Who Owns Trane?

James Trane, a Norwegian immigrant, opened a plumbing and heating shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 1885. His son Reuben earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin, and together with his sister Stella they incorporated The Trane Company on April 5, 1913 to manufacture the low-pressure vapor heating system James had designed.

Reuben Trane's 1923 invention of the convector radiator, replacing heavy cast-iron radiators with lighter fin-tube heat exchangers, established the company as an innovator. In 1931 Trane patented its first air conditioning equipment, becoming an early pioneer of comfort cooling, and in 1938 launched Turbovac, the industry's first hermetic centrifugal refrigeration machine. That product line, today's CenTraVac, remains the standard for large-building chillers nearly ninety years later.

The company grew into a full-line HVAC manufacturer: residential systems, rooftop units, controls. It acquired GE's central air conditioning division in 1982, then was itself acquired by American Standard Companies in 1984, becoming that group's largest business while retaining the Trane name and La Crosse operations.

When American Standard split up in 2007, selling its bath and kitchen unit and spinning off WABCO, Ingersoll-Rand purchased Trane for roughly $10.1 billion in a deal completed June 5, 2008. Trane operated inside Ingersoll-Rand's climate segment for twelve years. In 2020, the industrial tools business was spun off as the new Ingersoll Rand Inc., and the remaining climate company took the name Trane Technologies, making the 1913 brand the parent company's own identity.

Under that structure Trane has grown with the data center cooling boom, heat pump adoption, and commercial building efficiency retrofits. The brand marked its 110th anniversary in 2023 and supplies systems installed in landmarks from Grand Central Station to the Burj Khalifa.