Carolina Cooling & Plumbing, Inc. was formed in 1985 as a commercial, residential, and industrial plumbing and air conditioning contracting firm based in Surfside Beach, SC. From the start, the company worked across three different kinds of customers under one roof: homeowners, businesses, and industrial clients, each with different equipment and different stakes when a system failed.
Verlon and Claire Wulf purchased the company in 1995. Their leadership set the direction the company has followed since: grow the range of services a single contractor can offer, rather than asking customers to juggle separate companies for plumbing, cooling, and everything else a building depends on.
That direction led to a new name in 2006. Carolina Cooling & Plumbing, Inc. became Carolina Cool, Inc., a name that no longer confined the company to two trades. By then the business had already grown well past plumbing and air conditioning, and the new name gave the company a way to describe itself accurately.
We Offer a Wide Range of Services for Residential and Commercial Clients
The expansion continued for years afterward. Heating, electrical work, refrigeration, and indoor air quality service were each added as the company built out the capability to handle them. Friends in Verlon’s networking chapter of BNI still joke about when he will start up another division next, which is as much a comment on the company’s history as anything else: Carolina Cool has rarely stood still on the range of trades it covers. The Clean Air division, which specializes in indoor air quality and moisture control, is one of the more recent examples of that pattern.
That range of trades matters more on the coast than it would inland. Salt air corrodes equipment faster, humidity runs high most of the year, and the cooling season stretches on for months at a time, all of which put more strain on HVAC and electrical systems than a typical inland market sees. A contractor that only handles one trade can diagnose only part of a problem that often crosses into two or three systems at once. Carolina Cool’s growth into a full-service mechanical contractor was, in large part, a response to that reality.
Quality Service Built on A Great Reputation
The company’s reputation grew alongside its service list. Carolina Cool has been voted Best of the Beach for eight years running and has received the Reader’s Choice award for ten years running, recognition that traces back to the same staff-level commitment that built the business in the first place. Plumbers, electricians, project managers, engineers, and the service, purchasing, and management teams behind them have built the kind of tenure that shows up in fewer callbacks and more repeat customers.
Decades later, the company still operates on the same idea Verlon and Claire Wulf brought to it in 1995: give customers a written price before work begins, train technicians continuously on the systems they service, and cover enough trades that a Grand Strand property owner can make one call instead of four.