HVAC Residential Career Path

Residential HVAC Technicians Working Inside A Clients Home

There will be moments on the job when you’re stuffed into a roasting attic, sweating from places you didn’t even know you could sweat from, cutting your knuckles on sheet metal, on your fourth consecutive twelve-hour day, and you’ll think to yourself, “What the hell ever possessed me to become a residential HVAC technician?”

Then you’ll climb down out of the attic, flip the breaker back on, and feel cool air pouring out of the vents. The kids hoot, the wife brings you a glass of lemonade and the man of the house gives you a hardy slap on the back.

You think about the big paycheck you’ve got coming for the week and that boring office job you didn’t take and the fact that no supervisor was breathing down your neck… and then you’ll remember:

Money, independence, variety, and job-security … these are the things that bring people into residential HVAC work and keep them there for a long and lucrative career.

The Reality of Residential HVAC: From Sales to System Design

Residential work is a different world than what you might learn about in most HVAC technical programs. After spending months and months learning the refrigeration cycle, how motors work, the physics of gas and liquid refrigerant flow and electricity, it can be a shock to learn how much of the job is about sales and customer service… soft skills that instructors probably won’t talk too much about.

Residential HVAC technicians and installers serve the home heating and air conditioning business. They install, service, and replace residential HVAC systems, working alone and independently. Dispatchers pass along the jobs, but it’s often the responsibility of the technician to set up appointments, get details from the customer, even handle billing.

In many companies, residential technicians are also system designers and salespeople. Their compensation may even be largely commission-based, providing a quick route to good money for anyone with the right social skills and some salesmanship.

People Skills Are Critical To the Job

More than any other HVAC career path, working in residential means working with people. Part of being independent means your employer expects you to be the face of the company when dealing with customers. Keeping them happy is the biggest part of the job.

You’re in and out of private homes all day long. Some of them will be pristine and others look like junkyards, but every homeowner will expect you to be respectful of their property, and should be respected as the king of their castle. For you it’s a job site; for them, it’s home.

Customer service isn’t something that gets covered much in training but it’s an absolutely vital skill for residential HVAC techs. In a sense, it’s just as important as any technical skills you might learn.

School teaches you technical skills and troubleshooting, but, as one retired 30-year veteran of the industry we talked to put it, “How do you teach somebody communication skills?”

For the most part, you have to pick up people skills on your own, but don’t think that employers and managers won’t care. Every residential technician will be evaluated on how well they handle customer relationships.

“I’ve noticed that a lot of individuals who worked in retail before, or while they were going to school, have a little bit better knowledge on how to handle the customers,” says Kyle Buscher, a technician and service manager in Minnesota. “We’ve had a few guys who were strictly doing construction, and those were the guys that seem to have the hardest trouble with customer service.”

Residential is Quicker to Adapt to and Integrate New Technology

Customer service may be front and center but residential techs also need real technical chops. In some ways, high tech is coming to residential even faster than to the commercial/industrial side of the industry. With smaller, more modular and less expensive systems, the residential side of the industry can more easily adapt to changing technology and integrate high-tech components into existing systems:

NEST thermostats
Keen Smart Vents
Integrated home management systems
24/7 internet connection

Customers can be extremely informed and have high standards, which means technicians need to be even more knowledgeable about cutting edge HVAC innovations and Internet-based home-management systems.

Technology isn’t just changing the HVAC-system side of the business, though. Smart phones and the Internet are dramatically changing how the work gets done. A hacksaw, pipe wrench and voltmeter alone just aren’t going to cut it anymore.

Apps like iManifold allow techs to plug in numbers to calculate system capacity and perform onsite troubleshooting.
AAB’s Smart Tools offer plug-in sensors that turn a smartphone into a temperature sensor, airflow meter, or humidity detector.
Job scheduling is often handled online and customer contacts may be conducted through text messaging.
When the job is done, more and more service techs are taking care of the bill by swiping a customer credit card through a Square reader right on site.

Better Efficiency is the Upside … But it Comes at a Price

Customers are also increasingly sensitive to environmentally-friendly and green building standards. Their motivations to retrofit equipment can be driven not just be cost-efficiency standards but also by environmental standards. As a technician, you’ll have to become intimately familiar with efficiency standards and understand how programs such as the Residential Renewable Energy Tax Credit affect customer purchasing decisions.

But technicians have to walk a fine line. They know, for instance, that smart vents have the potential to burn out compressors if the system ducting isn’t resized. The knowledge is only half the battle, though; explaining to a customer why it’s not as easy or cheap as it looks on TV is the real challenge.

And new technologies introduce an entirely new category of problems that never existed a generation ago in residential HVAC. Technicians in the ‘80s never had to worry about a customer’s thermostat getting hacked and held hostage. Those challenges, and the right solutions to them, are still evolving, and any residential tech in the industry today is going to be part of that evolution.

Residential Will Give You All The Work You Can Handle

Because customer service is more important and staffing levels are lighter in residential companies, the work usually leads to plenty of overtime and late night, on-call hours.

“Residential, you spend a lot of time doing a lot of work,” says Mike DeRicco, a Pittsburgh area service technician who spent 15 years working in residential HVAC. “Meaning that you may work eight hours a day, but you might do 10 service calls in that eight hours.”

Successful residential techs thrive on the energy that comes with that fast pace. Walking into a new situation, assessing the problems, and coming up with a solution feeds the beast… you can feel like a hero ten times a day.

“Residential is much more personal,” says Buscher. “It’s much more face time.” And for many residential technicians, that is part of the draw. Working lonely hours on a strip mall roof doesn’t appeal to them.

Control Your Own Paycheck With Residential Sales

Some shops structure their business so that technicians also serve as salespeople. If you have any natural sales skills, this can be a big plus for residential jobs, because you can immediately start making good money—being paid a commission essentially puts your earning potential in your own hands.

The down side of this arrangement is that some of those same shops cut the base salary to incentivize sales. If sales isn’t your thing, you can find yourself under a lot of stress and pressure… and possibly even earning less than entry-level wages.

There is also an ethical quandary that sometimes comes with sales work that some technicians find uncomfortable. But this is easily resolved by getting back to the customer service perspective, as one retired HVAC foreman pointed out to us.

“You’re representing a company. You want to sell a product, you want to sell service, but you also are representing that client,” … “If you are working with somebody and you have a relationship with them, you have a responsibility to them to give them fair and honest appraisals.”

Getting Started in Residential HVAC

Most HVAC service techs in the industry today started off on the residential side of the business. Turnover is higher in residential firms and the education and experience standards required to get an entry-level job are relatively low. If you’re looking for a job right out of your training program, your best bet is to become a residential service tech.

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Getting a Foot in The Door

A lot of technicians get their start working as assistants, low-paid grunt laborers in busy HVAC companies. It’s a good way to get familiar with the business and make some contacts in the industry.

Getting an Education

It’s becoming less common to get promoted up to a full-fledged technician without some formal education. Almost all new technicians today have attended a trade school or community college program, or gone through a formal apprenticeship in HVACR before getting hired.

Although it’s a hands-on job, these technical details require some book-learning. Technicians that don’t know how to study don’t get very far.

Referring to EPA Section 608 certification and testing for other cards, Kyle Buscher told us, “I’d say we’ve had probably half the guys in our office pass on the first and the other half took two tries. I guess that goes to show the guys who put in the effort to actually study versus the ones who thought, ‘Oh, it’s an open book!’”

Getting a License

These programs often tie into state licensing requirements. Not all states license technicians, but those that do usually specify some formal education as well as on the job experience. In Vermont, for example, you will need either 4,000 hours of experience or 2,000 hours plus at least one year of HVAC school.

Cities and counties might also have their own license requirements, particularly in states that don’t have a blanket licensing program. And almost all technicians will need an EPA Section 608 certification for working with controlled refrigerants.

Regional demands can also dictate licensing and certification. For example, in the Northeast, the prevalence of oil-based heating puts oil-heat licenses and expertise in high demand. In the Midwest, gas heating is more common, so propane licenses and certifications are more common.

Manufacturers often have their own certification programs specific to their equipment, and some of them cooperate in supporting the NATE (North American Technical Excellence) certification.

Apprenticeships Bring Experience and Education Together

Apprenticeships are a route that combines on-the-job experience with formal training. The downside is that they can be extremely competitive and hard to get into, with candidate pools of several hundred hopefuls competing for a few dozen openings.

They offer one path to licensing in most states that issue licenses, and in others, like Kentucky, they are the only path to licensure.

Apprenticeships are more common in heavily-unionized areas, but in the tightly competitive residential HVAC market, there are relatively few union shops.

A Lifetime Career Opportunity

No one will tell you residential HVAC work is easy. But almost everyone will tell you it’s a great job, and only getting better.

“Where there is challenge, there is also great opportunity for those who want to go into the trade. I look at it like they are like doctors. They are coming in and diagnosing equipment, going through checkups.” Angie Snow, Owner of Western Heating and Air Conditioning in Orem, UT

Snow went on to say, “We need to look at it like that. Doctors are specialists in their field and technicians are specialists in their field. They have the ability to make a lot of money. There are less and less people in the trade who have the ability to fix and diagnose. The amount of money you can make, there’s a lot of opportunity there.”