and its finest stops may still lie ahead of us.

The rise continues, and the finest stops may well be ahead of us. Become part of the KRONOTERM story and contact us about your project.