Today on Cool Air, Hot Takes™, hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry celebrate a milestone: Trane's Graduate Training Program turns 100. Kris Gagermeier, Trane’s Director, Technical Training Center of Excellence joins to walk through the program's origins, how it's evolved over a century, and where AI fits into the next chapter of HVAC workforce development, including what it takes to get through 14 weeks in La Crosse.

We also have:

• HVAC Headlines: Repair revenue is eating a bigger slice of mechanical contractors' business — up from 21% to 31% since 2021, with more jobs, higher ticket sizes, and lower costs. Plus: Bill Gates-backed TerraPower is breaking ground on a 500 MW sodium-cooled nuclear reactor in Wyoming, targeting 2030.
• Stat of the Day: Dan mulches it over and shares some surprising landscaping industry stats.

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to rate and follow too!

Cool Air, Hot Takes™ is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Today on Cool Air, Hot Takes™, hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry sit down with Matt Caldwell, Director of AI & Cloud Data Centers at Hyper, a company building low-voltage electrical equipment for the data centers powering the AI boom. Matt makes the case that the US-China AI race makes the 1960s space race look like a warm-up lap — and explains why the industry needs to rethink how it designs, manufactures, and deploys infrastructure at speed.

We also have:

• Listener Hot Takes: Uncle Tom's hack for checking building pressurization, and Broadband Jesus’s EnergyNet.
• HVAC Headlines: Should your HVAC company have a mascot, and a Winnipeg case where rooftop HVAC metal theft caused around $500,000 in damages.
• Stat of the Day: Domino’s delivers how many pizzas a day? And just how much did the Apollo program cost in today’s dollars?

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to rate and follow, too!

Cool Air, Hot Takes™ is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Today on Cool Air, Hot Takes™, hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry sit down with Mike Dawson, VP of Sales at Parklane Mechanical, a company that's been solving industrial noise problems for over 30 years. Data centers are booming, and we've all heard the noise about them. Turns out, they're also just literally loud. Neighbors have opinions about that. Mike breaks down how noise control works, why it needs to be part of the conversation earlier than most people think, and what the job looks like on the ground.

We also have:

• HVAC Headlines: How data centers helped keep the lights on during Winter Storm Fern, Trane's new collaboration on oil-free compressor technology, and a 25-year cheese study that has absolutely no business being this interesting.
• Stat of the Day: Which U.S. states gained the most residents in 2025.

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to rate and follow too!

Cool Air, Hot Takes™ is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Season 4 is here! Hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry are back in the studio, fresh off the floor at AHR 2026 in Las Vegas, where the Cool Air, Hot Takes™ booth was open for business, t-shirts were flying, and the industry had lots to say.

This week, Charlie and Dan break down their hot takeaways from the expo — from the CDU arms race taking over every corner of the exhibit hall, to a surprising surge in electrification energy that nobody quite saw coming.

Live from the AHR Expo floor, we hear from:

1. Allison Clements, Design Engineers: A hot take on the gap between elegant design and real-world operability and why your maintenance guy needs to be in the room.
2. Ray Reiling, Trade Water: Why end-of-life refrigerant is everybody's problem and almost nobody's responsibility, and what you can do about it.
3. David & Conrad Bishop, Twin Bishop Strategies: How the service industry is about to get hit hard by the scale of data center growth and why working smarter isn't optional anymore.
4. Spencer Ingaldson, Darcy Solutions: Groundwater-enabled geothermal that delivers 50x the capacity of a traditional well. Yes, really.

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to rate and follow, too!

Cool Air, Hot Takes™ is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hot takes, cool systems, and zero fluff — Season 4 of Cool Air, Hot Takes ™ from Trane is here. Join Charlie and Dan as they bring in the sharpest minds in the industry to break down what's actually happening in heating, cooling, and building technology. AI, refrigerants, heat pumps, data centers, and whatever else is keeping engineers up at night.

Cool Air, Hot Takes ™ is brought to you by Trane Commercial, part of Trane Technologies, a leading provider of innovative climate control solutions and energy services for commercial environments.

Follow now wherever you get your podcasts for sharp insights, bold opinions, and a good time guaranteed.

Today, we’re wrapping season 3 with a deep dive into industrial high-temperature heat pumps. Hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry talk with Mobola Dosumu, National Sales Manager for Heat Pumps at Everllence, whose custom-engineered systems deliver multi-megawatt heating and up to 350°C steam for heavy industry and district energy. Mobola explains why these heat pumps aren’t “what’s next”, they’re already here, and how they’re accelerating industrial decarbonization.

We also have:

• HVAC Headlines: Should you really cover your AC unit in winter? Plus, how AI could boost HVAC productivity by 40%, and why predictive maintenance might finally get its moment.
• Dan in the Factory: This week Dan meets Billy Rice, Mechanical Commissioning Agent, to talk about what happens inside a fan-wall test, and a pretty wild air-pressure job story.
• Stat of the Day: The funniest (and strangest) statistics about Americans - from coupon dates to conspiracy theories.

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don’t forget to rate and follow too!

Cool Air, Hot TakesTM is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In this special end of year episode, hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry are flying solo and taking you on a tour of 2025’s hottest (and coldest) takes. From bold industry predictions and legendary pop-ins, to the now iconic reminder to “never fall in love with a bearing technology,” the guys look back at the takes that shook the HVAC world, and the ones that never quite left the factory floor. (Yes, Dan, we’re looking at your season 1, episode 1 hot take. Was it the coldest of the year? You tell us.)

We also have:

• HVAC Headlines: How Trane and NVIDIA are shaping AI thermal design
• Hottest & Coldest Takes of 2025: the death of liquid cooling, bringing your own power to the data center industry and draining water heaters. Do you agree with Charlie and Dan?
• Stat of the Day: which U.S. airline most deserves a middle seat on the naughty list for worst on-time performance?

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don’t forget to rate and follow too!

Cool Air, Hot TakesTM is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Today, hosts Charlie Jelen and Dan Gentry are joined by an HVAC legend, Mick Schwedler. With more than 43 years at Trane and former Global ASHRAE President, Mick reflects on how the industry has evolved from floppy disks and early energy modeling to digital design, electrified heating, and systems-level innovation. He explains why giving engineers just a bit more time and budget leads to better, more efficient buildings, and why HVAC’s true impact goes far beyond comfort cooling. From supporting cold-chain vaccines to reducing emissions and protecting health, Mick shows how this industry improves lives and inspires the next generation of engineers.

We also have:

• HVAC Headlines: the year HVAC “got run over by a reindeer,” Trane dives into liquid-to-chip cooling, and how to get your home winter-ready.
• Hot or Not: A special 1980s HVAC edition with Mick. Is thermal storage still hot? Would CHP ever rule the world? Debate ensues.
• Stat of the Day: Which countries rank highest for quality of life.

We want your hot takes and questions! Email coolair.hottakes@trane.com, drop a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Don’t forget to rate and follow too!

Cool Air, Hot TakesTM is a Trane Commercial podcast exploring bold innovations, emerging trends, and game-changing tech in HVAC, energy, and the built environment. Learn more at trane.com/coolairhottakes.

Follow for new episodes every two weeks and stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.