Did you know that plumbing apprenticeships can be dated all the way back to the European medieval period? Back in the 1300s-1500s, Masters of trades would take on young, unskilled workers and teach them their craft in exchange for their indentured servitude, wherein they would work for years without pay while they honed their craft.
Can you speculate why heat delivery in zone 3 was insufficient before the helper pump? How could the piping system be improved, considering the wasted length of PEX-AL-PEX tubing from the manifolds to the floor panels in figure 2?
Across markets, contractors report that moving labor from unpredictable jobsite conditions into controlled fabrication environments is yielding measurable gains: fewer errors, improved safety metrics, and installation timelines compressed from weeks to days.
You can teach anyone to sweat a copper joint or wire a circulator pump. What’s much harder to teach is attitude, curiosity, pride in craftsmanship, and the ability to make a customer feel at ease.
The EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), approved in 2024, presents a major challenge for U.S. companies, especially in the mechanical and manufacturing sectors. It aims to promote sustainable corporate behavior by requiring companies to identify and address adverse human rights and environmental impacts in their global value chains.
In this episode of And So It Flows, host Natalie Forster sits down with Spencer Pope, manager of technical support and training at Bradford White, to explore how education and workforce development are evolving across the plumbing, HVAC and mechanical trades.
