How Progressive Heating and Air Equipped 17 Trucks and Made Installation Commissioning Pay for Itself

Greg Wallace started Progressive Heating and Air 30 years ago in Georgia. Today the company has 36 employees and 17 service and installation trucks, every one of them equipped with measureQuick probe kits. The ROI on installation commissioning alone, Wallace says, paid for itself in a minute.

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The Challenge

Progressive has been an NCI (National Comfort Institute) shop for years. All service technicians carry NCI certifications, and Wallace sent his entire installation crew through duct classes, a move his peers thought was crazy. The technical foundation was strong, but the documentation was not. Before measureQuick, commissioning each installation took longer than it should have, and Wallace admits they often were not doing it at all. The company knew what good looked like. They just did not have an efficient way to prove it on every job.

Wallace also faced the universal HVAC scaling problem: he had accumulated all the diagnostic knowledge himself over 30 years, and transferring that to a growing team was slow. His senior service techs resisted new tools because they had their own methods. His installers had NCI training but lacked the instrumentation knowledge to do full system diagnostics. And when new installs had problems, he was pulling service techs off their own calls to go check brand-new equipment, burning time and money on callbacks that should not have existed.

I always wanted to have a startup crew, but the industry is hard to get employees and technical people and I never have been able to get a startup crew. So I said, screw it. I’m going to teach every one of my installers, the lead mechanics, how to start them up correctly and all the things to do.

Greg Wallace, President, Progressive Heating and Air

The Solution

Wallace met Jim Bergmann at an event in Branson, Missouri, saw measureQuick in action, and immediately saw the fit. He purchased probe kits for all 17 trucks and made measureQuick the standard for every installation. The company covers the cost of all diagnostic equipment, treating it as an investment rather than an expense technicians have to absorb. Hand tools and wear items are the techs’ responsibility. Everything else, Progressive provides.

The installation crews took to it first. There was a learning curve at the start, but once they were through it, the guided workflows kept them from missing steps. Wallace found that the new beta workflows made the biggest difference: instead of going through the diagnostic and discovering missed steps at the end, the workflow walks techs through the exact sequence. As Wallace put it, “You just follow the instructions and it does it all. It doesn’t take any longer because you don’t miss anything.”

The streaming feature opened up a new capability. Progressive’s PM technicians do not need to be class-four diagnostic experts. A class-one or class-two tech can deploy the probes, stream the live data to a lead tech or someone in the office, and get senior-level diagnostic accuracy without senior-level experience. The system diagnoses most things on its own. When there are edge cases, the streaming lets someone with the knowledge weigh in without driving to the job.

The Results

The impact on installation quality was immediate and measurable.

The first big win came when an installer ran measureQuick on a new system and saw red flags everywhere: high return temperatures that did not match the house temperature. Wallace coached him through moving the probes to the plenums. The return plenum read 79 degrees in a 74-degree house, which meant mixed air and duct leakage somewhere. The installer found a large slit in the ductwork. He became a believer immediately.

The second story is even better. Wallace’s install service manager, one of the last people at the company to learn measureQuick, took it to his neighbor’s house. The system scored an F: static pressure of 2.1 inches, 500 feet per minute across one filter, a three-ton system with two 10-inch ducts. They printed the report and showed it to the neighbor. A sales advisor was at the house the next morning with all the documentation needed to scope the ductwork repair. That was just the first of five systems in a 6,000-square-foot home.

My return of investment on just the installation alone paid for itself in a minute. I don’t mind paying the $5 fee for one year subscription for each system. That’s a no-brainer for me.

Greg Wallace, President, Progressive Heating and Air

The callback reduction was the clearest financial win. Before measureQuick, when a new installation had problems, Wallace had to pull a service technician off their own work to go troubleshoot a brand-new system, often in 95-degree heat. Now every installation is commissioned with documented proof. If something needs attention, the data shows it before the crew leaves the job site. Wallace does not have to send a service tech to check work that should have been right the first time. For a company that is not the cheapest in town and does not want to be, the data gives customers exactly what they are paying for: verified performance, not promises.