While ACCA and its members had a successful year, there were a number of challenges the industry faced as a whole. Some of the biggest were keeping up with the regulatory proposals and bills in Congress.
Steve Lauten, president and CEO of Total Air and Heat Co. in Plano, Texas, started working in his father’s residential HVAC business as a teenager. During high school and college, he gained employment with a commercial contractor, spending 13 years working with one large mechanical contractor before joining the family business in 1987.
Tightening a home’s envelope may reduce the air supply needed for combustion, and when there’s not enough combustion air, equipment could have combustion ventilation problems. Thus, the people who sealed up homes (often referred to as the weatherization industry) needed a way to determine if sealing a home up would undermine the safe operation of combustion equipment. To meet this safety need, they embraced combustion appliance zone (CAZ) depressurization testing.
Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, called the hearing to examine the issue of “midnight” regulations that often appear during the last few months of a president’s term.
ACCA has named Welsch Heating & Cooling Co., St. Louis, as its 2016 Residential Contractor of the Year. The company will be presented with the award on March 10 at the opening MainStage of the ACCA 2016 conference in Charlotte, North Carolina.
ACCA members came from around the country to learn office operational management strategies. The event, which was presented by ACCA and The NEWS, was immediately preceded by the Service Managers Forum, capping off a four-day gathering of ACCA managers across multiple disciplines.
The CCI is calculated based on a survey of the association’s contractor members, who are asked how positive they feel about new business prospects, existing business activity, and expected staffing decisions in the short-term future.