The Connecticut D-2 Limited Warm Air, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Journeyperson license, issued by the Department of Consumer Protection under Connecticut General Statutes Title 20, Chapter 393, authorises its holder — while in the employ of a licensed contractor — to install, repair, replace, maintain or alter warm air, air conditioning and refrigeration systems, including their media piping, with gas work inside the boundary and oil-burner work expressly outside it at any size.
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A limited license, read from its edges inward
Some licenses are best described by listing everything they cover. The D-2 is best described by its boundary, because the boundary is where this license does its work. It is a limited journeyperson license in Connecticut’s heating, piping and cooling family: narrower than the unlimited journeyperson license in the same family, broader than a purely cooling credential, and drawn with two lines a holder crosses at their peril — gas is in, oil burners are out. This page reads the license the way the Department publishes it: scope first, exclusions in the same breath, employ condition wrapped around both.
The issuing authority is the Department of Consumer Protection, acting under Title 20, Chapter 393 of the Connecticut General Statutes. Within the Department sits the Heating, Piping, Cooling and Sheet Metal Work Examining Board, a separate examining board for this trade family, composed of twelve members. Examination services for the Department’s occupational trades are provided by PSI, its contracted testing vendor, and separate fees are due to the exam vendor at exam registration, in addition to the Department fees described later on this page.
Inside the boundary: the work itself
The holder of this license may perform the installation, repair, replacement, maintenance or alteration of any warm air, air conditioning and refrigeration system. The grant is written around systems, and the verbs are the full working set of the trade — all five are inside the scope as published.
The scope includes the piping the systems need: necessary piping for the conveyance of heating or cooling media, and associated pumping equipment. That clause makes the license workable in the field. A warm-air, cooling or refrigeration system is not a box; it is a box connected to a building by the piping that moves its media, and the pumps that move the media through it. Connecticut writes that connective work into the D-2 expressly, so the holder who installs or alters the system may also do the piping and pumping work it requires.
The license also includes sheet metal work as it pertains to the credential’s limitations. The qualifying phrase is the point: sheet metal work rides with this license only so far as it pertains to the limited scope, and the inclusion should never be quoted without its qualifier.
Inside the boundary: gas
The D-2’s gas posture surprises candidates who assume a limited license excludes fuel work, so this page states it plainly, exactly as the Department’s scope materials state it: LP gas supplied by gas containers and natural gas piping are included in this license, and approved gas appliances, gas utilization equipment and accessories are included with them. A D-2 holder’s warm-air work may therefore run on gas, and the piping, appliances and utilization equipment of that gas work sit inside the boundary.
Hold that inclusion next to its deliberate contrast elsewhere in this trade family. Connecticut’s limited cooling journeyperson license draws the gas line the opposite way, excluding gas work from its scope entirely. The two limited licenses are different instruments with different fuel postures, and a candidate who memorises one license’s gas rule as the family’s gas rule has learned it wrong for the other. For the D-2, the rule is inclusion.
Outside the boundary: oil burners, at any size
Against the gas inclusion stands an exclusion stated with unusual completeness: this license does not include the installation or servicing of oil burners of any size. Both halves of the trade’s oil work are outside, and the size qualifier closes the argument candidates most often reach for. There is no small-burner exception, no residential carve-out, no threshold below which the exclusion relaxes: a D-2 holder who installs or services an oil burner is working outside the license whatever the equipment’s rating.
The practical consequence is a dispatch rule every D-2 holder should be able to recite. A warm-air job arrives fired by gas: inside the boundary, piping, appliance and utilization equipment included. The same job arrives fired by oil: the burner work is not this license’s, at any size, and the crew plan must put that portion in other licensed hands.
Outside the boundary: everything the limited scope is not
The D-2 is a limited license, and its limits are structural, not residual. Its scope is the warm-air, air-conditioning and refrigeration field stated above — not the whole of heating, piping and cooling work as the statutes define that wider term. The breadth of the wider definition — boiler and steam-generation apparatus, process piping reaching into manufacturing — belongs to the unlimited licenses in this family, and no D-2 scope text grants it. A task does not become D-2 work by being heating-adjacent; it becomes D-2 work by falling inside this license’s scope — and by not being oil-burner work.
The family’s shared exclusions sit outside the boundary as well: solar thermal work performed under the separate certificate the statutes provide, medical gas and vacuum systems work, and the passive monitoring of heating, air conditioning or refrigeration systems. And the sideways boundaries hold: electrical work and plumbing and piping work are separately defined occupations under the same chapter, with their own boards and licenses, and no D-2 scope text grants either.
The employ condition
Like every journeyperson license in this family, the D-2 is exercised only while in the employ of a licensed contractor. The scope text states the condition as part of the grant itself, and the fact base states no D-2 authority to contract with the public or to perform the trade independently. The contractor tier paired with this license is its own limited contractor counterpart, and movement to it is a licensing event on that tier’s own terms — not an authority the journeyperson license accumulates with seniority.
The ladder around the license
Connecticut builds this trade as a ladder with named rungs. Below the D-2 sits the apprentice: a person registered with the Labor Department for the purpose of learning a skilled trade, holding a permit under which work may be performed only under the supervision of a licensed contractor or journeyman. The permit expires upon the holder’s failure to apply for the first licensure examination following completion of an apprentice training programme, and a person completing the required programme shall, within thirty days following completion, apply for a licensure examination. Above the D-2, named here as ladder context only, sits the D-1 Limited Warm Air, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Contractor license — this line’s own contractor tier. The limited pattern in the sources runs from the limited journeyperson to its own limited contractor, and this program claims no other feeder.
Crews in this trade are ratioed while the ladder is climbed: for heating, piping and cooling work, the allowable apprentice-to-licensee ratios run one apprentice to one licensee, then two to two, three to three, four to six, five to nine, six to twelve, seven to fifteen, eight to eighteen, nine to twenty-one, and ten to twenty-four; thereafter three journeypersons to one apprentice.
Qualifying for the examination
The Department states the examination qualification for this journeyperson license as completion of a registered apprenticeship program or equivalent experience and training — the same operative sentence it states across this family’s journeyperson licenses. The statute frames the limited journeyman distinctly from the unlimited: a limited journeyman’s license covers a specific area or areas within the trade, and the required experience for it may be less than four years. Candidates should read their own route against that limited frame rather than against the unlimited journeyman’s terms.
For the equivalent route, the Department’s journeyperson application-path chart lists the D-2 at 4,000 hours of on-the-job training. This page states that figure with its chart attribution, as the chart’s figure for this license — the documented on-the-job measure an equivalent-route candidate should build a file against, employer by employer, in work inside this license’s scope.
Behind the trade route stands the general statutory floor for any Chapter 393 license: the eighteenth birthday attained, evidence of competency as the board or commissioner requires, a diploma or other evidence of eighth-grade graduation or equivalent education, and the requisite skill for the trade applied for.
Applying to the Department
Every individual applicant must take an examination. Only individuals can apply — company applications are not accepted. The Department does not pre-approve or review applications before submission, so the burden of presenting a complete, qualifying application sits with the applicant. Separate fees will be due to the exam vendor at time of exam registration.
Connecticut does not have reciprocal agreements with any other jurisdiction. The out-of-state route is an equivalency evaluation, not reciprocity: the license must have required the same classroom hours, an equivalent curriculum, and the same on-the-job training hours as the Connecticut license type, and applicants submit one out-of-state license only for review, with application fees non-refundable.
Department fees, stated as separate instruments
The Department’s fees for this credential are stated here as the separate instruments they are, paid at separate steps. The application fee for a journeyperson license is $90, non-refundable. The initial license fee, for a license other than a contractor’s license, is $120. The renewal fee for a journeyperson is $120. Each figure belongs to its own step of the route and is stated on its own; the examination vendor’s fee is a further separate matter, due to the vendor at exam registration, and no vendor figure is stated in this program.
Renewal and continuing education
All Chapter 393 licenses expire annually, and for this trade family the Department states the date directly: all heating, cooling and sheet metal work licenses expire annually on August 31st. Renewal notices are sent approximately thirty to forty-five days before expiration, and no person may engage in the licensed work after expiration until a renewal application has been filed.
On continuing education, the verified position for the D-2 is a negative. Connecticut’s continuing-education provisions in this field impose requirements on electricians and plumbers; the Department’s index lists no heating, piping and cooling category, and no D-2 requirement appears in the primary sources. Do not import another trade’s hours into a D-2 renewal plan.
The license is personal and statewide: its holder may work in any town or municipality without further examination or licensing, shall carry the license on their person while working and show it on request, and may not transfer it or let any other person use it. No person may engage in, practise, or offer to perform this work — including in advertising or listings — unless licensed or holding an apprentice registration card.
The field code layer, kept in its place
Work under this license is performed to the 2022 Connecticut State Building Code, in effect for permit applications filed from October 1, 2022 and built on the 2021 International Codes with Connecticut amendments: its mechanical volume is the 2021 International Mechanical Code with Connecticut amendments, its electrical standard is the 2020 National Electrical Code, and its adopted-code list contains no separate International Fuel Gas Code volume. That code is presented here strictly as the field layer the licensee works and is inspected under.
What the PassProfessor program will cover
The Connecticut D-2 Limited Warm Air, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Journeyperson program in the PassProfessor catalog is built on the substance Connecticut actually publishes about this credential: the limited scope stated system by system, with its media piping and pumping inclusion; the gas inclusion stated plainly; the oil-burner exclusion at any size, covering installation and servicing alike; sheet metal work as it pertains to the credential’s limitations; the employ condition; the boundary against the unlimited definition’s wider breadth and against the separately defined electrical and plumbing occupations; the ladder to this line’s own limited contractor tier; the qualification sentence and the Department chart’s on-the-job measure for the equivalent route; crew ratios and supervision; the application route, including the individual-only rule and the absence of Department pre-approval; out-of-state equivalency in place of reciprocity; the Department’s fee instruments, stated separately; annual renewal on the August 31 clock; the verified absence of a published D-2 continuing-education requirement; and the field code layer.
PassProfessor is an independent preparation provider and is not affiliated with the Department of Consumer Protection, the Heating, Piping, Cooling and Sheet Metal Work Examining Board, or PSI. Completing this program confers no license, eligibility, or equivalency determination; the Department alone licenses, evaluates equivalent experience and training, and rules on out-of-state equivalency. The companion guide — Connecticut D-2 Limited Warm Air, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Journeyperson Exam Guide (/connecticut-d-2-limited-warm-air-air-conditioning-and-refrigeration-journeyperson-exam-guide/) — works through the boundary, the fuel lines, and the application route in full.
Frequently asked questions
What work does the D-2 authorise?
The installation, repair, replacement, maintenance or alteration of any warm air, air conditioning and refrigeration system, including necessary piping for the conveyance of heating or cooling media and associated pumping equipment — while in the employ of a licensed contractor.
Is gas work inside the D-2?
Yes: LP gas supplied by gas containers and natural gas piping are included, and approved gas appliances, gas utilization equipment and accessories are included with them.
Are oil burners inside the D-2?
No. The license does not include the installation or servicing of oil burners of any size — no small-burner exception exists.
Under what condition may a D-2 holder work?
Only while in the employ of a licensed contractor. The license states no authority to contract with the public or to perform the trade independently.
What qualifies a candidate for the D-2 examination?
Completion of a registered apprenticeship program or equivalent experience and training, within the statute’s limited-journeyman frame. The Department’s journeyperson application-path chart lists this license at 4,000 hours of on-the-job training for the equivalent route.
What are the Department’s fees for this license?
Stated as separate instruments: an application fee of $90, non-refundable; an initial license fee of $120; and a renewal fee of $120. The exam vendor’s fee is separate and is not stated in this program.
Does Connecticut recognise an out-of-state license by reciprocity?
No. Connecticut states that it does not have reciprocal agreements with any other jurisdiction. An out-of-state license is evaluated for equivalency against the Connecticut type’s requirements, on one license submitted.
When does the license expire?
Annually, on August 31st. No licensed work may be done after expiration until a renewal application has been filed.
Is continuing education required to renew the D-2?
No D-2 requirement appears in the primary sources: continuing-education provisions in this field cover electricians and plumbers, and the Department’s index lists no heating, piping and cooling category.
Is PassProfessor affiliated with the Department?
No. PassProfessor is independent and is not affiliated with the Department of Consumer Protection, its examining board for this trade, or PSI.
When does enrollment open?
The program is in the works and enrollment is not yet open. Leave an email address on this page and PassProfessor will write to you when the program is ready — and only about this program.