Contractor Aron Frailey estimates he has installed as many as one thousand radiant snow-melt projects since entering the business right out of college nearly 20 years ago. The jobs have been many and varied — from high-end residential to large commercial. He even spent three weeks in Moscow in 2017 at the behest of the U.S. State Department, building a snow-melt system for the U.S. Embassy there — “Although I couldn’t speak a lick of Russian,” he notes.
But, Frailey’s most unusual job to date is one of his most recent: The UVU Pedestrian Bridge on the Orem campus of Utah Valley University, the largest public university in the state. “It’s the first bridge I have ever done,” says Frailey, who founded Thermal Engineering in Salt Lake City in 2008. After nearly two decades working on some of the largest snow-melt jobs in the world for his own firm and a previous employer, he does not hesitate to label the UVU Bridge “as definitely a learning experience.” By that, he doesn’t mean an easy one.