So You Want to Become an HVAC Service Technician

Becoming an Hvac Technician is not only a rewarding and challenging career, it is a career that will always guarantee you work no matter where you are located. The hardest part of this career would be to find a company to work for that you can deal with and not worried about getting laid off. Once you have adequate experience and Hvac training in this field, you could even go as far to opening up your own small business, which with alot of hard work and effort could ultimately transform into a prosperous HVAC company.

The duties of an hvac service technician are a little more technical and challenging than other fields of air conditioning, heating, and refrigeration. The main thing is you will have to have great troubleshooting skills, customer service skills, and if you are someone that is getting paid based on commission, you are going to have to know how to sell.

There are a lot of shady hvac technicians that are out there that sell their customers stuff that they don’t need, solely to earn that high pay check. Hopefully this is not the route that you take, though you will make more money you will have to be able to sleep at night knowing that you earned an HONEST days paycheck.

Being that the only state in the US I have done hvac technician work is Florida, I cannot speak for other states in the US. But there are plenty of companies around that will pay you an hourly rate for an honest days work, but most of them pay their Hvac technicians based on commission.

Some of the main jobs that you can expect to do in your service are replacing evap and condenser coils,  TXV valves, checking proper air flow, replacing drain pans, repairing faulty wiring, changing out compressors, along with many other smaller duties.

Hvac technicians should have strong knowledge on the different types of refrigerants used these days, as well as the proper refrigerant recovery techniques that are required by the EPA. Not only that, they should also be EPA certified to even handle refrigerants in the first place, which if you did take apart of an accredited college course EPA certification should be a part of the curriculum.

Expect to spend many of your working hours up in attics, and you are going to run into a bunch of them that have extremely tight accesses, and should you be in a region that has hot weather, expect the attics to be at torching temperatures.

So if you want to become an Hvac technician, expect their to be slow times throughout the year. There may be times that you are working 25 hours a week and their may also be times where you are working 80. Also, be aware that almost every air conditioning and heating company out their has an emergency on-call service, so expect to be taking a week on 24/7 call every now and then. How often the Hvac technician will have to go on call will entirely depend on how big the company is, and of course how many technicians there are in total.

So if you want to become an Hvac technician, you have to be the type of person that is not afraid to get their hands dirty, not afraid of crawling in tight spots and hopping up into attics. Not afraid to put in that 12+ hour day, while also expecting that you will have 3-4 hour days when the season is slow.