Technician Spotlight: Bradley Wallberg | ACHR News

Name: Bradley Wallberg  

Title: Owner and operator 

Why He’s in the Spotlight: Bradley Wallberg is the type of technician who goes above and beyond almost on a daily basis.  

Rachel Ellman, vice president of engineering at Mojave Energy Systems, has seen this firsthand for the last two years that Wallberg has been providing build and repair support on Mojave HVAC’s a/c units.  

“Bradley is an exceptionally sharp technician, performs the highest quality work, and does not give up until the job is completed and completed well,” said Ellman. “He helped my company, a startup new to the industry, enormously by sharing his insights gained from 16 years of learning how a/c systems work and fail.” 

Wallberg also built Mojave’s first prototypes, helped them understand and fix fundamental problems, and responded quickly to emergencies so they didn’t miss any deadlines.  

“He accelerated our journey up the vapor compression learning curve by at least a year,” Ellman said. 

Wallberg deals with tasks like the construction, service, and maintenance of refrigeration and a/c equipment, ranging from building walk-ins to cleaning ice machines. And the mention of ice machines tees up the funny story of how Wallberg become a sophisticated technician — and then, a business owner — perfectly.   

In high school, he started bagging ice for an ice company — one whose owners also happened to own a refrigeration company in that same building. The summer after he graduated, while tending to his normal duties of bagging ice and delivering it to grocery/liquor stores, he also started fixing some of the bagging equipment so he could continue to do his job. Eventually, the manager of the refrigeration company noticed, and offered to teach Wallberg the ways.  

“And that was about it,” Wallberg said. “Then you start sweeping floors, and eventually work your way up and someone says, ‘Hey, we’re going to go build this walk-in — jump in the van.’” 

Around 2007, shortly after Wallberg began training and became a technician with that same refrigeration company, he got his EPA. He stayed with that company until just a few months ago. That’s when Wallberg obtained his contractor license and opened his own company, Thermal Precision in Cupertino, California. The future looks good — Wallberg is getting at least two new customers a week. Right now, he’s the owner-operator, and he’d like to continue to grow the company.  

None of this would have been possible without the owners of the ice company who gave Wallberg a job in the first place.  

“I grew up in my grandmother’s house in high school, and so the owner [of the ice company] brought her kids to my grandmother’s daycare and took care of the kids, babysitting for them, going on vacations with them,” he said. “Then they offered me a job to go bag ice, and they’ve really supported me in everything that I’ve done so far.” 

Advice to New Techs: Wallberg said new techs should be prepared to get their butt kicked — every single day. 

“You’re playing the long game with this industry, because there’s so many different niches that you can get into — I mean, I do commercial industrial refrigeration, and that’s pretty broad in itself,” Wallberg said. “But don’t be discouraged. Be prepared to be humbled, practically daily.” 

And, he said, it’s not always a “get rich quick” type of situation. It’s a “10-15 years later in the industry, enjoy the fruits of your labor” type of situation.  

But the fruits will be worth it. Because now, Wallberg gets to be the “superhero” to someone almost every single day by going in and fixing, say, a walk-in freezer that has $20,000 worth of meat in it, with the Bay Area in the background as he cruises from job to job, on his way to meet someone new. And to him, that’s the best part of it all. 

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