Do you trust the “pros” in your area?

ILikeEmOlder

Long story short, I think it is fair to say that hiring an HVAC contractor in today’s world is akin to rolling the dice at the craps table…odds are that the house wins, and you are not the house.

I find it hard to find good contractors to work with (regardless of trade), whether it is my own house or that of a client.

What I cannot stand is the amount of faith people put in labels — whether it be “licensed,” “premier” contractor, etc. This is about as aggravating as thinking the big companies are inherently better than the small shops out there.

I remember my earliest years in the trades. I learned on my own that most guys calling themselves pros were hiding behind the label. The real “pros” always seemed to humbly just say they were always working at being the best they could without any chest pumping.

Fast forward to today, I am looking at taking a teaching job as an instructor for folks looking to enter the trades at the post-high school level. I have a good idea of what they may need to know to be successful in the trades, but I wonder whether there will be enough good companies for them to grow within.

I am left with the feeling that my job will be two-fold: train and prepare them, and develop the companies that will hire them and allow them to grow and prosper in their chosen path.

Please tell me I am not alone in feeling this way!

Intplm.

You are not alone. This is a problem that has been manifesting itself for decades.

With your teaching position, hopefully that position will also include a job placement service through the school. Vetting employers has become similar to vetting future employees. Something unheard of back when. Hopefully you will have a curriculum that meets the requirements you deem necessary and the cooperation of the administration. This mixture combination is most important for successful graduates well trained for the trade.

Not to mention the reputation of the instructor.

hot_rod

pretty much every Plumbing and HVAC company will hire the right person. There are more job openings than job seekers in any trade

Bloomberg Report claims by 2027 we will be short 550,000 plumbers!

So you don’t need to develop companies to hire your trainees.

Clean, sober, on time is a good first interview. Any technical competence beyond that is a bonus for the employers and a pay boost for the applicant!

One shop near me picks up high school students at the end of class, trains them and offers a job when they graduate.

Good luck on the project

jesmed1

Here in the Boston suburbs I think it's a "glass half full" situation. I've talked to a lot of contractors who cannot get enough trained help. So it seems there is a huge need for a new generation of trained, motivated young people willing to start on the bottom rung and learn from the older guys. Unfortunately the older guys are retiring, and there's a gap in the middle where the skills and knowledge that should have been passed along is being lost.

As for good companies, it's also a "glass half full" situation IMO. Our condo building has a very good, large Boston-area oil company servicing our boilers and delivering oil. Their boiler techs are well trained and know their stuff. I wouldn't hesitate telling a young person to go work for them.

On the other hand, our church has a service contract with a small family-owned HVAC company that has let us down more than once. The business was started by the father decades ago, and he knew his stuff. Then he retired and his sons took over, and they are not too sharp. They installed a new gas furnace without doing any duct size calculations, with the result that the furnace overheated repeatedly and had to be locked in low fire mode permanently in order not to damage the heat exchanger. So I would not send any new hires to them.

It's probably the same everywhere. You can find a lot of good contractors here in Boston, but you can also find a lot of guys you wouldn't give a second chance to and who you would not want "bringing up" the next generation.

Larry Weingarten

Hi, I'd like to add that self employment is an option. For the tech that knows their technical stuff, there will always be work. But to work for yourself, you'll want some financial know-how. Ellen Rohr's books, along with many others will give the understanding needed to actually make the business work. I prefer the stability and responsibility of self employment. I've been teaching financial literacy at a local high school. The education is sorely needed!

Yours, Larry

GroundUp

Over the years, I've worked with enough contractors to generally know which ones are competent and which are not. There are a lot of really good electricians local to me, but the rest of the trades are a crapshoot at best. The big name outfits tend to have so many employees that what you generally see are the ones who just got tossed into the mix with little to know knowledge on the trade. When I was working commercial, there were thousands of other tradesmen who came and went during that time and while I'll admit that sometimes I didn't belong there either, VERY few of them were somebody you'd want on your team. One job in particular was a remodel of an entire level in a hospital with all new boilers, piping, fan coils, heat exchangers, and everything else hydronic. I was a foreman there for about a year and had a total of about 90 pipefitters pass through my crew despite never having more than 15 at one time. The only guy I could trust to do anything without messing it up was a brand new first year apprentice, and even he was one that was late every day. One guy was in his upper 50s and couldn't do anything without having his hand held. I tried for 3 weeks to spoon feed him and answer every silly question, but one day he asked me for the 30th time "what does this symbol mean?" on the print (it was a valve symbol, that everybody knows) and I lost it. "You can't weld, you can't solder, you can't read a tape measure, you can't core drill, you can't climb a ladder, and you can't read a print. What exactly can I use you for?" His response was that he just turned out as a journeyman (following a 5 year apprenticeship) in 2004 so I have to give him a chance to learn. This discussion took place in 2017, so he'd been a pipefitter for ~18 years but needed more time. I'm of the opinion that you're either a tradesman or you're not, and you can't teach someone with no mechanical inclination to be one. Unfortunately many of those people can't do anything else either, so they come to the trades because it pays well and generally allows a lower level of education than say, a white collar job. Even some of my fellow foremen who were in charge of big 7 figure jobs could barely be trusted to cut a thread or sweat a joint, but they were well organized and could adjust the manpower enough to make a schedule work.

Just a few months ago I had a service call on an old WM that was making funny noises and the basement heat wasn't working. The first time homeowner had paid 2 small shops and one big shop to fix it and one of the little guys replaced a relief valve and expansion tank (maybe it needed them but maybe not) and the other two told her the boiler needs to be replaced. It was as simple as a new circulator (noise) and new thermostat (basement) and took me 5 minutes to figure that out. I'm definitely no genius when it comes to service and generally avoid service for that reason, but after seeing the competence levels of other local shops, it's actually scary what people are doing out there.

Intplm.

Trusting the pro's in my area? It takes some time to get to know them.The issues I have had and have read above come down to two things; One is trial and error, that being getting to know who to trust. And two, building and maintaining a good relationship.

I like to be able to say, thats my plumber, painter, electrician and HVAC/R company. That five letter word trust. That's the golden ticket.

RTW

Quote above:

"The education is sorely needed!"

Agreed. A large part of the equation for successful education in the Trade Schools is funding from the Federal Dept. of Education, a department that in the past week reduced or dissolved education funding to all states; for all I know the department exists in name only.

I don't envy the challenges ahead for the OP and best if students get involved asap, but lack of funding may doom the industry

Responses from instructors in the trades welcome on the demise of funding from the Dept. of Education and its anticipated effects

Regards,

RTW

Mad Dog_2

Throwing $$$ at a problem rarely solves anything. There are much deeper & more inherent reasons why. Mad Dog

Intplm.

Trade schools are very important. More so now than in our recent past.

One of the things that trade schools cannot fail at is its relationship between administration the instructors and of course the students.

For example. When I was a Voc. Ed. instructor I fell victim to what I see happening in our grade schools today. Administration allowing for bad behavior to rule the day from the students.

I had an unruly student. Would cause disruptions constantly. This would happen numerous times for weeks. And it was an adult class!

The entire class was upset. I reported this issue to the front office with a response that was equivalent to a shrug. They wouldn't do anything about it. Finally I asked the student to leave.

The next day I was asked to come to the office. The student was there. To make a long story short I was asked to apologize to the student right there in the office. Does this sound crazy to you? Can you believe it?! I couldn't. But yet there I was ambushed in the office. The other students were also upset after finding out what happened. But, you know what I did? With my best poker face I apologized. And I said I will handle things differently next time. The timing when this happened was at the end of the semester. I submitted my two weeks notice and left to the disappointment of the students and fellow instructors. And as a result of my leaving the school from what I was told had to scramble to find someone else to fill the vacancy. They were now also under threat to lose their accreditation.

I was a well thought of instructor with above average and excellent performance reviews. I ended up at a different school that didn't behave this way, taught there for years. The school that I had left sold to another company and closed shortly after. This was reportedly due to the poor practices of the administration.

@ILikeEmOlder Integrity and fairness builds trust and success. Hopefully the school that you teach in will allow for it.

Long Beach Ed

I don't see the lack of government funding as diminishing the supply of qualified mechanics in the industry any more than I see the reduction in illegal immigration reducing the supply of qualified mechanics.

The private market and its finances dictates the supply and quality of a profession, not the government's supply of cash.

When disposable income, qualified contractors reap the rewards. When customers can't afford to eat, handymen get more work.

RTW

It seems government has played a positive role in trade school education, though I'm sure there are other approaches as well, but I doubt churches and charity groups will make up the funding lost from the now defunct Federal Dept. of Education

Here is a reference and would appreciate input from current trade school educators on losing funding in the comments

QUOTE:

" The Department of Education provides funds for trade school education through various grants and programs. These include Pell Grants, federal work-study programs, and discretionary grant and program funds for State and Local Education Agencies (LEAs). Additionally, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) funds education research and teaching"

Regards,

RTW

Hap_Hazzard

You need to know the right questions to ask. The first and only time I hired someone to come and work on my boiler I got lucky and they sent someone who had taken Dan's steam course. I only needed a combustion anaysis, which could have been done by any competent gas man, but it was good to know he knew steam systems too.

hot_rod

A community college professor I know got frustrated when many of the students, high school grads could even do the basic math needed for simple load calcs, etc. High schools graduating students that can barely read, write, add and subtract!

But they could txt like nobody's business :)

Hap_Hazzard

When criticizing education, make sure you chek you're speling carfuly. 😂

Intplm.

In the state of Connecticut they have been refurbishing and building new technical high schools for the past twenty-five + years. The last one to be revamped, from what I have been told is Windham Vocational Technical High School located in Willimantic Connecticut. The remore is that the Windham school will be replaced with a new complex, and moved to the grounds of the University of Connecticuts depot campus. If this is indeed happening, It will be a completion of a three or four plus decades project. Currently the Tech. Ed. High School system has some eleven thousand students working toward diplomas.

ILikeEmOlder

Thanks for the input.

It’s all valuable, because it is coming from your experiences over the years.

I have heard a lot of talk about the politics within education. The folks in these programs will be pursing associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, so I imagine those politics will be a part of the job for me.

The curriculum is another matter that has yet to be fully revealed to me.

I am doing what I can now to prepare, as I would any challenging project in the field.

Keep the comments coming.

hot_rod

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/comment/1848739#Comment_1848739

If only this site had someone knowledgable enough to spell check all the posts 😚

Like a spell check cop👨‍✈️

JMWHVAC

Thirty plus years ago I needed an oil boiler tech as mine was not working quite right. I called an outfit that's well known in the area, said I need it cleaned and fixed. At least I thot that's what I said.

When tech came I told him about the problem. He looked surprised and said, "I am just here to clean the boiler. If you want a problem fixed you have to call the office." My turn to be surprised! I could not believe they would send a tech out that cannot correct combustion and fix probs. Inaudibly I said, "Alright buddy, do your thing and get out and I will learn to fix it." And so I started learning & doing service.

SlamDunk

In my opinion, youcan always boil it down to 30% of any team, or group that are heavy hitters who genuinley love what they do and excel at it. The other 70% just want to look as cool as the 30% but rarely love what they do. That is the secret sauce and you can't teach it.

Mad Dog_2

You can't teach guts either. Mad Dog

Intplm.

The worker who does most of the work is given the work of the rest.