Nicolas — Lead Marine HVAC Technician.

A real marine tech, not a residential tech moonlighting on boats.

There's a difference between an HVAC tech who occasionally services a boat and a marine HVAC technician. Marine systems run on seawater. They share refrigerant circuits with raw-water pumps and strainers most house techs have never touched. Wiring runs through bilges. Refrigerant lines bend through bulkheads. Compressors live in engine rooms that hit 130°F. And the customer is usually trying to leave the dock at 6 AM tomorrow.

Nicolas is a marine HVAC tech. That's what he does. He came in with 17 years of residential and commercial HVAC experience already under his belt — refrigeration fundamentals cold — and then trained directly under Devon on the marine side to make the jump to boats. He knows every Treasure Coast marina, every harbor master, and the right way to walk a boarding line without scuffing teak.

What he services on the water.

Cruisair and Dometic self-contained units. Split-gas systems on cruisers. Marine chilled-water systems with multiple fan-coil zones. Glycol chillers on larger sportfish. Mabru and Webasto inverter-driven equipment. Seawater pumps, circulation pumps, flow switches, reversing valves, control boards, expansion tanks, and the kind of fiddly raw-water strainer that ruins a captain's week.

He runs Barnacle Buster descaling treatments on schedule, isolates refrigerant leaks with electronic detection and nitrogen pressure testing, and rebuilds compressors when the budget says rebuild — and replaces them when the math says replace. Every job is documented with photos so you know exactly what was done while you were ashore.

How he works on your boat.

Drop cloths go down. Shoe covers go on. Tool bags stay on canvas. Every fastener is accounted for before the box goes back. Bilges are wiped, not just closed. The captain or owner gets a written summary of what was diagnosed, what was repaired, what was deferred, and what to keep an eye on — in plain English, not tech-speak.