5 Air Conditioner Brands Owned by Lennox International

Air conditioner buyers looking for a Lennox unit have five other home HVAC brands available to them through the parent company’s history of expansions and acquisitions, SlashGear reported.

The Tech TL;DR:

• Lennox owns subsidiary home HVAC brands beyond its flagship name, including Armstrong, Ducane, AirEase, Concord, Comfort-Aire, and sister brand Century.
• Allied Air manages Armstrong, AirEase, Ducane, and Concord, sharing manufacturing facilities and component designs across models.
• Units across the portfolio transitioned to R-454B refrigerant to reduce global warming potential.

David Lennox founded the company as a furnace manufacturer in the 1890s before selling it off in 1904 to journalist and businessman D.W. Norris. Over 120 years later, the Norris family maintains a stake in the company. That history includes the acquisitions of several rival climate-control systems.

Lennox launched the Armstrong brand in 1928, later selling it and reacquiring it in 1988. Today, Allied Air owns Armstrong and manufactures its air conditioners, gas furnaces, and heat pumps in Orangeburg, South Carolina. The brand’s headquarters and a 40,000-square-foot research and development facility sit a few miles north in Lexington County.

Armstrong shares its underlying technologies with AirEase, another brand launched by Lennox in 1928 that is also housed under Allied Air. Systems from both brands are built at the South Carolina factory and share the Wi-Fi-connected Comfort Sync A3 thermostat, the MHT heat transfer system, and the Quiet Shift coil defrost system.

Both brands offer identical air conditioner ranges, including the A7AC22V variable-capacity model alongside single-stage models A7AC14F and A7AC13F. Buyers are essentially receiving the same product with different brand labels.

Lennox announced its acquisition plans for the Ducane air conditioning division in a press release in May 1999. At the time, John Norris, Lennox International’s CEO and board chairman, said that Lennox acquired Ducane because it served an important market portion that Lennox International did not service at the time, alongside Ducane’s unique heating and cooling products.

Ducane operates under Allied Air as a value-oriented line missing some advanced technologies found in Armstrong units, though it retains a 10-year limited parts warranty. Like other Lennox portfolio brands, Ducane shifted its units to R-454B refrigerant in 2025, achieving a 78% reduction in global warming potential compared to the previous R-410A refrigerant.

Concord offers an identical lineup of air conditioners to Ducane under the same Allied Air umbrella from the South Carolina headquarters. Concord systems also utilize the R-454B refrigerant and qualify for a 10-year limited parts warranty upon registration.

Lennox acquired Comfort-Aire and its sister brand Century through its takeover of Heat Controller in 2026. Heat Controller was founded in 1933 and acquired Century in 1975.

Both Comfort-Aire and Century offer the LE and SE series of air conditioners, alongside heat pumps and gas furnaces. These two brands skew toward smaller distributors compared to the rest of the Lennox portfolio.

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