Electrification – An Open Letter

Electrifying homes across America is becoming a train-wreck, but we can fix it with #betterhvac.

We’re lighting our money on fire by hawking Electrification without first dealing with the decay at the core of our industry. 

My eyes were really opened to the extent of these problems when two of my most esteemed colleagues Bill Spohn and Nate Adams – both staunch proponents and champions of electrification – posted that they both had issues with their new heat pump systems during the first cold snap of the season. Both woke up to cold homes. Both men have tremendous resources when it came to the design and installation yet both experienced failure at some level. To their credit, both were transparent about it. Thankfully, both resolved the control issues in short order… but that experience left me very concerned for the rest of us who are only beginning our electrification journey.

The professionals of our industry can’t even get refrigerant charge and airflow and controls correct on a home’s air conditioner, so how are we ever going to survive heat pumps and electrification? Top it off with an impending labor crisis and we’re in for a hot mess. This is the reality that we are all faced with if we do not quickly mobilize and reshape our thinking about the ways HVAC installation and service are done. Kerry Adkins recently interviewed by a local news station put it this way:

“Eight to ten years from now if something doesn’t change and change pretty soon. We are going to have about a 40% shortage of skilled labor. That is a trainwreck,” said Adkins.

“It doesn’t mean that 40% of the work is not going to get done. It means 40% of the work is going to get done by people that really don’t know what they are doing and because they don’t really know what they are doing the systems are not going to be as reliable and efficient as they should be.”

On Time Service Owner Kerry Adkins

Let that sink in for a second.  Realize that the labor crisis is a self-perpetuating, compounding crisis – and nothing more. Totally avoidable. As an industry we have overwhelmingly settled for the status quo, continually trying to solve the most complex problems with the very tools that created them. It’s time that practice stopped. I do not believe that we have as much of a labor shortage as that we are not effectively using the workforce that we already have – technicians of all skillsets. 

It’s easy to infer that the industry is becoming more complex. At a glance, our work looks much more intimidating than years past. We have introduced inverter technology, communicating systems, onboard diagnostics, cold weather heat pumps and the like. Yet study after study shows the problem lies not in the complexity of systems but rather the fundamental problems at the time of installation and service. The basics – refrigerant charge, system airflow, system sizing, duct sizing, and improper evacuation – have become the biggest problems that plague our industry. These are not “equipment complexity problems” but rather a breakdown in technicians learning and applying the fundamental skills.

As an industry we are stuck in a rut with a perverted sense of normal.

• Callbacks are accepted as a cost of doing business, but they’re completely avoidable
• New equipment failing prematurely is accepted by the manufacturers because our workforce doesn’t comprehend that it needs to be installed and commissioned differently. They simply build in excessive warranty costs. This spawns massive – and avoidable – environmental waste.
• Contractors are still selling entry level equipment. Our industry should be the leaders to more energy efficient and healthy homes, but many if not most contractors still install the cheapest equipment, selected without a load calculation, without evaluating the existing duct system, air filtration, or in most cases even reading the installation manual. These systems have a lower upfront cost but considering lifetime energy and maintenance costs they are in most cases far more expensive.
• We are not properly maintaining systems. Annual maintenance is only performed on about 20% of systems across North America, often in the most busy and inopportune times. For many contractors’ annual maintenance has become a sales opportunity rather than the service opportunity that it truly is. Countless billable opportunities are overlooked and missed because the maintenance technician is incentivized to sell instead of performing a real maintenance and diagnosing real problems (which, ironically, are billable).
• Homeowners don’t trust their HVAC professionals, so they can’t make sound financial decisions. They are tired of getting sold something new rather than serviced. Professionals are taking a homeowner’s agency away when deciding on what to do with the system that most affects their health and comfort – their home’s HVAC.
• Technicians are neglecting root cause analyses of component and system failures. ECM motors, heat exchangers, and compressors should easily last 20 years with almost no maintenance. Most systems could last 15-20 years with proper installation and configuration. That’s not the case today, where many high-tech motors and compressors needed replacement within a year of initial  installation.

So what norms have we accepted? Here are a few.

Refrigerant charge needs to be checked annually.

False. Refrigeration units are sealed systems, keep them sealed! – if you charge them right and properly test for leaks, you should never need to attach your gauges until the system’s final disposal. A home A/C is no different than a home refrigerator. Once we have a benchmark of performance, we can test the system completely with temperature probes with no need to measure pressure. This non-invasive method can save millions of pounds of refrigerant annually (By the way, the factory charge is often not the correct charge. 50%-70% of systems have refrigerant charge and airflow problems).

Condensate traps need annual cleaning.

False. Condensate traps should not need to be cleaned, ever. Condensate is distilled water. Pick up a jug at the store and see how much dirt is at the bottom. Condensate line plugging is just a symptom of dirt bypassing or sifting through the filter media and settling on the equipment before being absorbed by water. Properly selected and installed filtration media will trap 99.9% of the dirt. This also protects the fan motor, circuit board and indoor coil.

Airflow needs to be checked or adjusted annually.

False. Airflow is a one and done process. If you trap the dirt at the filter and replace the filter when it’s at its limit, that’s all you need to do. The blower wheel and indoor coil will stay clean and airflow will not change. 

Manufacturers are selling leaky coils.

False. Coils are painstakingly tested during manufacturing for leaks. What often kills coils and compressors is improper evacuation leading to the formation of acids and formicary corrosion occurring from the inside out. Hitting 500 microns is not enough. We need to hold 500 microns during a decay test. Many times, when inspecting a kill compressor we see the copper that was stripped from the system deposited onto the compressor bearing surfaces.

Condensers need annual cleaning.

False. Condensers need to be cleaned when they are noticeably dirty. This could be monthly, annually, or once every 10 years. It all depends on the dirt load and equipment use. Your refrigerator does not get a condenser cleaning until the dirt is impacting operation. An air conditioner is no different, so don’t waste time with unnecessary work.

Commissioning processes do not provide enough value for the time invested.

False. Using the right process and tools, commissioning will save you dividends by eliminating callbacks, avoiding frustrated customers and  frustrated technicians that hate rework. Call backs are traumatic for everyone involved, and many service businesses foolishly accept callbacks as the cost of doing business. Call backs result in substantial losses in real revenue, time, and productivity, and cost the consumer an average of 9% more in utility costs over a lifetime.

Static Pressure should only be tested in problem cases.

False. Static Pressure Should be checked on every system. Our own test data has revealed that 70% of residential systems are above the 0.5” WC level specified by manufacturers. 47% are above 0.7” where danger of early failure begins. And to pile more bad news, switching from PSC to ECM typically increases static pressure 30% because more air is flowing through the system. Pending dampers open and return clear, high static most times means undersized filters and or undersized ducts. Ductwork retrofit can be a real profit center for companies. 

A technician must average 6-8 calls a day for a company to be profitable.

False. A technician should have a mindset that his/her first call of the day is their only call of the day. Right now, we expect our technicians to speed around town in a manic frenzy believing that quantity is the answer to our revenue problems – but the opposite is true. Tremendous amounts of revenue are lost due to rushing through calls, not having a standardized practice of service and not actually performance testing equipment. Getting the equipment running does not mean it is running well. If you’re out replacing capacitors and not looking at the electrical system, the control system, the air distribution system, the air filtration system, the ventilation system, the condensate disposal system etc – YOU ARE MISSING REVENUE EVERY CALL (and pissing off everyone involved while doing it). I am by no means saying “Mrs. Jones” will fix all the issues that you find, but how can you even offer a solution if you cannot identify the issue.

HVAC companies need to hire the “best” talent.

False. Many HVAC professionals with 20 years of experience have 1 year of experience repeated 20 times – approaching each job the same way. This perpetuates destructive norms and rules-of-thumb. Bad habits are difficult to un-train, but junior – unshaped – talent can be leveraged in valuable ways. With minimal training and the right exponential tools and software, junior talent can find just as many billable opportunities as your seasoned veterans (if not more). It’s not technicians that fail but rather your business processes. Adopting standards like ACCA Quality Installation, or Energy Star Verified Installation or even standardization with measureQuick takes the value from your technicians and places it back into the company. When the company owns the process, and the standard is enforced, the expectation of quality and the outcome become consistent. What differentiates technicians then is how fast the standard is completed. 

Indoor air quality should be left to the IAQ experts

False. We are supposed to be those experts who understand temperature, humidity dewpoint, wet bulb, particulates, filtration and the impacts that each of these have on human health and general well being. The HVAC technician can make a bigger and longer lasting impact on consumer health than their general practitioner  by simply controlling a few IAQ variables. The transmission of illness, annoyance of allergies, and prevention of toxic mold are all controllable by controlling in particular temperature, relative humidity and filtration. At best we have been doing the first and the latter are neglected or only a by-product of the equipment operation. We are trying to solve these issues with blue lights instead of stopping them at the source. We have emerging solutions like HAVEN to provide holistic control and monitoring of these systems. Filtration, and dedicated humidity control are profitable upgrades that solve real problems and dramatically increase the consumer comfort as well as extending equipment life.

All of these accepted myths perpetuate a chaotic and wasteful industry.

This means that an electrified future will be an even bigger mess unless we address our existing, self-imposed dilemma.

• Premature failure of equipment due to poor equipment selection, duct design, duct leakage, faulty installation or poor evacuation.
• High electrical bills do to improper control configuration
• Plagues of poor indoor comfort due to little or no design considerations
• Brownouts or blackouts due to excessive demand on our antiquated electrical grid
• Service technicians having to perform service under less than ideal conditions. Cold weather repairs lead to a host of new problems.
• And finally the industry unifying that electrification is simply a bad idea. Not because it is but because it’s not done right.   

I’ve spent 30+ years my life watching these problems build, and I’ve also chosen to spend my career trying to fix them. I believe in a future of #betterhvac – where every call is a billable call. Callbacks become a thing of the past. No time is wasted on unnecessary travel, duplicate tests, or duplicate data entry. Homeowners are satisfied with every interaction with their service company because it is transparent. A future where doing every job correctly is frictionless, hassle-free, and the only way for a HVAC company to stay profitable in a competitive market.

#betterhvac is the cure our homes and HVAC businesses need before we can pursue the electrification of our nation. Through #betterhvac, businesses will multiply their customers and profits through voluntary use of scalable technology. Through #betterhvac, every tech can achieve the same, repeatable outcomes.

A #betterhvac Framework For Success

At measureQuick, we’ve been exploring how to create a framework for #betterhvac. Though this framework is still in its infancy, Our partners who are implementing measureQuick and #betterhvac have seen massive improvements to their bottom line.

• 40-60% increased revenues per ticket
• 10-15% increased closing rate
• 30-50% reduced callbacks
• 80-90% increased average ticket size
• Up to 500% return on investment

The current process that #betterhvac companies follow to create major business value is as follows:

1. Use measureQuick and vitals scoring to identify and document poorly operating systems and candidates for electrification. 
2. Learn and adopt ACCA/Energy Star quality installation standards and use them. 
3. Install better and more air filtering paying particular attention to the prevention of air bypassing it. 
4. Monitor and control indoor air quality with a product like HAVEN.
5. Control humidity, with a dedicated humidifier (when needed) and dedicated dehumidification. 
6. Stop duct leakage. Perform a duct tightness test with a calibrated duct tightness tester and get the leakage as close to leak free as possible. 
7. Additionally, buy a high quality flare and learn how to make a flare, and buy a torque wrench to properly tighten it. Press fittings are proving to be the most reliable fitting over time, but we are stuck with the flare for a while. While the flare is harder to do, it is very good when it comes to low leak rates.
8. Evacuate with a high-quality vacuum gauge like the AccuTools BluVac that has provisions for an actual decay test, ideally to 100 microns or less.
9. Commission with measureQuick a Minneapolis digital TrueFlow grid and smart probes to get airflow and refrigerant charge correct as well as to verify the actual system performance.  
10. Benchmark the system with measureQuick once optimized to have the ability to test the system without gauges
11. Monitor the performance for degradation over time with a leave behind system like SmartAC. Service the system when it needs service. Make every truck roll a billable truck roll.
12. Leverage lower skilled labor moving forward as the software will very precisely perform the diagnostics and direction on how to move forward.

We have become an industry full of mechanics, and what we need are actual technicians. What is the difference? Mechanics fix systems with tools, and technicians take it a step further and leverage exponential technology. “Getting it running” is no longer good enough. We need to get it running right if we want to move towards electrification. This means a proper evacuation, correct refrigerant charge, correct airflow, and careful installation of filtering. This means proper design, commissioning, and benchmarking to allow for new service practices going forward. This means continual monitoring and “just in time” service going forward to optimize how we use our labor force. This means elimination of callbacks and poor operation of equipment. This means everything is changing. You need to change with it. 

That change will make your business more efficient, sustainable, and profitable.

We recently interviewed a few HVAC business owners who are using measureQuick to scale their businesses. Check out the full 40 minutes below.