David Holdorf is one of the funniest, most self-deprecating guys I know. Sure, he’ll laugh at a good joke, humor served well done or raw – but he’s just as likely to laugh ‘til his belly hurts, even when the joke’s at his expense, along with a room full of hooting n’ snorting industry pros.
You may know a few folks like that: people who wake up and go back to bed with a smile or whose lives are anointed with humor. Somehow, they seem to live in another dimension, with comedy and satire at their fingertips – and not a trace of pride or superiority. That’s the Dave Holdorf I’ve come to know. Holdorf has learned to wield humor while imparting useful information during his classes. “I excel at really bad dad jokes. The dumber they are, the better,” he said.
Fortunately for the hydronics industry, and Taco, thousands have come to know Holdorf as Taco’s Eastern Region Product and Application Instructor.
“He may be smiling half the time you’re talking to him, but you’re sure to get some of the best [hydronic] expertise on tap that can be found,” said Keefer Rader, owner of Albuquerque-based Outlaw Mechanical. “With Dave, humor and information live side by side. I really, really enjoy learning from him.”
Holdorf and instructional cohort John Barba, Taco’s Training Director, have made a lifestyle of blending humor with training – mingling technical topics with laughter for many years. Industry-wide, they’ve conspired to take humor mainstream, finding the perfect balance of technical information and comic relief.
Learning Together
Fortunately for Holdorf, having fun at his own expense happened early. He recalls his first time leading a training session. “The first couple of classes were just off-the-charts scary. There were friends of mine who remember those classes. They were in the audience,” he said. “And they saw how rattled I was, nervous as could be.
“I was so uncomfortable, feeling inept, and somehow – out of that – a flair for humor grew. The discovery was that I could replace discomfort with fun,” added Holdorf. “Oddly enough, I found that class attendees were engaged, and enjoyed the experience. Miraculously, we were learning and laughing together.
“I love what I do – and the best of it happens when I’m among a group of trade professionals. We laugh, swap stories, and learn. What could be better?” asked Holdorf.
As a residential trainer for Taco who leads dozens of training sessions each year, Holdorf is now part of a six-person, full-time training team at Taco focused on helping customers learn about hydronic systems, large and small.
In addition to his duties as a trainer for the Eastern region, he’s a regular on “Taco After Dark” and “Taco Tuesday” webinars. In a typical month, Holdorf also adds custom classes for wholesalers and rep firms, and will spend several days at Taco’s HQ in Cranston, RI where he and other trainers hold larger, scheduled classes followed by factory tours.
An installer at AHR Expo this year, standing in Taco’s booth, told another customer that, after his “five-star” training sessions with Barba and Holdorf at Taco’s state-of-the-art Innovation & Development Center (IDC), he and other students “went out on the town with Taco escorts to eat and drink like Vikings.” Learning and having fun go together well.
Foley: A Best-of-Best Installer
High-profile installer, Dan Foley, owner of Foley Mechanical, Inc., based in Lorton, VA, says that his training experiences at Taco – and more importantly, the experiences of his installers – are “worth every moment.”
Foley added that “Time is our most precious commodity. I’ve learned to focus our efforts on those things with the greatest personal or professional reward. Training with Taco, and specifically with Dave Holdorf and John Barba, among others, are right up there among the best-of-best experiences.”
Holdorf started working in the trades as a teenager when he worked in his family’s machine shop. When he reached his early 20s, Holdorf worked part-time while earning an Associate’s Degree. He enjoyed math and figured engineering would be a good career to pursue, so he enrolled in SUNY Maritime College in New York City.
Four years later, in 1996, he achieved a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering and also earned a third assistant engineer’s license in the US Coast Guard – allowing him to work on all sizes of diesel- or steam-powered ships – opening the door to a career in hydronics.
After deciding that a career as an engineer, or a life at sea weren’t for him, Holdorf moved into the field full-time, drawing from his education and his machine-shop experience to land a job at SUNY Maritime – leading classes, and running the machine shop. One day a friend called from a business on Long Island who was looking for new college grads to design and support radiant hydronic systems.
“In the mid-’90s, in-floor radiant heat was relatively new here in the United States,” he said. A few years later, as the emergence of PEX tubing created a Renaissance for the hydronic industry, and with the birth of the Radiant Panel Association (now the Radiant Professionals Alliance), there was new energy and excitement in the industry – fertile ground for a young pro, inspired by hydronics.
As his skills grew, he also developed a fondness for training.
“I learned that – with all this information rattling around in my head – I was surprisingly capable of sharing it with others. It’s not like I trained to be a trainer. It was just one of those things that came naturally to me, allowing me to get up in front of a room full of trade pros, helping them in ways I still find surprising today.”
These days, Holdorf draws on his practical experience as an engineer to teach students how to disassemble equipment, learn how the moving parts work together, and reassemble them.
“The bigger need is for trade pros to understand the working role of components as part of entire systems,” said Holdorf.
“Hydronics is marvelous in that way,” he added. “If trade professionals come away from my classes with an understanding of how water and steam behave, and know a thing or two about how the technology we build facilitates, improves, manages, and moves thermal energy from place to place – we all win.”
Advanced Hydronics at PPATEC
Holdorf has become a cult phenomenon and is now regarded as one of the nation’s best trainers of hydronic trade professionals.
At the Pennsylvania Petroleum Association (PPA), Holdorf has become a leading source of knowledge and training expertise for HVAC professionals throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.
He leads one of their most popular courses, Advanced Hydronics, and not only wrote the book used for the multi-day course, but also designed the laboratory there used for hands-on training.
His book, Advanced Hydronics, published by NORA (National Oilheat Research Alliance), is a favorite resource among hydronic system technicians.
“We love it when Dave comes to teach. He’s one of our most popular trainers,” said PPATEC’s Alan Mercurio. “He has a special way of keeping a classroom full of technicians engaged and eager to learn.”
According to Holdorf, anyone can put together a bunch of parts and call it a hydronic heating system. But are those parts and pieces selected properly and being used as they were intended? That’s the focus of the advanced hydronics course, intended to take attendees through the decision process, prior to system design.
“I’ve now learned from Dave [Holdorf] on a couple of occasions at PPATEC,” said Eric Love, a technician with HB Home Services, a division of H. B. McClure Company, based in Harrisburg. “He’s a terrific instructor, and very entertaining. He’s one of many reasons I now look forward to more training there.”
“You’ve gotta have fun,” added Holdorf. “We’re doing education, but we’re also entertaining at the same time, right? It’s the blend that we all enjoy – both the instructor and the class participants – wherever and however the training happens, online, at Taco’s IDC, at a wholesaler’s location, or at PPATEC.
Maybe there’s a lesson in life buried in there somewhere.”
Taco After Dark with BNP Columnist Dave Yates
Weekly, Wednesday evening Taco After Dark webinars have risen to the top as the nation’s most popular online source of live (and YouTube-archived) hydronics knowledge and expertise. Essentially, it’s a free, topically-targeted talk show – minus only Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, or Johnny Carson.
The focus of Taco After Dark is to provide practical, real-world solutions to the challenges hydronics professionals face every day.
Taco After Dark began in 2020. Holdorf and Barba made a call to Mechanical-Hub’s managing partners – hoping to offer an exciting online training platform. Long story short: Taco and Mechanical-Hub worked together to engage both of their trade pro audiences. These days, all of the Taco After Dark broadcasts are recorded on Mechanical-Hub’s YouTube page.
As the Hub’s manager, John Mesenbrink said, “Online learning brings us together. And that’s exactly what happens when Holdorf and Barba engage their online audience.”
Not long ago, Holdorf enjoyed connecting with show co-host John Barba and special guest Dave Yates, who was the owner (now retired) of York, PA-based F. W. Behler, Inc., a full-service mechanical contracting firm, and plumbing columnist for Plumbing & Mechanical magazine.
Talk about a forum for fun. These guys could make you laugh through the last, post-apocalyptic hour of mankind.
At the time, Holdorf had set up a temporary studio at PPATEC. He was later joined by several of PPATEC’s staff and a gaggle of students – advanced installers and service pros among them – for the fun, fast-paced training session. The evening’s broadcast topic: hydronic piping and circulation.
Who’d believe that such a topic could quickly roll into waves of laughter, merriment, and interactive learning?
If you haven’t yet experienced the style of humor and education – the clash of laughter and learning that’s unique to Taco After Dark – you owe it to yourself to check it out. Don’t take my word for it – all of their sessions are archived; the stored broadcasts are almost as much fun as the live productions.
Holdorf, true to form for the broadcast, took just a slice of the full-day residential hydronics training class, and served with a healthy measure of merriment.
Enraptured Audience
It would be quite a challenge to educate and entertain a large, mixed group of hydronic techs, but not for Holdorf and Barba with just the right mix of antics, humor, and trade secrets.
One young technician in the live audience for the PPATEC Taco After Dark broadcast was Owen Kunder, a mid-20s service and installation tech with Stevens, PA-based Vertex Mechanical. Kunder drove more than 30 miles to attend the live event.
“I haven’t had much training for boiler work yet, so being there for the broadcast was really exciting,” he said. “I learned a lot. One thing that stuck out was hearing Dave talk about system design, and the differing PSI levels that vary with building height. It was fascinating.”
Kunder was soon joined by fellow Vertex installer, Jared Fox. “This was my first experience with Taco After Dark,” said Fox. “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but when Dave got rolling, I was very impressed.
“[Holdorf] offered insights into why things are done a certain way when designing and installing hydronic systems,” continued Fox. “I learned a lot in a short period of time; he gave me a deeper understanding of concepts and practices that I thought I knew a lot about. I was also learning from his answers to my questions – and especially the questions of others. There’s always new stuff to learn, and this experience was super valuable.”