You Can Be Anything › All careers › Trades & Skilled Labor
HVAC Technician
Installs and maintains heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.
Did you know?
Willis Carrier invented modern AC in 1902 — not for comfort, but to control humidity in a printing plant
How subjects help
- Physics: Understand how a refrigerant soaks up heat indoors and releases it outside to cool a room.
- Mathematics: Calculate how much heating or cooling a building needs from its size and windows.
- Chemistry: Handle refrigerant gases safely and recover them so they don't harm the ozone layer.
A famous name
Willis Carrier: Engineer who invented modern air conditioning in 1902 and founded the heating and cooling firm Carrier.
Try it yourself: Design a box that keeps ice frozen
- Plan how to wrap or fill your box so heat cannot get in. Think about layers and gaps.
- Build your insulated box, tearing paper and foil by hand. Put one ice cube on a saucer inside it and close it up.
- Put the second ice cube on a saucer next to the box, with nothing around it. This is your comparison.
- After an hour, open the box and compare the two cubes. Then change one thing in your design and test again.
HVAC technicians, boilermakers and cryogenics researchers choose and fit insulation so heat stays where it should: keeping a building warm, a boiler hot or a super-cold tank cold.
Adapted from DiscoverE: Keep a Cube.
Also try: Test a tile pattern that fits together.
Known for it in
USA, UAE, Australia, Canada, Germany