Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Low 23F. Winds light and variable..

Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Low 23F. Winds light and variable.

Victor Santiago wraps a belt with shrink wrap at Wire Belt Co., which makes mesh wire conveyor belting primarily for the food industry. The company is moving from its 30-year home in Londonderry to the former Walmart building in Bedford.

Victor Santiago wraps a belt with shrink wrap at Wire Belt Co., which makes mesh wire conveyor belting primarily for the food industry. The company is moving from its 30-year home in Londonderry to the former Walmart building in Bedford.

After 30 years in its Londonderry facility on Harvey Road, the fourth-generation family-owned Wire Belt Co. is moving to a new facility in Bedford.

Having outgrown its current space, Wire Belt President and CEO David Greer decided it was time to find a bigger building.

He recently signed a lease for the former Bedford Walmart building at 17 Colby Court and will begin renovating the 123,000-square-foot space for light manufacturing. The company makes wire mesh conveyor belting primarily for the food industry.

Greer said the area is already zoned for industrial use, and the building owners had received a change of use permit from the town Planning Board. Additional approvals will be needed from the town to renovate the building, once the designs are finalized.

He’s hoping to bring a proposal before the Bedford Planning Board by early November, and ultimately move the company over to a newly developed facility by third quarter 2022.

The company bought the Londonderry building in 1990 and expanded it twice, increasing it from 24,000 square feet to 48,000 square feet, and installed a 250-kilowatt rooftop solar array, enough to cover half of what it uses. At the time the array was installed, in 2010, it was the largest solar array in the state.

“That is far eclipsed now,” Greer said.

Today, Associated Grocers of New England in Pembroke claims the title for having the largest rooftop array with the 3,400-panel system recently installed by Revision Energy.

Greer said he plans to build a new 1-megawatt solar array on the Bedford building, which should cover all their energy needs, and he’s teamed up with ReVision Energy for the project.

Not including the cost of the solar panels, Greer expects the building renovation process, converting it from a retail store to a light industrial space, will cost somewhere in the area of $6 million to $8 million. Sullivan Construction of Bedford will be doing the renovations.

Wire Belt Company will immediately occupy about 70,000 square feet, and ultimately grow into about 100,000. The remainder 23,000 square feet will be leased out, Greer said.

The new space will allow the company to expand its production lines, add new machines, get rid of 30 ancillary storage containers it uses to store its wire and develop new products. The company makes its own production machines, since the proprietary process gives them a competitive edge.

It will also allow Wire Belt to hire more people and reduce the amount of overtime required of the workers. Some are working up to 40 hours of overtime over their regular 40 hours, Greer said.

The company currently has over 100 employees in New Hampshire, and will be hiring 10 more people in the short term, in engineering, production, customer service and other areas.

Finding an industrial space wasn’t easy, Greer said.

“We had a number of false starts finding a new home,” he said.

He wanted to keep the business within a 10-mile radius because he said keeping their current employees is “crucial.” But the cost to build a new facility is “exorbitant” and competition for existing buildings is hot.

“The market for industrial space, I think, is worse than the housing market,” Greer said. “There’s virtually nothing available.”

Before settling on the former Walmart building, company leaders looked at two other buildings in Bedford. One of the buildings they looked at was the former Segway building at 14 Technology Drive, but Greer said they were outbid.

Wire Belt acquired similar companies in England and Germany in the 1990s, which make a similar product, with some variation, for the global market.

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