Plumbing & Mechanical Top Stories

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Manufacturers exhibiting at AHR Expo 2026 are bringing forward solutions that prioritize intelligence, flexibility and practicality, addressing real-world challenges faced by contractors, engineers, distributors and building owners.

All year, leadership is a fast-moving, day-by-day experience. But December's slower pace lets you take a step back, and that's when strategic thinking happens. An intentional leadership reset is a chance to reflect on what truly matters, refocus on the strategies that drive results, and reignite the performance, purpose, and passion that will carry you into 2026 with clarity and momentum.

In 2025, we brought you stories on everything from heat pump water heaters to the top 20 under 40 in the plumbing industry. 

I'm grateful my family showed my brother the value of trades. After my great-grandfather's plumbing business closed, my dad became a welder and shared his skills with my brother during many afternoons in the work shed, like an apprentice learning from a master.

Today, we still get calls about older systems. The potential customers often think their house or building is the oldest we have ever seen. I suppose people think every other building on their block has removed the old steam or hot water system and replaced it with something more modern.

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.