Come Christmastime, local HVAC company owner Mark Souza is going to have a whole lot more than just a business card to hand out to prospective customers.
He’s going to have a book.
Souza, who has spent the last year turning his two decades of experience in the HVAC field into Souza’s Heating and Air Conditioning, has been working with a group of Manteca residents and natives in pursuing a goal – parlaying their knowledge and experience into a book that can benefit others.
While he’s still putting the finishing touches on “The HVAC Almanac: The Homeowner’s Guide to Minimizing Costs and Maximizing Comfort” he fully expects to have everything completed in time to be wrapped and placed under the tree.
“We all have what is known as ‘limiting beliefs’ and this process helps you know yourself gives you a chance to get all of your expertise down on paper,” Souza said. “There’s a feeling that you get when you know that you’re going to do this – you feel like the authority of your own skillset when you’re done.
“Author comes from the word ‘authority’ and that feeling of being the authority on your industry and based on your experience – knowing enough to write a book about it – feels great.”
Part of the reason that Souza said he chose to pursue the book was the very limited amount of information that most people have when it comes to one of the most vital creature comforts that we all enjoy – the system that controls the temperature inside of our homes.
Time and time again, he said, he would tell homeowners that he needed to access their furnace in order to determine what was wrong with the AC unit, and was almost always met with a confused stare – “why would you need to check my furnace when it’s my AC that is the problem?” was a common refrain.
“A lot of people don’t understand that the fan that blows the air into your home is in your furnace – the furnace is about one-third of your entire AC unit,” Souza said. “When you go to a mechanic even if you don’t know cars you can figure out what it is that the mechanic is talking about, and in the HVAC world that is not the case – there is so much lingo and mumbo-jumbo that goes along with it that it’s hard to understand what you’re being told.
“That’s why I wanted to put the book together – to create an easy-to-understand guide that will help homeowners when making decisions between repairing and replacing the units that we all depend on.”
And even though he has two decades of experience working within the HVAC field, Souza that the process of writing a book taught him a ton of new things about the trade that he has turned into his life’s work.
During the process of writing he went all the way back to the history books to research how Egyptians kept themselves cool in the desert, and what the Romans did to control the climate without the benefits of electricity or other modern functions.
All of that research, he said, helped him make an even more complicated process that much simpler for the people who need it, and helped him gain a deeper appreciation for the field that he makes his living in.
“People are going to be able to get their hands on it by Christmas – friends, family, potential customers,” Souza said. “It’s a business card – it’s a big, awesome business card that I hope will help me be able to get my foot in more doors.
“I don’t anticipate making a whole lot of money with this thing, but hopefully people will be able to understand what is in my head and they’ll want to do business with me as a byproduct.”
To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.
