Design Principles for Residential HVAC Contractors pt. 2

If your service business’s main selling point is that it’s “up to code,” you’re not doing anything to stand out from your competitors and give your customers a “Wow Experience.” Instead, offer customers quality service above and beyond the bare minimum that they – and you – will take pride in.

This week on Cracking the Code, HVAC design expert and EGIA founding faculty member, Drew Cameron, continues his discussion on residential HVAC design principles that will help you upgrade your service quality and give your customers a system they’ll love.

Audio Transcription (in Beta)

On today’s show, we continue to learn the design principles for residential HVAC contractors.

Now, last week we dove into the design principles content, and today we’re going to wrap up that conversation with Mr. Drew Cameron and EGI member, Eric Kelsey. They’re gonna guide us through the entire content. Take it away fellas. We’re doing the technical survey of the house, things. As a company advisor, you have to go in and, and look for, and you have to diagnose what’s going on with the, you know, the existing situation, and then put together a possible remedies that you may have to address from a technical perspective so that when you.

Quote the job and you hopefully sell the job and earn their business That the scope of work is the right scope of work. That’s up to code. It’s safe It’s going to allow the machine to function the way that it should it’s going to give your your installers all the parts pieces And materials as well as the labor time to be able to do the job.

And so from a technical perspective That’s what we’re we’re focusing in on is the system application And so where we left off is you’re talking about oil to gas conversions in certain areas of the country I know certain some things don’t apply to certain people but uh, You You know, maybe not have older gas converters, but you have to look at the refrigerant lines Are you going to reuse the refrigerant lines?

What are the sizes of the refrigerant lines? What type of refrigerant is that is out there? What type of refrigerant is the new system going to be? And if you’re going to reuse the lines, are you going to have to flush them? If that’s something that you do and is that something that code allows? Is there insulation that’s missing off the lines if you’re going to reuse the lines?

And you have to make sure that you’re going to put air in insulation back onto the refrigerant lines that you’re going to reuse. If the lines are just snaked outside of the house, are you going to put a line set enclosure on the ones that are there that you’re inheriting and reusing, or are you going to put a line set enclosure on the one and explain that to a homeowner, obviously, so that they can see that you’re just not going to have that snake running down the side of the house here.

In addition to that, condensate removal. Again, the other way that they might be doing, it may not be the best way to do it. In many cases, obviously, if you’re using a condensate pan, you want to make sure that, uh, you, you, uh, you pipe out the primary and the secondary so that the customer knows that there’s a, uh, a stoppage on the primary drain.

So you’re piping out the secondary to a conspicuous place that they can see. They know that they’re seeing condensate come out and get the secondary drain that they got an issue, but you’ve got safety’s triple, hopefully triple safety switches on the, on the pans as well. Remember we talked about yesterday 90 percenters and humidifiers in the winter.

How are you going to drain those out? so so the uh, the What you’re expelling out is in freezing and then you got to make sure that you’re basically hitting all the codes and clearances And I don’t know what they all are for your area Uh, but you know, where are you exhausting the termination of of your 90 percenter?

uh, you know and you have to be wary about windows proximity to ignition sources and and Uh, gas lines and gas valves outside as well, uh, property lines and structures that you have to have clearance from this condensate discharge location and what to avoid. So you’re not dumping acidic water onto like a sidewalk or a patio.

I’ve seen, uh, I’ve seen companies that had to buy whole new patios, uh, or stamped concrete for people because they discharged condensate out onto the patio and it’s acidic to some extent. Smoking carbon oxide detectors. We talked about outside each bedroom or, uh, uh, On each floor or even near the equipment to be a safety thing.

And again, it also differentiates yourself. The other thing you can also include, uh, you know, that we did back in Cameron Sons all the way back in the 90s is we also included fire extinguishers. You’d be shocked as to how many homes don’t have, number one, a fire extinguisher or a fire extinguisher on each floor.

And that’s something that you can include and mount as part of what it is that you do. Again, separating and differentiating yourself. Uh, which we talked about in the, uh, the sales training class as well. Uh, proximity to a dryer vent, uh, as far as you know, what you’re exhausting, uh, to, uh, snow mounts. If, uh, you guys, guys are in certain areas, do you want to put your heat pumps up on snow mounts?

Um, and things of that nature. And so lastly, decks, trees that are over outdoor units that may put droppings into the, uh, the outdoor unit as well as cottonwood. Uh, and so that’s a variety of issues that we talked about Eric on a survey that we look for anything else on a survey that you look for inside the house, outside the house, behind the scenes, kitchen, Exhaust is a huge big one for indoor air quality.

Yep. Okay. Uh, Attic fan making sure that it gets covered in the winter time. What do you mean gets covered in the winter time? Uh, attic fan is just like leaving a door open. Okay, so I’d like to put a cover on that and are you talking about like meaning a an addict when you talk about An addict fan you’re talking about a whole house fan whole house fan whole house fan That’s not the gable mounted attic fan on uh on the gable or the roof mount.

No, okay You’re talking about a one that’s exhausting tied into the living space, right? and again, I would I don’t know why people some people like those they sound like helicopters to me, but You know again, I I agree, you know, if you’re going to do it You know, uh put a insulated box that you sell over it, right?

You can make it out of duckboard for the customer Um attic tents, do you do anything with attic tents? Yeah, put over the work. Yeah, they work very well So attic tents are something again. We don’t have them here. But again go search the term attic tent There’s a couple different manufacturers of those out there Uh, those pull down stairs and those cubby holes, they leak incessantly.

Again, we talked about the stack effect. Watch the videos on the stack effect from a technical perspective. Again, you’re going to see why customers are uncomfortable. And again, you can be the person who provides the solutions for pennies on the dollar. It takes about 45 minutes to put an attic 10 in and takes a little can of.

And some staples. Yep. And it’s, it’s a way to sell another hour of labor. Yep. And really it’s to solve a problem. It’s not to sell the hour of labor. It’s to solve the problem. Again, you’re the only one that’s going to be talking about all this stuff, which is why we want the comfort advisors to do this.

Otherwise you can just be the box changer and you’re like everybody else, you’re a run of the mill and customers will comparison shop you because you’re comparison selling and you’re not compelling because you’re not doing anything different, better and more than anybody else. Y’all want something different, better and more, but you’ve got to be able to do something different, better and more.

be something different, better and more offer something different, better and more. Then you’ll be that value proposition will be worthwhile. And again, you will get jobs for 345 6, 000 more than your competition because it’s the scope of work is completely different. And so our job is to diagnose the symptoms and the root causes of the issues that we’re finding out there.

Develop a prescription of permanent solutions versus temporary fixes and band aids that you do, uh, you know, that may be short term, uh, you know, short term, uh, fixes as, as, as, as it were. And so you have to offer your customers all the options so that they can consider. Like I said to you, I may offer things that I know they’ll say no to.

But that’s the idea right is let them see everything that’s available to them and let them start to make choices By eliminating certain things they leave the subset of the things That they do value that they are important and when they look at those things they now have perspective Okay, at least i’m not spending thirty thousand dollars, but I feel comfortable with this and I think this will address my concern But if I just show them the one thing they have no perspective Of the other things that are available to them.

And so what we make You Valuable we make affordable and economically perceivable by giving customers context of all the things that it is that they can do And like I said, I gave you the survey documents, um in the the packet of information that you’ll get here So let’s talk about heat loss heat loss heat gain load calculations because we measured the house We took all the measurements of all the rooms the windows the doors the insulation factors the number of people the appliances the direction That the house faces right all of that and we’re going to plug it into either a form some calculation tool You piece of software, an app, or something of that nature, right?

Again, what are we talking about here, right? Houses lose heat and they gain heat, right? They lose heat during the winter and they gain heat during the summer. Insulation just slows it down. Insulation just slows down. Windows slow it down. Doors slow it down. We were talking about, uh, yesterday here in the studio, there’s a, a garage door, uh, outside the studio.

That’s in the uh, the the you know, the production area, you know behind the scenes here And then there’s glass block as well on the wall and eric made the comment. Well, you tell me what was the comment? Look, the glass has a lower r factor than the garage door does right and you would think that the garage door Would actually be more leaky as far as more leaky as far as uh, More, uh, less resistance if you will than glass block, but the glass block here is extremely leaky Right and allison bales from energy vanguard says a poor wall is still better than a good window, right when it comes to resistance of basically letting uh heat out or letting the the solar gain in and so this graphic kind of I think does a Nice job of talking about what heat loss heat gain is now You have to understand when we talk about heat loss heat gain.

I’ve been teaching this stuff She’s 30 40 years almost, uh, you know, load calculations. And what you have to realize is, is what most contractors don’t realize. There is what we call the design load and that’s obviously what you get from using your form or your software But then there’s the extreme load.

That’s the load that basically if the temperature were to reach let’s say in Philadelphia I’m sizing for 95 degrees. That doesn’t mean on occasion. We don’t get to 98 or a hundred or a hundred and two That’s the extreme load, but there’s also what we call the part load, right? There’s the days of the years where it’s not 95 degrees.

And how, and understanding what that is, because like we talked about yesterday, what do we have available to us now, okay, that we didn’t, you know, the homeowner didn’t have available to them when the house was built. Partial load equipment, right? And so again, it’s like buying a two stage air conditioner, two stage furnace is like getting two, two systems in one, one for extreme days and one for the mild days.

And like Eric talked about a little bit, I think it was yesterday. Talked about, we’re going to probably be on first stage and heating and cooling in many markets, probably 70, 80, 85 percent 90 percent of the time. Right. But see, if they have a single stage piece of equipment like they do now, it’s all on or all off.

They get all the capacity where they want to meet or not every day of the year, regardless of the temperature, what’s going on inside their house. But with a stage piece of equipment, they have a system for the mild days, and they have the system for the extreme days, and the system automatically adapts and adjusts.

And then if we go to a modulating system, again, it’s 1 percent increments up and down and we float with the load. And so it adapts to what’s going on outside, inside, into your lifestyle. And the system, because of the communicating thermostats, it learns. And if you can’t talk about this intelligently because you, as a comfort advisor, don’t know about heating and cooling, uh, load calculations, it learns.

Then you’re gonna go out there and a customer’s gonna buy, you know, at the low end of the market. It’s why the low end of the equip, uh, uh, of the spectrum of equipment is the most popular equipment out there, number one. A lot of that goes into the new construction stuff, but it’s because most contractors race to the bottom.

Right. And, and it’s a competing at the, uh, at the, at the lower end of the spectrum. I want my comfort advisors to be the most skilled people out there. They don’t need to be able to do the work, but they need to be able to understand all of this. Right, so they can share, you know, and again, and then you’re hearing me how we’re taking it from the technical and taking it to a place where we can have a conversation with a homeowner and, and, and helping the homeowner understand what they’re buying, right?

Homeowners want to understand what they’re doing, right? It’s a big problem and you can sell by doing a heat loss, heat gain calculation. You can sell multi stage. Yep. You can sell variable speed equipment. It’s so much easier. Yeah. Uh, we have a gentleman, uh, who’s a member, um, out in California. I saw him a couple weeks ago in Nashville and he’s a user of our software, which we’ll talk about here in a little bit.

And, uh, he says, I, you know, I love doing a load calculation and I love showing the customer, here’s the load calculation and what you need for heating and air conditioning. Okay. Based on the design conditions for this market, he goes, but he goes more often than not. He asked someone more often than not.

What kind of temperatures do you, do you see during the winter and during the summer? And the customer told him that. And so he basically plugged those two numbers into the software. Software changed like that. And he says, now look what size heating and air conditioning system that you need. He goes, and guess what?

Your system gives you everything all of those days. But he goes, I can get you a system that will match that. Right. And like he said, he does the heat loss, he can load calculations, adapts the temperatures, and he sells more stage and modulating equipment, sells actually zero single, uh, single stage equipment.

Oh, sometimes I’ll see single if they’ve got a system up and the system down. Yep. So, uh, so what is the heat loss? Again, we’re not going to teach these, uh, these concepts in detail here, but I want you, you and your company advisors to understand what they are right in a heating season, the heat flows from the heated structure, right?

Hot wants to go to cold, right? And so heat moves afterwards by way of conduction through walls, floors, roofs, windows, doors and exposed ductwork also by infiltration of cold air and then it. It leaks out, exhalate, exhalation, right, so we have infiltration and exfiltration or exhalation of heated air through the cracks in the foundation and whatnot.

And so the rate at which that happens increases the lower the temperature goes, right? So the lower the temperature goes, the faster the heat loss, fair? Yep. Okay. Now we flip the script and we basically say on the heat gain side, we gain, we gain heat the other way. Right. And obviously the hotter it gets, the, the faster that the heat that’s outside the house wants to come inside the house.

Right. Cause it’s lower pressure, lower temperatures inside the house. Right. Right. And so the, the hotter it gets. The heart of your air conditioner has to work. Most homeowners don’t understand this. They just think they you know, they go to the magic box on the wall They dial up a number and they hope that they get a result and they don’t know how their system operates This is where your job as a comfort advisor is is to educate them You know, I had I had an army of salespeople at Cameron and Sons and then service experts when I worked there as well And the connective was the utility that bought my company as well I had an army of these people and have worked with armies around the country And when comfort advisors can explain these concepts to homeowners It’s amazing when customers just sit there and they just kind of lean in and they get, they get mesmerized.

Right. Right. And then when you pull out the tools and you prove it, game changer, fair. You’re the only one bidding. Yep. You’re, I mean, you’re the only, you’re the only one they’re going to even consider. Right. Right. Cause you’re the only one doing this. Hi, I’m Darrell Yeshinsky. Hey, I’m Bob Larkin. Many of our contractors meet with us monthly and you chances are have met with us monthly.

We found that members have deeper and greater needs. So we came up with next level coaching, which is we meet a lot more often and there is accountability. To deal with some of the issues of money, growth, finding employees, having an exit strategy to get off this roller coaster. These are the issues that contractors want answers to and we can provide those answers in Next Level Coaching.

When you join Next Level Coaching, you’re going to find solutions that are easy to implement and logical. Most importantly, we hold you accountable to specifics. We’re going to meet twice a month. And have specific to do’s and with those specific to do’s, we’re going to discuss and dive into your financials in a very granular way.

You’re going to have a clear budget. We’ll be able to establish pricing. We’re going to help you create leadership programs that build your people. We’re going to help you find people. You may think of differing ways to engage employees that will keep them more involved by joining Next Level Coaching.

So if you’re interested in making more money, growing your company, finding good employees. And developing an exit strategy. Give Dell an hour call. We’ll be happy to talk to you about next level coaching, and we’re going to see you on the next level. You have no idea how many salespeople that I work with that we get them to basically, I, in fact, I do this.

I did this in Nashville. We had 114 people at an EJ event a few weeks ago, and I asked the room, how many of you do load calculations? I would tell you about 98, 99 percent of the room hands went up. And I said, how many of you do load calculations on every house? And about 80 percent of the hands in the room went down.

And those are the people that I can knock out of the box every time with just the one thing that I’m doing. Cause again, math, fact, science, data, you’re, you’re selling opinions and my math, fact, science, and data will Trump you. As well as my value proposition and that’s just one element which we’re going to talk about more about a little bit here But what are some of the factors impacting the loads right?

It’s local climate weather conditions and heating and cooling hours It’s the direction that the home faces It’s the design and the layout of the house the number of stories It’s the square footage the ceiling heights the location the number of appliances and the lights Again, we don’t factor lights in except for about two watts per square foot on a residential load But if they got a lot of can lights or halogen lights in their house huge, right?

They throw off a lot of heat In a commercial load calculation, you actually have to factor in, uh, each of the ballasts for the, for the load calculations. Fair. We, we did a led change out and we went from 27 tons to 14 tons. Okay. When commercial building. Right number of people in the activity, right? I mean the amount of heat that we give off as people It’s about uh, I think it’s like 230 btus sensible and about 200 btus latent, right?

But if you basically go to a gym at a retail facility that number jumps up into the 700 to a thousand range Right because again, you’re you’re putting off a lot of heat a lot of Perspiration. So again, the activity gets factored in there. The construction. What is the home made of the insulation factors and is a drywall or plaster and what type of glass and tightness in the fireplaces because that’s going to allow for leakage of materials of information.

Excuse me. Um, I lost my train of thought there. Uh, home construction techniques. Yeah, it allows for that infiltration and exfiltration, right? The home construction materials are the insulation factors. And what are the conditions are those of those things, right? We talked about looking at an attic, right, and saying maybe they have R30 of insulation there, but if I look across it and then it dips down, Like three inches.

Again, what is the condition of the insulation? Is it relatively uniform? Use your best judgment. Uh, there. The duct system, like we talked about a little bit earlier, what is the configuration of the duct system? Where is it installed? Is it part of the living space? If it’s part of the condition space that I can, uh, get rid of the duct loss and duct gain.

If I’m going ductless mini splits, then I get rid of the duct loss and duct gain in that calculation. When I’m doing my sizing there, what is the construction and, and is it made of duct board or uh, uh, is it flex and uh, and is it sealed? And or insulated right and again Transparency full transparency. I have a co owner of this software again.

There’s lots of tools out there, but we just got Plugged by contractor magazine. This is the article where they plugged us But as a member, this is why I wanted to share this with you You don’t have to use our tool. Our tool is quick and easy eric’s a is a user This is subscriber. It’s fifteen dollars a month per user, but you get a uh, Or 150 dollars a year you get a 15 discount if you use that eds.

tech You Forward slash E. G. I. A. Uh, 14 day free trial. Try it out. Takes about 5 to 10 minutes. Do a load calculation. You can do it right there on your phone, tablet, uh, laptop, right in the home. And again, you don’t have to do it in the home. You could print this out after the fact or bring the laptop or the tablet back if you’re doing a two step process.

So that’s load calculations there. Once we do the load, Eric, we got obviously got to pick the equipment. Now, what are some of the things we take into consideration, you know, uh, when we’re basically getting downflow is a rooftop unit. Is it horizontal? Yep. So, so the configuration, once you do the load, what type of thing are you replacing?

Right. We talked about what are the dimensions of that? Can you get it into where it’s got to go? Right. Might you need a crane? As you said, I was on a job last week where we needed a crane. Uh, I used to get a crane for half a day. Um, it was about 400 for half a day. You always have to get them for half a day.

You know, if this was last week, 1, 600 for half a day. Wow. Unbelievable. Right? The fuel. Okay. Where, what is the fuel type that you have? Is it oil, gas, propane, right? Or electric? The capacity. We know what the load is, right? And so what is the capacity? And from that, it’s on the heating side, we size to the heat loss, right?

And so with the calculation gave you a heat loss, right? And a heat gain. And a heat gain. But on the heat loss side, we size, we basically have to pick equipment that gives us the output, right? Correct. Based on the load, right? So that’s the heat loss. So if it’s an 80 percent furnace, then you have to outsize the furnace a little bit.

So this next thing I think is a in my travels over the years This is I think a concept that’s lost on many contractors sizing to on the cooling side sizing to the sensible gain Yes, we have to cover the total load, but we size to the sensible load. So talk about that a little bit You’ve got latent which is moisture and is sensible.

What’s the larger part of the load? That’s always sensible and how much like what percentage of the load is usually sensible, roughly speaking, you know, it varies per house, but it totally varies per house, but usually, um, the latest super high efficiencies, I’m only getting 10 percent latent removal. 10 percent late removal.

So you’re, you’re saying the machine itself has a 90 percent sensible capacity. And what is the, the sensible load of the house though? Typically what percentage of the load is the sensible load? Usually it’s in the 90%. Usually that 80 to 90, 95%. Yeah. Yeah. And so again, you have to size to cover the sensible load.

What happens if we don’t cover that sensible load, which is the majority of the load, what’s the, what’s the customer experience going to be? They’re going to feel humid. Yeah, you may have dropped the temperature, but you didn’t remove the humidity. And what’s going to happen on the extreme low day that we talked about?

Frequently, we have to add a dehumidifier with the air conditioner to get that extra moisture out. You might have to add a dehumidifier, okay, or you may have to change out equipment. But the customer’s experience, if you put in the wrong size piece of equipment, what’s their experience going to be if basically I’m sizing for 95 and I didn’t cover the It’s going to be a very sensible load.

What’s the customer going to experience? It’s gonna be a hot night. It’s gonna be a hot night. System’s gonna run, it’s never gonna shut off, and it’s not gonna satisfy the thermostat. And what are you gonna do as a company? You’re gonna be running service calls, aren’t you? All day. Okay, no charge, zero dollar tickets, unprofitable, again, because your people didn’t do heat loss, heat gain, load calculations, and size to the sensible gain.

When you use the software, the software does it for you. It tells you exactly what you need to do, you don’t have to rerun that calculation. Uh, in the packet of information I’m going to give you as well, there are things that talk about oversizing and undersizing issues. Talk about that a little bit, right?

Is it better to oversize equipment or undersize equipment? It’s never better to do either. I get it. But if you had to pick one. Well, I try to have the air conditioning to be 95 percent of what. So you’re saying under size. Under a little bit. If you were going, if you were going to be anything. A little bit.

If you were borderline on the load calculation is to two to two and a half or three to three and a half ton. I’d go a little bit. You’d go lower. A little bit. Why? Because then that way you hit just about all parts of the year. Yeah. And think about it, you picked the extreme day in the load calculation software, right?

That’s the ex extreme load. How often did we get there? How many days of the year did we get there? And on those days, you’re only pegging that load, right? It can be 30 hours a year. That you need that three ton unit system and the rest of the time. So then you’re right sized 30 hours of the year and wrong sized the rest of the year.

Correct. Okay. And that’s the idea. Better to be a little smaller because most load calculation software, FYI, by the way, especially ACCA Manual J, Hank Rickowski, the author of Manual J, has said most his software, the code that he wrote for that software, oversizes by 20%. 28 percent sometimes 28 percent right so again number and again, he’s factoring in the fact that you said r19 installation in the attic He knows in some spots.

It’s r13 and r22 in other areas, right? So just kind of keep that in mind We obviously take into consideration airflow Once we do the load calculation the software also tells us how much air we need to move To move the btus right and so we then have to make sure we got the adequate ductwork, right?

Measure the ductwork. And so we talked about airflow in depth yesterday. And so make sure that your, your size, again, you wouldn’t measure the ductwork for the, you know, that’s existing, you have to make sure it works for the new thing as well. Installation location, where are you going to be putting the equipment and is it safe?

Is it up to code? Is it going to be impinged upon by anything? Um, you know, new units are bigger than the old stuff. Will it fit? Is there a bush in the way that has to maybe be removed? Uh, fencing that needs to be taken down, uh, you know, to get it through, you know, through the fence. Are you going to need a super genie on a job?

Um, and whatnot. Are you be mounting a ductless mini split high on the side? Well, what’s it going to take? Do I need a ladder, right? As a comfort advisor, that’s your job to help be an extension of your installation team. The climate zone that you’re located in, Realizing, you know, in in some cases, it doesn’t make sense to go to the, you know, the top of the line on a 90 percent efficient furnace in Southern California.

I mean, if they want that technology, you know, so be it. But maybe what we do is we get them to invest in a high end air conditioner and in a middle of the road, you know, heating system. Again, whatever is going to fit their needs, but what climate zone are you getting tied into? Uh, I know, for example, in Minnesota, there, uh, when I built their price book in Minnesota, uh, one of our EJ members, uh, companies, uh, no 90, no 80 percenters in the book, but you come down to the mid Atlantic area and we’ve got some 80s and 90s in the book.

We’ve got heat pumps. You go up there, they didn’t want any heat pumps in the book. They said, we just don’t sell them. So I think that’s a mistake, but I think they’re changing their tune there. What is the technology that you’re going to embrace to basically solve the customer’s issues? And obviously we talked about this on the IRA and the SCER thing, right?

What are the efficiency? What is the efficiency of the equipment? Are there any tax credits or rebates, utility rebates as well? Manufacturers rebates, uh, you know, for doing certain things, the promotions that are out there, the incentives that are out there, and I caution, you know, company advisors and the promotions that you put out there as a company, they’re never the reason to do business with you, but they might be the reason to consider doing business at a certain level.

If the benefits of the machine are going to address the concerns that you have. Don’t chase the incentives, right? Get the things that you want to get the result that you want and then the incentives basically help And so I teach you that obviously a little bit when we do the uh, Elevated consumer buying experience class as well.

And lastly, what are the benefits of the various types of pieces of equipment? So I want to kind of bring back what we talked about yesterday eric into this conversation We talked about what is the technology that is available, right? There’s two stage equipment uh On the heating side and the cooling side right there as well as heat pumps.

There’s variable speed fans and x13 fans, right? There’s much and there’s modular. What’s that constant torque constant torque right the x13s and then there’s modulating Furnaces as well as heat pumps and air conditioners. So let’s talk about like how does a customer benefit? We already talked a little bit about the two stage but Uh, how does a customer benefit from some of this technology that’s available?

Well, the really super new technology does a better job getting a cold coil, right? And then some of the stuff there any downsides to the you know, the high end technology that you know So it just doesn’t dehumidify well enough. Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I like the two stage equipment better than some of the available speed equipment Okay, because it’s a cold coil that takes the moisture out What about some of this advanced technology, uh, or basically shifting a customer from, let’s say, a gas furnace or an oil furnace, like we talked about last week in Virginia, over to a heat pump or modulating equipment.

They were used to this 140 degree air blasting out at them, right? It’s warm to the touch. And then they go over to this, like this woman in Virginia, right? She’s spending 24, 000 to get a heat pump and new duct work and all of that. That’s only. The temperature rises only 20 degrees. So she’s going to feel the air coming out.

It’s a little bit cool to the touch, right? Yeah. But will it satisfy the thermostat? Absolutely. If it’s big enough. Absolutely. So as a comfort advisor, do you feel like you should be compelled to explain to the homeowner? You’re not going to get this, right? If they say they wanted to heat eight degrees in the wintertime, nine degrees in the wintertime, you’re not going to put a heat pump in.

You got to, you got to match what their needs are to what you can do, right? Happiness is about expectations, right? And so you’re got to manage expectations with your customers and notify them that how this equipment. Any equipment that you’re putting in, indoor air quality, HVAC, uh, equipment, um, and whatnot, changing fuels, all the things that you’re doing, anything that you’re doing that’s going to change the comfort experience in the home as a comfort advisor is incumbent upon you.

You have a fiduciary responsibility to educate your homeowner as to how the comfort experience will change and evolve when you do these new things. We didn’t realize this two stage variable speed 80s were coming on back in the in the mid 90s back in my company and I Had a a guy on my team Um, one of my best friends, he became one of my best friends obviously after working with me But anyway, he sold a two stage variable speed 80 to an elderly couple And it was a great job.

My, my team did a great job installing it. They were happy with our people. They were happy with our process, but you know what they weren’t happy with the comfort level. So we sent our people out there and we started chasing things and we reran the load calculation, making sure everything was right.

Everything was installed, right? Everything was performing properly. We got the manufacturer’s rep out there to verify everything, tested out nine ways to Sunday properly. And you know what the, the basically Achilles heel to us was. That they why they weren’t comfortable even though we were matching the thermostat and it was comfortable We put data loggers around the house and measured all the temperature and you know what it was They said we’re not comfortable and we’re like why why not?

What’s not making you comfortable when our old system ran guess what? We knew it was working the way that it should we knew it was comfortable because it blew the curtains And the new one didn’t. Why? Because it had a variable speed fan that would ramp itself up, and again, it would hang at that mid level, right?

It didn’t ramp itself all the way up to 100%, and it wasn’t blowing the curtains at the same level, and in their mind, they weren’t comfortable, even though all the data proved otherwise. And my salesperson didn’t understand that because he didn’t do the questionnaire that I provide to you and didn’t do the analysis That we’ve been talking about here yesterday and today didn’t talk about the various levels of technology didn’t manage the expectations and changing things right going from a uh an old temperature, uh, It was an oil gas conversion by the way and went from an uh oil furnace It was putting out 140 degree air at the register to the 80 percent It was probably putting out about 100 125 degree air So it was even cooler to the touch And so we ended up having to uninstall that and put in a single stage piece of equipment You 100 percent money back guarantee for two years.

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