“I absolutely refuse to put an AC system in without doing a heat load calculation to your house,” says Rob Moran, who owns R.M. Mechanical Air Conditioning Services in Holiday, Florida.
The calculation, he says, is “the absolute one thing that has to be done to a house.” It is also “the only way you can size the system properly.”
The company sizes replacements from a Manual J calculation on the house itself, not from the nameplate on the old unit, and it pulls the permit and meets the inspector on its changeouts. Its website explains why sizing matters in Tampa Bay humidity. An oversized unit satisfies the thermostat fast, shuts off, and never runs long enough to wring the water out of the air. The house ends up cool and clammy.
Moran expects the same care from anyone who works under his name. He runs every service call himself. His daughter works in the field with him, and a man named Ryan helps with installs, rough-ins and trim-outs. Moran calls himself a perfectionist, and he says that is part of why finding more help is hard.
“Everybody’s got their own way of doing it,” he says. He doesn’t care how a person gets there, as long as the finished job “looks exactly how I would have put it in.”
The rules extend past the equipment. There is no smoking and no cursing on his jobs, because anyone on the site is “100% representing my company,” he says. Ryan, he says, gets to the job before he does.
The rule Moran holds hardest is the clock. He got it from his father, who was military. “If you’re on time, you’re late,” Moran says. “Fifteen minutes early, and you’re on time. That’s always been beat into my head.”
The companies that brought him into the trade reinforced it; they would not put up with no-shows. Moran says there have been only a couple of times he has had to call a customer from the road to say he was stuck in traffic behind an accident and would be about 15 minutes late. “If I say I’m going to be there on a certain date, I’m going to make that date happen no matter what,” he says.
He hears from customers who have been stood up by other contractors. One of them, he recalls, told him the way to become a millionaire in America is to show up to the job when you say you’re going to show up.
His daughter watches him do it, he says, and he sees himself in her. He never wanted to disappoint his own father, and he doesn’t think she wants to disappoint him.
Moran didn’t set out to work in air conditioning. He was in automotive until 2000, when he switched to HVAC because standing over cars was killing his back. He spent most of the years since working for other companies. When he went out on his own, he says, he wanted a business “more geared toward honesty and upfront pricing.” The first year was a struggle he says he expected, and the work has since grown into new construction and a steady run of service calls.
He says he started the company so his daughter and her fiancé would have something to lean on later in life. He thinks the tide has turned toward the trades after years of pushing everyone into college instead of technical school. “The technical people are going to be the next millionaires,” he says.
He plans to hand the business down. “I’d like to see it go generation to generation,” he says, “with no expectations.”