It all started with the New York Metropolitan Opera House.

As that venerable structure was being built in the mid-1960s, Larry Wetzel, an undergraduate in the Pennsylvania State College of Engineering, looked on in awe.

"I've always had an interest in how things work," Wetzel said. "I've always had an engineer in me. But what got me into the construction industry, and specifically the HVAC side of the industry, was the summer between my junior and senior years in college. I was working in New York City with one of the companies that was building the Metropolitan Opera House, and I was very intrigued by the amount of engineering that went into the HVAC system—not only the heating and cooling, but also noise, acoustics, vibration, and so on. I discovered that the real-world application of engineering can be very interesting."

Wetzel rode that love of mechanical systems through a long and interesting career in the HVAC engineering field, and today, Wetzel, chairman of the board of Air Innovations Inc., Syracuse, N.Y., is the recipient of the inaugural HPAC Engineering Engineer of the Year award.

Wetzel is a professional engineer in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California and holds contractors licenses in those states as well as Florida and Virginia. He holds eight U.S. patents, with other patents pending in Europe and Canada. His 1983 design of the first packaged and modular air conditioning system for the cleanroom industry, AdvancAir, still is widely used today for environmental control of temperature, humidity, and air quality in the manufacture of semiconductors and other electronics and pharmaceuticals.

A deep interest in indoor-air quality has been a hallmark of Wetzel's career. He has authored several peer-reviewed articles and been the principal investigator in research projects totaling more than $2 million related to indoor aeroallergens and asthmatic responses in children. Not only that, he’s a savvy businessman: Air Innovations was listed as the 102nd fastest-growing, privately held manufacturer in 2011 by Inc. magazine.

Wetzel's U.S. patents include those for IsolationAir, HEPAiRx, and the Wine Guardian Through-the-Wall.

IsolationAir, a portable contamination-control unit for health care and emergency preparedness, evolved after the 2001 World Trade Center bombings and the avian-flu pandemic. Wetzel's design incorporates HEPA filtration and ultraviolet lights into a portable, self-contained cabinet that can quickly change any hospital-sized patient room or emergency-preparedness space (such as a doctor's office or hotel room commandeered by the government for injury and illness overflow) into an isolation room with either positive or negative pressure.

IsolationAir prevents infectious diseases from spreading and protects immuno-compromised patients from being exposed to others' illnesses. Just as importantly, users can bring IsolationAir to patients instead of patients besieging hospitals or traveling long distances for treatment. The cost to purchase an Isolation Air unit is significantly less than the cost of a hospital building out a permanent isolation suite. Not coincidentally, Air Innovations sold its first unit to a hospital on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana that had first-hand experience with issues caused by Hurricane Katrina.

HEPAiRx is a window-mounted ventilating room air purifier for home use. It is designed to quickly dilute, filter, and reduce the indoor pollutants often cited as causes of asthma, respiratory irritations, and allergic reactions. The packaged device consists of an air-to-air heat exchanger, a HEPA filter, and an air conditioner. In clinical trials with asthmatic children in upstate New York, the window-mounted unit yielded statistically significant reductions in children's asthma symptoms.

Wine Guardian Through-the-Wall is a natural outgrowth of Wetzel's love of wine. It is designed to control temperature, air circulation, and humidity in wine cellars to protect valuable wine collections.

Before he became the chairman of the board and co-owner of Air Innovations (along with his son, Michael, who also is a professional engineer) Wetzel traveled a path familiar to many engineers: a life of learning and discovery—with some hard life lessons mixed in.

After he graduated from engineering school, the New York-based company that had been doing the work on the Metropolitan Opera House offered Wetzel a position working on a unique project in Upstate New York: a plant that was being built to process sugar from sugar beets as an alternate source of sugar after the Cuban embargo.

"There was a tremendous learning curve for a young engineer out in the field to see what worked and what didn't work and to learn some of the unintended consequences of design," Wetzel recalled with a wry chuckle. "I could write a book about it. The plant ultimately failed for a number of reasons, but it was just one dumb mistake after another that caused me to learn very much very quickly."

Preferring upstate New York to the city, Wetzel stayed in central New York after the sugar-beet-plant project and held various positions with two mechanical contracting firms in the Syracuse area that were doing commercial and industrial work. Little did he know he was about to be wowed again by a project that would change his destiny.

"I became involved as the mechanical contractor when the local General Electric plant built its first cleanroom," Wetzel said. "I became really intrigued by the sophistication of the technology and the tolerances that were required to meet the performance criteria of a cleanroom. So I went off on my own and started a business called Cleanroom Technology Inc. that focused on designing and building cleanrooms for the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries."

The company grew very quickly and performed work for clients all over the country. Eventually, it teamed up with a French company that was manufacturing wall systems for the European cleanroom market. The French company, Clestra, eventually bought the cleanroom technology from Wetzel, and he became chairman of the company's cleanroom group.

During this time, Larry's son, Michael, went to work for Clestra in France, and Larry ultimately left the company to found a venture-capital company specializing in assisting startup businesses.

After three years in France, Michael moved back to the United States, and the wheels began turning again for the Wetzels. They purchased a company called Floratech that manufactured refrigerated display cases for floral arrangements. Using that as a base, the Wetzels began to develop new products, including small cooling units for cleanrooms. Then, in 1999, Clestra decided it wanted to exit the U.S. market, and the Wetzels were able to repurchase their original cleanroom technology from the company. That led to a burst of product-development creativity and a diversified product portfolio.

"We decided we wanted to diversify, and that's when we got into the cooling units for large walk-in private and commercial wine cellars," Wetzel said. "Today, we're the largest and most diverse manufacturer of wine-cooler units in the United States."

The original Floratech business now represents less than 10 percent of Air Innovations' total revenues. About 60 percent of the company’s business is in original equipment manufacturing. For example, Air Innovations builds a filtration and cooling unit that is incorporated into a high-speed scanning machine used to examine checked airline baggage for explosive devices, as well as a cooling unit that goes into an automated blood analyzer used in hospitals and medical laboratories.

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