8 Air Conditioner Brands Owned By Trane Technologies

Although there are scores of good AC brands that compete against each other in the HVAC market, a surprisingly high number of those brands are owned by just a handful of corporations. One of those is Carrier, with a brand portfolio including the likes of Toshiba, Payne, and Bryant. Another is Trane, which now owns a similarly broad array of subsidiary brands, despite its humble beginnings.

The Trane Company was first incorporated in 1913 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Over the following decades, the company filed a laundry list of innovative patents involving different components of heating and cooling systems. Its ownership changed multiple times, with the latest iteration of Trane having only been around for around two decades.

Throughout its different ownerships and various name changes, the company has launched new brands and bought up some of its competitors. As well as giving it access to different specialized markets, these additional brands also broadened its offerings for the larger public. Trane's portfolio now includes far more than air conditioning, but these eight subsidiaries make up its current family of HVAC brands.

The American Standard brand is not only one of the most notable names in Trane's portfolio, but also one of the oldest. Exactly how old it is depends on whether you consider its predecessors to be the true foundation of the company. The merger that resulted in the creation of American Standard took place in 1929, with American Radiator Company and the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company joining forces. The American Standard name, however, wasn't officially adopted until 1967. Before the merger took place, the two companies had been operating since the late 19th Century.

The history of mergers and name changes doesn't stop there either. The Trane Company was acquired by American Standard in 1984, and remained a subsidiary of the latter until 2007. That year, American Standard announced it was selling off a significant portion of its non-core business operations and would be renaming itself to Trane. A year later, Trane (and thus American Standard) were bought by Ingersoll Rand, before being spun off again into the freshly independent Trane Technologies in 2020.

Today, American Standard serves as Trane's main premium HVAC brand. It primarily caters to homeowners, but also sells light commercial air conditioning systems. According to the brand, there are more than 5 million American Standard air conditioning units installed in households.

Launched as a standalone company in 2021, Ameristar is one of the newer brands in Trane's HVAC lineup. It was formerly a line of air conditioners marketed under the American Standard brand, and the two are still linked today. Trane refers to the brand as "Ameristar by American Standard Heating and Air," and notes that it's positioned as a more affordable option compared to American Standard's mainline products.

Alongside its air conditioner range, Ameristar also offers furnaces and heat pumps. Its products come with up to 10 years of warranty coverage despite their low prices, although to benefit from the full warranty period, buyers are required to register their products with the brand within 60 days of having them fitted into their homes.

Alongside their lower purchase and installation costs, Ameristar's air conditioners are also designed to be energy efficient. The company claims that buyers can expect energy savings of as much as 38% compared to an average 20-year-old air conditioner, depending upon which model they pick.

New Yorkers will recognize the MTA as the authority that runs the city's buses, subways, and other transport systems, but Trane's MTA brand is not related to the transport company. This MTA does manufacture air conditioning systems that are used in train and subway stations, though, as well as making units for airports, hotels, restaurants, and even data centers. Much of its product line is designed for commercial use, but the brand sells a smaller range of residential air conditioning systems too.

The brand operates in around 80 different countries across the globe, although most of its sales come from Europe, and only a small portion comes from the U.S. It's hardly surprising, since MTA is an Italian company, having been founded in Padua in 1982. Its products are still mostly built in two facilities in the Italian towns of Tribano and Conselve, but the company has been owned by Trane since 2023.

Ameristar isn't the only value-focused air conditioner brand in the Trane family. Just as Ameristar is American Standard's more affordable sister brand, RunTru is the cheaper sibling of Trane's own air conditioner line. When the RunTru brand launched in 2019, Trane's Brand Marketing Leader Scott Ewald told Contracting Business that it was designed as "a value brand offering for our current Trane dealers," saying that it "provide[s] cost-first customers a dependable solution without all of the bells and whistles found in a premium Trane system."

RunTru's range of air conditioners and heat pumps are made in the U.S., in the same factories as Trane's own-brand products. Similarly to Ameristar, RunTru offers many air conditioner models, with the most energy cost-effective being marketed as 38% more efficient than an average 20-year-old air conditioner. A 10-year warranty is offered for buyers who register their new air conditioning systems within 60 days of them being installed.

Many of Trane's brands make air conditioning systems for residential or commercial properties, but its Thermo King brand focused on designing systems for vehicles instead. Among other things, Thermo King makes HVAC systems for buses, cargo vans, trains, and trams. It has been doing so for many decades, too — in fact, the company was responsible for creating the first refrigerated railroad boxcar back in 1938.

The brand's journey to becoming part of Trane started when Ingersoll Rand bought Thermo King in 1997. Ingersoll Rand later bought Trane before spinning all of its climate-control companies, including Thermo King, off into a separate division, which now operates under the Trane name.

Since then, Thermo King has made its own, smaller acquisitions while operating as a Trane subsidiary. In 2024, it bought Klinge Corporation, a maker of refrigerated shipping containers. It can take many days or weeks for cargo ships to cross major oceans like the Atlantic, and keeping sensitive material cool during those crossings is not an easy task. Klinge offers shipping containers that can maintain temperatures as low as -13 Fahrenheit, making it possible to transport food, pharmaceuticals, and temperature-sensitive chemicals.

The increasing capabilities of AI are helping to reshape industries of all kinds, and it's being used at all levels. Plenty of plumbers now use AI to help them run their businesses, and some HVAC techniciansuse it too. AI can also be used to help optimize existing HVAC systems, and Trane's Brain Box AI brand sells technology designed to do exactly that.

This technology can be fitted to older systems and uses a unique algorithm to adapt its energy usage on a building-specific basis. It can factor in things like energy tariffs, the amount of people in a building, and current weather conditions in real-time, potentially allowing it to adapt much more efficiently than a conventional control system.

According to the brand, this algorithm-based optimization can help lower energy costs by as much as 25%, and reduce emissions by up to 40%. Brain Box also offers other AI-based technology alongside the smart HVAC controls, including an AI agent designed to assist building managers and a cloud-based management system that can be used to control the climate of multiple buildings at once.

Shortly before RunTru and Ameristar were launched as individual brands in Trane's portfolio, Oxbox was created as the corporation's dedicated value-oriented brand. Oxbox officially launched in 2019 and was intended to attract new customers that otherwise would not have purchased from a Trane brand.

It uses a separate network of distributors to American Standard and Trane, unlike Ameristar and RunTru, both of which are sold through the existing networks of their respective partner brands. Its products are also built in various facilities across the world, rather than being primarily U.S.-made like RunTru.

At launch, Oxbox was sold across the southeast of the country, but it expanded over the following years and is now available via a network that stretches across the U.S. Buyers benefit from the same warranty coverage that's offered by Trane's other value brands, with five years of standard cover for non-registered units and up to 10 years for registered units.

From its beginnings in Italy in 1995, Thermocold grew to become a major player in the European air conditioning market. In 2017, it was bought by Ingersoll Rand, which at the time was Trane's parent company. When the climate division of Ingersoll Rand was spun off to become Trane a few years later, Thermocold was transferred with it.

The company sells both commercial and residential air conditioning systems, and has acquired a string of patents for various systems and design elements. Among its most notable proprietary designs is a multi-pipe HVAC system that can deliver hot and chilled water without the need for a separate boiler, making it much more energy efficient than a traditional system.

It still operates in Bari, Italy, the same city where its founders were originally based. The company has stated that its mission is to reduce the environmental impact of air conditioning systems where possible, and to that effect, it offers systems that use a range of refrigerants including R290 (propane). The same refrigerant is also being considered by some automotive AC system manufacturers, since it has much less potential to impact global warming than other, older refrigerants.