— Mechanical
Mechanical. Still in our own hands.
HVAC, piping, sheet metal, retrofits — installed, serviced, and recommissioned by people on Athena's payroll, not subcontracted out. Forty years of California mechanical work in commercial, institutional, and public-sector buildings. We hold the California B, C-4, C-20, and C-36 licenses. The trade that started in a garage in 1984 still anchors the firm today.
— Capabilities
What we actually do in mechanical.
The full mechanical scope — install, service, and the trades that back them up. In-house, self-performed, not subcontracted.
HVAC installation
Ground-up, retrofit, tenant improvement. Air handlers, rooftop units, split systems, packaged systems, VRF, boilers and steam. Forty years of getting the math right before the equipment shows up.
Central plants
Modular central plants, chilled water, hot water, condenser water systems. Design-build and retrofit — sized to actual load, not projected load.
Fan wall retrofits
Modular blower arrays replacing single-fan air handlers. Retrofittable through existing doors. Redundant, quieter, efficient at part-load. Recent example: the CSU Chancellor's Office in Long Beach.
Ductwork, sheet metal & piping — in-house
Full sheet metal shop under our own roof. Spiral, rectangular, and oval ductwork. Chilled water, hot water, hydronic, condensate, and refrigeration piping — welded, soldered, brazed, mechanically joined. C-4 license covers boilers, steam, and pressure piping. All in-house, not subbed.
Service & recommissioning
Annual maintenance contracts. Troubleshooting calls. Recommissioning when systems drift out of design intent. Same techs who installed it know how to service it.
Public-sector mechanical
Schools, government facilities, water utilities, healthcare. Prevailing wage, DIR, SB/LSBE, bonding, prequalification — all in place.
— Why self-perform
The schedule depends on it.
Most controls firms can't self-perform the mechanical they're controlling. Most mechanical contractors can't self-perform the controls they're installing. That gap is where projects fall behind, where the trades blame each other, and where the schedule slips by weeks.
Athena does both. Same payroll, same accountability, same crew on site. When the mechanical and controls are scoped together, owned together, and installed together — the schedule holds. The math works. The owner gets the building when the owner was told they'd get the building.
For the record: we don't sub mechanical to a partner. The crew installing your air handler is the same crew Athena will dispatch when something needs attention six months in.
Modular central plant install — Athena crew on site, mechanical scope self-performed.
California contractor licenses:
— Operational scale
Thirty-plus rooftop units. One weekend.
The Kaiser Permanente CDRP project. Self-perform crew, mobilized for a compressed window, on a working medical campus. This is what schedule control looks like when the trades are in-house.
CSU Chancellor's Office, Long Beach — fan wall retrofit in progress. Modular blowers replacing a single-fan air handler.
— Fan wall retrofits
One fan out. An array in. Air stays moving.
Fan walls replace a single large supply or return fan with an array of smaller direct-drive blowers. Modular. Redundant. Quieter. Efficient at part-load. And — the piece owners actually care about — retrofittable without cutting a hole in the building to get the old fan out.
The array fits through the door in pieces. The controls sequence handles staging and failover. If one blower drops, the rest compensate. Maintenance is swapping one small unit instead of scheduling downtime around the biggest piece of equipment in the mechanical room.
We just finished a large fan wall installation at the CSU Chancellor's Office in Long Beach — the kind of retrofit that used to require a full air-handler replacement. Not anymore.
— Cultivation HVAC & Controls
A grow room is a climate problem before it's an HVAC problem.
Cannabis grow operations, commercial greenhouses, vertical farms, research and biopharma. Every controlled environment where climate is the crop and the mechanical design has to serve it. Argus platform integrated with in-house HVAC — both trades under one crew.
The combination is uncommon. Most controls integrators don't self-perform mechanical. Most mechanical contractors don't carry Argus. We do.
— After turnover
We hand the system off — with training.
New equipment is only as good as the team running it. Handoff training, coordinated manufacturer time, and multi-year service contracts — so the system we installed stays the system that works.
Handoff training
Post-install walkthrough with the facility team. Sequence of operations, startup and shutdown, seasonal changeovers, what the strange noise probably is. Delivered by the people who installed it — not a subcontracted trainer working from a manual.
Coordinated manufacturer training
When the equipment warrants it — high-efficiency boilers, VRF systems, controls with proprietary front-ends — we coordinate a manufacturer factory rep on-site. Their training, our project management, one visit for the client's team.
Preventive maintenance
Scheduled inspections, filter and belt programs, coil cleaning, refrigerant checks. The unglamorous work that keeps a $200K rooftop from becoming a $250K replacement four years early.
Service & maintenance contracts
Multi-year agreements bundling scheduled visits, ticket-tracker access, remote support, and time-and-materials work. New: our first mechanical maintenance contract covers RTUs, AHUs, and controls for a regional transit operator — scaling from there.
— Service Department
When the system needs a tech.
Mechanical systems don't get to coast. Compressors fail. Valves drift. Control loops chase. Filters clog. Athena's service department exists to handle that work — for the systems we installed, and for the systems we didn't. Annual maintenance contracts and one-off troubleshooting calls land at the same intake.
— Recent thinking
From our mechanical team.
Building Automation
Access Expert or Security Expert? A field guide to Schneider’s two access control products (and who should install them)
Read moreBuilding Automation
Cloud-managed BMS, explained — what Neeve actually does.
Read moreBuilding Automation
Twisted-pair adapters, compared — the open T1L standard vs. Schneider’s free topology.
Read more— Other expertise
Explore the rest of what we do.
— Building Automation
Building Automation
Schneider, Johnson Controls, Argus. Native or on Niagara. Legacy migrations without ripping out the wiring.
Read more— General Contracting
General Contracting
Tenant improvements, modernizations, and public-sector work where mechanical and controls are the heart of the job.
Read more— Security & Access
Security & Access Control
Schneider Access Expert and Security Expert. Card readers, mobile credentials, integrated with 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— Next step
Have a mechanical project to talk through?
New install, retrofit, service contract, recommissioning — whatever the scope, the form goes straight to our service team. Not a queue.
