Carel: HVAC and refrigeration controllers, humidifiers and site supervisors

Overview

Carel was founded in 1973 as C.AR.EL. and grew from controls for air conditioning into a group that also supplies humidifiers, refrigeration controllers and the software that supervises them. Its history records the first HUMITRONIC humidifier in 1978, a research centre from 1998, overseas plants from the 2000s and a stock-market listing in 2018. The company still describes itself around two markets, HVAC and refrigeration, and reports them separately.

In refrigeration, the range is built to cover a whole food store rather than a single appliance. Panel controllers run plug-in cabinets and small cold rooms, MPXPRO runs display cases and cold-room evaporators, pRack runs the compressor rack, and the boss supervisors gather these controllers on site. Each family has its own published manual with a serial protocol table, which is what makes the controllers readable by a third-party monitoring system.

Carel has also added software through acquisition. The 2023 purchase of a majority of Kiona, a Trondheim group whose software optimises energy use in refrigeration systems and buildings, gave it a remote energy service to sit above its own controllers.

Offering

The MPXPRO controls one display case or cold-room evaporator. It is a DIN-rail controller supplied as Master and Slave boards: the Master can coordinate up to five Slaves, for example across a multiplexed cabinet line, and carries the serial connection for all of them.

The pRack pR300 and its predecessor the pR100 are programmable controllers for supermarket and cold-store compressor racks. They manage compressors and condenser fans on up to two suction lines and two condensing lines, and report suction and condensing pressures, superheat and discharge temperatures.

For stand-alone appliances, the ir33+ platform covers ir33+, ir33+ wide, ir33+ small wide, easy wide and easy small wide panel controllers. UltraCella is a modular cold-room controller platform with its own accessories.

Supervision comes from the boss family. The cold-room range describes boss micro panels for systems of up to 30 connected devices, with an embedded Wi-Fi hotspot for commissioning and, on premium versions, a 4G modem that sends alarms by SMS, email or Telegram. Hardware is sold through equipment manufacturers and distributors; Kiona adds energy optimisation sold as software.

Technology

Carel's refrigeration controllers talk over RS-485. On the MPXPRO, the user manual states that the Master's serial port recognises the CAREL supervisor protocol and Modbus RTU automatically, and that each Slave is addressed from the Master's own address. The pR300 manual sets the supervisor protocol per port, so one port can stay on a CAREL supervisor while the other is set to MODBUS SLAVE; its default supervisor address is 196.

The ir33+ panel controllers have no serial terminals of their own. An IROPZ48500 or IROPZ485S0 card plugs into the programming-key connector, and the ir33+ manual prints the Modbus number of every probe, alarm and relay status, with temperatures in tenths of a degree. That table is the practical starting point for reading these units from any Modbus master.

At store level, the boss supervisors collect the serial networks and present trends, alarms and web pages. RefIndustry's report on boss micro describes it as an edge device with Wi-Fi, a 4G modem, data trending and integration of third-party devices over common HVAC/R protocols.

Security of the supervisors has needed attention. A CISA advisory of June 2024 rated a path traversal flaw in boss-mini 1.4.0 at CVSS 9.8 and directed users to version 1.6.0 or later, default credentials changed and a segregated network.

Markets

Carel sells into two markets of very different size. RefIndustry's report on the 2025 results puts HVAC revenue at €450.9 million, up 10.0%, and refrigeration at €177.2 million, up 5.5%. HVAC growth was led by North America, up 20.9%, where data-centre and commercial cooling drove demand; EMEA grew 7.6% and APAC 1.4%.

The company profile lists refrigeration applications as cold rooms, refrigerated cabinets, compressor racks and condensing units for supermarkets, food service and cold-chain facilities, alongside healthcare, museums and industrial processes on the humidification side. It names sales subsidiaries in seventeen countries, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Korea, Thailand and New Zealand, and partners and distributors in a further 80 countries.

Kiona extends the refrigeration channel into food retail software. When Carel bought its majority stake in 2023, Cooling Post reported that Kiona's software served around 57,000 facilities and food retail stores across Europe from 17 offices in eight countries.

Company

CAREL INDUSTRIES S.p.A. is registered in Padua and has its headquarters at Via dell'Industria 11 in Brugine. Luigi Rossi Luciani founded it in 1973 with three partners, named by Wikipedia as Luigi Nalini, Rocco Cilenti and Giancarlo Galvani. Rossi Luciani is chairman and Francesco Nalini is chief executive officer. The shares have traded on the Milan exchange since the 2018 listing.

Growth has come partly from acquisitions. The company history lists Recuperator and HygroMatik in the 2010s, then Arion, Sauber, Klingenburg, Senva, Enginia, CFM, Eurotec and Kiona. Production sites include Suzhou in China, opened in the 2000s, and plants in Brazil and Croatia, the Croatian one doubled in the 2020s; Wikipedia counts twelve production sites and more than 2,700 people in 2025, while the company's own page gives about 3,000.

The 2025 results show revenue of €629.0 million, up 8.7%, EBITDA of €124.1 million and net income of €73.6 million. The group ended 2025 with net cash of €18.4 million against net debt of €50.2 million a year earlier, its first net cash position since the listing. RefIndustry reported research and development spending of €32.7 million, above 5% of revenue.