Colorado Mesa University Tech was awarded a nearly $225,000 federal grant, the school announced Wednesday, to provide “Heat Pump Employment Ready” certificates to students as part of their coursework, as well as to interested area trades workers through community education courses. The grant also helps cover costs for an addition to the school’s Mobile Learning Lab fleet, to provide similar training in Montrose and Delta.
The funding was celebrated by local businesses in the interior heating industry, two of which — Grand Junction Winair and Avalanche Heating, Plumbing and Cooling — wrote letters of support for the grant.
“The demand for trained and certified technicians is outpacing the current supply,” wrote Jim Ostrander, Avalanche’s owner, in one of those letters. “A heat pump certification program at CMU Tech would not only benefit students but also strengthen the local workforce and help companies like mine grow and serve our communities more effectively.”
Grand Junction Winair Education Director and Lead Service Representative Matt Peiffer said such classes would help modernize the region’s training for its workforce. He hopes it will also help bridge a gap between rural western Colorado and the Front Range, where training opportunities are more readily available.
“Back in the day, the way you learned heating and cooling, or plumbing, was you rode with a guy, and he’d show you everything he knows,” said Peiffer, who is also an adjunct instructor at CMU Tech. “Unfortunately, some of this is newer technology (and) there is nobody that did it back in the day … there is nobody to learn it from.”
The heating and cooling technician of 25 years said the training was necessary to equip others in the trade on the Western Slope. There has been a nationwide push to move away from gas and propane furnaces and toward more environmentally sustainable and cost-efficient heat pumps, which use refrigeration to control interior temperatures rather than generating heat by burning fuel.
While the newer systems have plenty of upsides, Peiffer said they were far more difficult to service and install than older, gas-powered technology, and required more specialized knowledge. That means the certificates now offered by CMU Tech can significantly improve recipients’ employability.
“I can teach a guy to install a furnace very, very quickly,” he said. “But to install a heat pump is a lot harder, because now I have to teach him how to do the piping … I have to show him how to wire one of the most complicated HVAC systems in the industry, and regular heat pump systems have a lot of wires to them. And these are all field-installed, they’re not factory-installed.”
The school, for its part, said it was excited to offer new opportunities with the grant money.
“At CMU Tech, we work really closely with industry partners … to determine what education is going to be most beneficial and relevant to not only our students, but also our local community,” CMU Tech Vice President Brigitte Sundermann said in a statement. “When we can create programs like this one that align with industry needs, our students are more successful and secure jobs easier.”
