Sprint called me and asked me to name my price. I named it. Then I delivered the project under budget and ahead of schedule. That’s not something I say to impress anyone — it’s just what happened, and I think it’s worth understanding what that actually meant.
This was Sprint’s largest infrastructure project in company history. The facility was a classified national infrastructure site — the kind where you don’t name the location in public, and I won’t. What I can tell you is that it housed the original transatlantic cable data center, and we were building out a 12-star cell triangulation system capable of locating a cell phone to within one foot of accuracy. The mechanical, electrical, and HVAC systems had to support that mission. Nothing could go down. I was the onsite engineer for seven years total, with the core build running for one continuous year.
Phase 1 — Breaking Ground
The project started with demolition and excavation at an active facility. You don’t shut down a live national infrastructure site to do construction — you work around it. Continuous operations, round-the-clock concrete crews, crane work coordinated so nothing interfered with the facility’s uptime. Every pour documented. Every phase photographed.
Phase 2 — Systems Go In
Once the structure was up, the mechanical and electrical work began. Cooling towers on the roof. Chilled water plant in the mechanical room. Electrical distribution, switchgear, transfer switches throughout. Hundreds of individual systems that all had to integrate and perform without interruption to the live facility operating alongside us.
Phase 3 — Commissioned and Running
The standard for project completion on this job was different from anything I’d done before. It wasn’t enough to get the systems running. Upon completion, every single piece of equipment, every system, every door, and every fixture had a complete operating manual, a maintenance manual, and an identifier tag. You could walk into that facility ten years later, find any component, and know exactly what it was, how it worked, and how to service it. That’s the documentation standard we held ourselves to.
What This Means for Hartzell’s Customers Today
I’m not telling this story to make it sound like I only do big projects. I do residential work every day — tune-ups, change-outs, service calls in Kingfisher and Watonga and every town within sixty miles. But when you call Hartzell’s, you’re calling a company whose owner spent seven years as the onsite engineer on Sprint’s largest infrastructure project in their history. That experience doesn’t go away.
It means I know how to read plans, coordinate systems, hold subcontractors to a standard, and document everything. It means when I look at a residential or commercial HVAC job, I’m looking at it with the same eyes that commissioned a $30 million classified infrastructure facility. The scale changes. The standard doesn’t.
— Dave Hartzell, Hartzell’s Heat & Air, Kingfisher, Oklahoma. In business 15+ years.
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