— Mechanical & HVAC
Mechanical work, as prime or as your mechanical sub.
Most of our work is for owners, with Athena as the general contractor or prime mechanical contractor. We also work for general contractors as the mechanical subcontractor. Either way, we self-perform the HVAC and controls and manage the rest of the scope as one job, as we have in Southern California’s commercial, institutional, and public-sector buildings for forty years.
— Capabilities
What we actually do in mechanical.
We self-perform the HVAC work and manage the rest of the mechanical scope as one job.
HVAC installation
We install air handlers, rooftop units, split and packaged systems, VRF, boilers, and steam on ground-up, retrofit, and tenant improvement work. After forty years, we get the load math right before the equipment shows up. See our HVAC projects.
Central plants
We build and retrofit chilled water, hot water, and condenser water plants, including modular central plants, and we size them to the actual load rather than the projected one.
Fan wall retrofits
A fan wall replaces a single-fan air handler with an array of smaller blowers that fit through the existing doors. It runs quieter, and if one blower fails, the rest keep the air moving. Our most recent one is at the CSU Chancellor’s Office in Long Beach.
Sheet metal & piping
We run our own sheet metal shop, and our crews install all refrigerant piping and water piping up to 2 inches. Larger water piping goes to a piping contractor under our contract, and we manage it on the same schedule as everything else.
Service & recommissioning
We handle annual maintenance contracts, troubleshooting calls, and recommissioning when a system drifts from its design intent. Because our own crews install the equipment, they already know how to service it. See service & maintenance for what a contract covers.
Public-sector mechanical
We work in schools, government facilities, water utilities, and healthcare buildings, with prevailing wage, DIR registration, SB/LSBE participation, bonding, and prequalification already in place. For a prequal package, start with our line card.
— Where we work
Buildings that stay open, and buildings changing purpose.
Our specialty
Occupied, operating buildings
Hospitals, courthouses, labs, and campuses can’t shut down for construction. We plan the work around nights, weekends, and phased turnovers so the building keeps running while we’re in it.
Our specialty
Adaptive reuse
When an existing building takes on a new purpose, such as an industrial building becoming a data center or an office building becoming a laboratory, the mechanical load changes completely. We plan that conversion inside the shell that’s already there, as we did as design-build prime when a 1956 Culver City courthouse became the BioScience LA life sciences lab.
We also build new, including ground-up construction and core and shell. See our HVAC projects.
— Preconstruction & delivery
Brought in early. Built the way it was priced.
How we deliver
- Design-Build
- Design-Bid-Build
- Progressive Design-Build
- BIM coordination
Recent design-build work includes the CSU Chancellor’s Office, Keck Graduate Institute, and the LADWP Water Quality Laboratory.
Constructability reviews
Before anything gets built, our in-house engineers check the design against real field conditions and price it, working with your engineers or for owners comparing methods.
- Cost estimates and ROMs
- On-site evaluation
- Schedule feedback
- Material and labor pricing
We don’t design your project. We work with your engineer of record, or manage the engineers as part of a design-build.
— Who we work with
Prime or sub, the same crew shows up.
Most of our mechanical work is as prime for owners and public agencies. We also work for general contractors as the mechanical subcontractor, and alongside engineers and architects on design-build teams. Open the one that sounds like you.
Owners & facility teams
Most of our work is for owners, with Athena holding the prime contract. HVAC work rarely stays in the mechanical room, so we carry the trades it touches under one contract and close the space back up.
What we bring as prime:
- Self-performed HVAC and building automation.
- Every other trade the scope calls for, subcontracted and managed by us, including electrical retrofits, plumbing, ceilings, drywall, paint, roofing, and TAB.
- Constructability reviews and ROMs before you commit to a delivery method.
- A single contract and schedule for the whole job.
See our prime contractor projects
Start a project conversationPublic agencies
We work for cities, counties, courts, schools, and water utilities, with prevailing wage, DIR registration, SB/LSBE participation, bonding, and prequalification in place.
What public owners get:
- Prime contracts on mechanical-heavy public work, including courthouses, juvenile halls, and labs that stay open during construction.
- Our line card for your prequal package.
General contractors
We also work for general contractors as the mechanical subcontractor. Because we run jobs as prime ourselves, we know what the GC is carrying and plan our work around it.
What we bring to your project:
- Self-performed HVAC installation, sheet metal, and refrigerant piping, with larger water piping managed under our subcontract.
- Controls from our own building automation team, so the mechanical and controls arrive together.
- Submittals and BIM coordination with the other trades.
- Startup, TAB coordination, closeout, and operator training.
Engineers & architects
We don’t design projects. We work with the engineer of record, or manage the engineers as part of a design-build, and bring field pricing and constructability to the drawings.
How we support the design team:
- Constructability reviews and ROMs while the design is still on paper.
- Field verification of existing conditions before the drawings go out.
- Design-build teams where we manage the engineers and hold the schedule.
- BIM coordination with the other trades.
— Why self-perform
The schedule depends on it.
Most controls firms can’t self-perform the mechanical they control, and most mechanical contractors can’t self-perform the controls they install. That gap is where projects fall behind, where the trades blame each other, and where the schedule slips by weeks.
We do both. Our mechanical crews and our building automation team share one payroll and one schedule, so when the two scopes are planned and installed together, the schedule holds and the owner gets the building on the date they were promised.
For the record, the crew that installs your air handler is the crew we’ll send when it needs attention six months later, and that crew works under a safety program that scored top tier in two independent reviews in 2025.
A little company history: the Athena crew, years back.
California contractor licenses (#523044):
— Operational scale
Thirty-plus rooftop units. One weekend.
On the Kaiser Permanente CDRP project, our self-perform crew mobilized for a compressed window on a working medical campus. That’s what schedule control looks like when the trades are in-house, and it’s part of a Kaiser partnership that goes back to 2011.
A fan wall retrofit in progress at the CSU Chancellor’s Office in Long Beach, with modular blowers replacing a single-fan air handler.
— Fan wall retrofits
One fan out. An array in. Air stays moving.
A fan wall replaces a single large supply or return fan with an array of smaller direct-drive blowers. The array is modular, redundant, quieter, and efficient at part load. For most owners, the bigger win is that it goes in without cutting a hole in the building to get the old fan out.
The array fits through the door in pieces, and the controls sequence handles staging and failover, so if one blower drops, the others compensate. Maintenance means swapping one small unit instead of scheduling downtime around the largest piece of equipment in the mechanical room.
We recently finished a large fan wall installation at the CSU Chancellor’s Office in Long Beach. Not long ago, that retrofit would have meant replacing the whole air handler.
— Cultivation HVAC & Controls
A grow room is a climate problem before it’s an HVAC problem.
Cannabis grow operations, commercial greenhouses, vertical farms, and research and biopharma spaces share one requirement: the climate is the crop, and the mechanical design has to serve it. We integrate the Argus platform with HVAC we install ourselves, so one crew carries both trades.
That combination is uncommon, because few controls integrators self-perform mechanical and few mechanical contractors carry Argus. We do both.
— Service & after turnover
We stay with the system.
New equipment is only as good as the team running it. We train your team at handoff, and our service department handles maintenance contracts and troubleshooting calls on the systems we installed and the ones we inherited.
Handoff training
After installation, we walk the facility team through the sequence of operations, startup and shutdown, seasonal changeovers, and what that strange noise probably is. The people who installed the equipment lead the training.
Coordinated manufacturer training
When the equipment warrants it (high-efficiency boilers, VRF systems, or controls with proprietary front-ends), we bring a factory rep on site. The manufacturer runs the training and we run the project management, so your team gets everything in one visit.
Preventive maintenance
Scheduled inspections, filter and belt programs, coil cleaning, and refrigerant checks are unglamorous work. They’re also what keeps a $200K rooftop unit from becoming a $250K replacement four years early.
Service & maintenance contracts
Multi-year agreements bundle scheduled visits, ticket-tracker access, remote support, and time-and-materials work. Our first mechanical maintenance contract covers RTUs, AHUs, and controls for a regional transit operator, and we’re building from there.
— Next step
Have a mechanical project to talk through?
For repairs and service contracts, the request form goes straight to our service team. For a new install or a retrofit, our business development team will talk through the scope and the schedule with you.
— Other expertise
Explore the rest of what we do.
— Building Automation
Building Automation
We install and service Schneider, Johnson Controls, and Argus systems, natively or on Niagara, and we migrate legacy systems without ripping out the wiring.
Read more— General Contracting
General Contracting
We lead renovation and MEP infrastructure work in occupied buildings as general contractor or prime, and we carry every trade the job touches.
Read more— Security & Access
Security & Access Control
We install Schneider Access Expert and Security Expert, with card readers and mobile credentials tied into the BAS you already trust.
Read more— Service & Maintenance
Service & Maintenance
Multi-year contracts covering BAS and mechanical — scheduled visits, T&M, software upgrades, remote hosting, and the client portal that keeps your team ahead of the system.
Read more
