NATE Announces Finalists for Technician Competition

North American Technician Excellence (NATE) will sponsor the eighth annual Certified Technician Competition at Comfortech 2007 in St. Louis, Missouri September 27-28, 2007. Seven HVAC Technicians will compete for the title of Top Tech 2007 as they diagnose and solve residential heating and cooling problems on equipment and simulators in the exhibits area.
The 2007 finalists were selected from thousands of HVAC technicians who took the NATE exam in 2006. Semi-finalists are technicians who took the NATE test in CY 2006 and scored exceptionally well (in the top 1% of the 20,000 tests given in 2006). Over 200 semi-finalists were identified. From these, seven regional high-scorers were chosen as finalists to compete in St. Louis at NATE’s Certified Technician Competition 2007.
The 2007 NATE Top Tech finalists are:
James Wargo, Air Group, Whippany, NJ
Wayne Pendergast, G.M. Hobart Company, Montpelier, VA
Kenneth Delcore, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Green Bay, WI)
James Garrett, Barbosa Mechanical, Dallas, TX
Jonathan Small, Right Way Plumbing, Heating Air Conditioning, Sedoro Woolley, WA
James Moore, Moore Heating Air Conditioning, Aurora, CO
Robert Pietrangelo, Comfort Solution, Huntingdon Valley, PA.
Corporate sponsors of Certified Technician Competition 2007 are Service Experts and Lennox Industries, and co-sponsors are Penton Media and NATE. Eastern Heating and Cooling Council (NJ) will also recognize the winner with an additional award.
The seven competitors will be introduced at the opening ceremonies Thursday, September 27, 2007. All CTC contestants compete in timed events to diagnose problems. Each contestant has a maximum of twenty minutes to correctly diagnose a problem on a simulator or a unit with a built-in problem. The contestant with the most correct answers wins the Top Tech title. In the event of a tie, the technician with the fastest time wins.