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44 minute read
In this episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, hosts Ed Smith and Eric Fitz welcome Corbett Lunsford, a building science expert and host of the PBS show Home Diagnosis, to discuss the importance of scientific approaches in HVAC, the power of testing, and how to navigate the industry with confidence.
Corbett shares insights on tools like blower doors, RED Calc and his own psychrometric wheel. With years of experience in building science, he brings a fresh perspective on how proper testing and measurement can significantly improve HVAC performance and efficiency.
This episode is packed with valuable information for HVAC professionals, contractors, and anyone passionate about building science. Tune in to gain expert knowledge that can help you refine your approach, deliver more comfort to homeowners, and better explain your solution to your customers.
Expect to Learn:
- Airtight homes are essential for comfort, efficiency, and health – don’t fear tight construction, just ventilate properly.
- Homeowners are increasingly well-informed, and HVAC pros should be ready to engage with curious, educated clients.
- Building performance starts with the enclosure; HVAC systems must be designed with the current and future envelope in mind.
- Testing tools like blower doors are critical to uncover hidden issues and verify system performance.
- Proper HVAC installations begin with proper design. “The box” is nothing without accurate Manuals J, S, D, and understanding room behavior.
- Fast rebate programs without proper testing risk widespread system failures.
Episode Breakdown:
[00:00] - Introduction of the episode.
[01:17] - Corbett’s Background
[04:34] - The Importance of Testing in HVAC
[06:52] - Essential Tools for Building Performance Analysis
[13:44] - Common Industry Misconceptions
[17:07] - The building envelope comes first; HVAC must work with it, not around it.
[22:57] - Blower door and pressure tests reveal issues you can’t see.
[32:13] - Great installations begin with smart HVAC design.
[46:37] - The Role of Consumer Education
[50:03] - Closing Remarks and Where to Connect with Corbett
[50:59] - Free Resources and Tools for HVAC Professional
Connect with Corbett Lunsford:
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Corbett Lunsford: In the 70s and 80s. They were building tight homes. And then we decided in the 80s, 90s, 2000, 20 tens, and here we are in the 2020s, that you don't want to build a house too tight. People are saying that right now. That is the stupidest thing that you could say about a home enclosure, because yeah, you want to build it really tight. My home has no pest control necessary because there is no way for pests to get in. I've never had bugs sprayed inside my home and I never will.
[00:00:28] Ed Smith: Hey everyone, quick public service announcement. We just put out our first e-book. It's our top ten heat pump sales tips that we've gotten from the experts we've had on this podcast. It's totally free. So if you want it, click the link in the show notes to get your copy. Okay, on to the show. Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump podcast. I'm Esther Smith.
[00:00:47] Eric Fitz: And I'm Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amplify Energy.
[00:00:50] Ed Smith: So today we're delighted to have the one and only Corbett Lunsford join us. Hey, Corbett.
[00:00:55] Corbett Lunsford: Hello, Ed. How's it going?
[00:00:56] Ed Smith: Good, good. We want to get into some nitty gritty building science and heat pump stuff. But before we do, lots of people know you from your YouTube trainings. You do. We just saw you at the HVAC symposium. You gave a great presentation. Thanks, but we'd love to start with where we were before we started taping your backstory, because it's not obvious that you have landed as one of the thought leaders in building science. Tell us about your path that got you here.
[00:01:28] Corbett Lunsford: Sure. No. I remember one of the biggest compliments I ever felt. I don't know if you meant it as a compliment, but I, like, had written this book about testing, and the guy that I had sent it to called and was like, this is a great book, but who are you? Who are you? He just wouldn't stop asking me. And I'm like, yeah, exactly. So that's part of the reason that I do what I do, and I try to make it clear I'm not a good builder. I'm not a good HVAC installer. I'm just a guy who's asking questions. And I think that's the first thing that needs to happen is that people need to ask questions, and a lot of contractors don't feel comfortable doing that because they feel like they look dumb, or they're disrespecting their ancestors because they learned from their dad, who learned from his dad, etc.. So I came to this in 2008. I went to music school. I used to play piano for dance companies and Second City, which is a touring comedy theater improv group. We were talking about improv. I was an improviser, but I was a musician who was an improviser, and so I'm very comfortable flying off the cuff.
[00:02:23] Ed Smith: Second city is like one of the names in improv.
[00:02:25] Corbett Lunsford: Yep. So I was a music director for one of their three touring companies, and that's how I met My Bride. We went to her college and did a show, and I met her at the party after. So yeah, it really came in handy, but I decided to get out of that because begging for money from people who begged for money from other people is probably not a great business model long term. Also, Grace was a nonunion actress at that time, so we were in Chicago. I just quit, I just decided, you know what? The universe is telling me to quit. And so I decided to let the universe tell me what else to do instead. And I didn't really have any knowledge. And somebody had said, hey, I've got a really good idea for you. I have this house that I just bought and I know there's a lot of stuff wrong with it, but I don't know who I can call because if I call a window guy, you know what he's going to want to sell me and an HVAC guy and all these people. So I just want somebody to come out, make a list of all the things that are wrong with the house and how to fix them. There's no place in the Yellow Pages back when they existed to look for that. And I was like, that's actually not a bad idea. So I looked into it and all the guys who were doing that kind of thing, once I could figure out what it was called, which is energy auditing is what we used to call it, or hers raters.
[00:03:28] Corbett Lunsford: They were generally all older guys who had come to it in the even as early as the 70s but 80s 90s back when the energy crisis and the kind of echoes of that. And so they came in through this energy efficiency door. They didn't do a great job marketing themselves. They didn't talk about it in a way that I thought was compelling, like the sex appeal of this kind of thing and the kind of fear we could talk more about fear later. Not fear mongering, but plugging into that lizard brain that people have was missing and people wouldn't get their calls back in a week, because people who do this are generally just like small HVAC shops. Find it hard to run a business, do the books, do all the things that are businessy because we don't have business degrees? And so I was like, great, I could do this. I could build a website because I had to when I was a musician, I could do all the graphic design and do the advertising. And so we started and it was called Green Dream Group. And I thought it was green, like green was the thing that was Pete Green and immediately found out that nobody knew what we were talking about. When I said, we can find out what the invisible dynamics in your home. And they're like, I don't. Sounds like feng shui. Is it feng shui? And I was like, no. So Grace was a filmmaker, and she said, we got to put you on camera and you got to show people what it is that we do.
[00:04:34] Corbett Lunsford: So blower door testing, infrared thermal imaging, pressure testing, combustion analysis, things like that. And so we started making videos and I was terrible. If you want to feel good about your anybody who's watching this who's like, I should make some videos, you should. And you're going to be terrible at the beginning and it's okay. Just watch any of our first videos. It's like obvious that I hated every minute of it. And so it's just practice. You keep on doing it. And we happened to have gotten into this when there weren't any other trainers around. It was before the Arra funding. So like in 2009, there was this big funding bundle that punched a bunch of money into BPI certification and more energy auditing and rebates from the utilities and things like that. And so anyway, we saw the rise of that and then the fall of that, which is disheartening. So I don't care about rebates or government money at all anymore. Actually, I feel like it's probably anti-productive to what we're really trying to do, which is get normal people involved in this. So in our opinion, we came pretty early, decided that the boss of this entire construction industry is widely misunderstood. People think like the government when they're trying to roll something out, they'll give it to architects, and they think that architects give that stuff to builders because builders do what architects say, and then the builders will sand it down to their subs, and the subs do what the builders say.
[00:05:48] Corbett Lunsford: And like none of that is actually true, in my opinion. I think if you give it to the normal people and then they go and they ask for it, people start getting afraid of what are these people learning that I don't know. And so essentially all my clients now, after having started the company, worked in Chicago for seven years. We moved down to Florida in 2015 and built a tiny house on wheels called the Tiny Lab, which is the world's highest performance tiny house on wheels. Because if I came to your town and I said, hey, do you want to learn about building science? You would say, no. But if I say, do you want to tour my tiny House on wheels in 2015 with our baby and our two cats that we live in 200ft², they would say, oh my God, I'll wait in line for an hour in the rain for that. So that's how we got the we would do presentations and open houses and every day and talk about building science. And so through that. Then we made the first season of our television show. We had $7,500 from BP, and we had two cameras, and we would have like, people watch our baby while we ran the cameras and the sound and scripted it and edited it and did all the stuff. It was a real it was not fun. And so then we ended up moving to Atlanta at the end of the tour.
[00:06:52] Corbett Lunsford: Built a big house, made that the second season of the show, and then made the third season. About these researchers that we've been working with for a number of years in the chemistry and microbiology space. So now I have about ten clients a week all over the country and abroad as well, who call me for an hour zoom consult as like a second opinion, which I think there should be way more of. Everybody should know how to do this. Just look at a plan, look at a manual J calc, look at the whatever and just be like, hey, have you considered these factors that maybe didn't go into this design? And people go, oh, great, because they know a lot, because they're all getting these master's degrees from YouTube University, because you can learn anything. I built a house based on YouTube, like I would build the stair stringers, and I'd go that morning and go learn how to build stair stringers because like you can. And my house, by the way, is it says stand. We had a structural engineer. We had all the right people, geotechnical engineering and all that stuff. So knowing the right people, though, to ask, I think is important. And there's nobody in this space. So we happen to step into it. And my point is that these ten people who call me every week from all over the place, normal people, little old ladies, 20 year old first time renters, they know what ACH 50 they would like to see out of their blower door test.
[00:08:01] Ed Smith: Wow.
[00:08:02] Corbett Lunsford: Wow. 99% of contractors don't know anything about this. So all of the clients that I have, and this is for anybody who's listening to this, who's not a pro, feel like they're the only person in their area who knows anything about building science. And that is true for somebody in the middle of the Philippines or on the coast in Portugal, or somebody in the middle of New York City. Everybody has this experience where, like most of the contractors just do what we've always done, because that's just how you do things.
[00:08:27] Ed Smith: Yeah.
[00:08:27] Corbett Lunsford: So I'm hopeful.
[00:08:29] Ed Smith: That's an incredible story. And so 2000, you started that journey in 2008.
[00:08:35] Corbett Lunsford: 2008 was the beginning of our company. Yes. So 17 years. That's incidentally the same year that Matt Riesinger started his YouTube channel. He has an actual audience based on an actual thing that people know about. We had to teach people about what the topic is and then get them to like, engage with it. So that was a little we're lagging behind for sure, but it's okay. I don't mind.
[00:08:55] Ed Smith: Now. I think you're just going to be incredibly humble about it. But I'm going to ask anyway, like you rocketed up the learning curve of what is a pretty tricky, incredibly tricky space where there's misunderstanding, there's misinformation. There wasn't much to go off of. I guess my question is, how the heck did you do that so fast?
[00:09:13] Corbett Lunsford: So when kids ask me when they're like getting into the job market, they just graduated from high school or college or whatever, and they're like, okay, I'm putting in my resume and I'm like, please don't do that. Getting in line. That's a long line that everybody is the same graded the same way on your resume or whatever it is. That is just not the way to do things. You find the person who does the thing that you want to do and you invite them to lunch. You say, can I take you to lunch and just ask you questions? Everyone has to eat lunch. I love being taken to lunch. If somebody offers that and they're like, hey, can we just go? You pick the restaurant, I'll take you anywhere you want. And I just want to ask you things. That is how this works. So my first music gig, actually, the way I got that Second City gig was I took a guy who was a composer for theater out to lunch, and he ended up because I was 20 years old, and he was like, I'm treating you like you don't have any money. Come on. He was like eight years older than me. And so then a week later, he got a call for a gig that he did not want to do because it was beneath him. But he was like, but I can help you because I know the perfect guy for you to call. Therefore making him look good and also making me look good. And I got the call and that's all that happens basically.
[00:10:19] Corbett Lunsford: So if you want to do something, you go find the people who are doing that thing really well, and you just either buy them lunch or pay their hourly rate, whatever it is, to just get them to show you things. So I shipped up a guy named Brian Coomer from down south of Chicago for a full day. We paid. What is your hourly rate? I'll pay it. I want eight hours of your time to just show us exactly how all this testing should work. And he taught us, me and my team for a day. And now that's like a service that I find very useful for people is like, you'll read a bunch of stuff, but then you've got these holes and you just need those holes filled in, and you can literally do that in one hour if you find the right person. So I think that's something that we can all try to engage in. I find that in general, 50% at least of my job is non-technical. It is explaining this stuff to people. If you do not know how or you're not interested in explaining it, in my opinion, you should not be a customer facing professional like you should be working back in the closet somewhere doing the technical thing. That's nice, but we need people to be talking about this and teaching people why manual J, why heat pumps all that stuff? Because just saying, oh, it's because everybody does it. That's the same problem that we're in now.
[00:11:24] Eric Fitz: Corbett I love it. It's I think you start at the very beginning, this theme of asking questions. And it's just so obvious, like you're an incredibly curious guy. And yeah, that innate curiosity I feel like can drive so many amazing things.
[00:11:38] Corbett Lunsford: It's two things, though, Eric. Actually, I feel like, yes, being interested in doing stuff I built my own house, like I built the tiny house on wheels in my parents backyard. And then I built this house with my mom and dad, and people come in here and they're like, you framed the walls. And I was like, yeah. And they're like, why would you do that? And it's because I want to know how it works, and I want to know how hard it is, so that then when I'm talking to a builder, I'm like, hey, man, I get that. Like, you don't want to do the whatever. Like, I've been there. I built my own duct system. I installed my own RV, my own makeup air system, so I know exactly how hard HVAC contractors work and how cramped it is down there, and how much of a crick in your neck you get when you're in a crawl space working on stuff, or you get overheated in an attic. But I think the other thing is that there's an ingredient in both me and my bride, which is that we are we're never really afraid that we can't do something. It sounds like it's a superpower, but it's also a handicap because we'll get ourselves into situations like going on tour.
[00:12:33] Corbett Lunsford: My dad was like having a stroke every single day, thinking of us on the road in this 13,000 pound house dragging behind this truck all over the country. I've never driven a big truck. I had never used a nail gun before I built that tiny house. He was like, I hope to God this thing is structurally stable because I don't know, it's fine, by the way, it's still standing. In fact, we're going to we're working on it now. But anyway, that kind of gets you into trouble. But then if you tell enough people, hey, here's what we're doing. And that's always the first thing we do is like, we're going to make a TV show. And then people are like, didn't you say you're going to? And then they're going to hold you accountable? So I find that that kind of thing really puts on pressure. It creates the peer pressure that I need. I cannot work out by myself. For example, I have to go to a class where people are watching and be like, okay, now I have to do it because I said I was going to do it.
[00:13:17] Eric Fitz: Oh man. Yeah. And it's I feel like that's so often the case that your biggest strength is also can be your biggest weakness. So I'm super impressed. Corbett. It's an amazing story and it's yeah, it's fun just to to hear how not only are you curious, but you're willing to like, get in there and do it. And at the risk of potentially getting to a place where maybe you're a little bit farther down a rabbit hole than you, then?
[00:13:40] Corbett Lunsford: Yeah.
[00:13:41] Eric Fitz: Maybe you should be.
[00:13:42] Corbett Lunsford: Yeah. And you'll be stressed.
[00:13:43] Eric Fitz: Learn so much. Yeah.
[00:13:44] Corbett Lunsford: And I hope that what people will take away from that kind of a story, and there's lots of stories like that, is that you can make your own cred. There is no okay. There is, but it's not useful in real life. There's no master's degree or even like, there's maybe 1 or 2 bachelor's degrees in building science in the entire country. It's not really a thing. So you have to go out there and make. You could put letters behind your name with a certification like any of the ones. Everybody knows what they are. But ultimately, if you end up building your own house, making your own TV show with your raising all the money for it and using the cameras and learning how to edit and all that stuff, it's like, whatever it is, I'm not saying everybody needs to make a TV show, by the way. We put it on TV because it had never been on TV before. Building science had never been on TV. So people don't believe that think something is real unless it's on TV in America. And that's what we kept hearing again and again as we were on tour. People came to the tiny house because they saw tiny house on TV, and so it's real. So anyway, that's why we did the TV show. But you can do anything like that if you just say, here's what I'm doing and you make your own cred, and don't let people tell you that you're not the expert. Somebody needs to be the expert and might as well be you.
[00:14:49] Ed Smith: As an example, we didn't talk about this at the in Florida when we saw you, but your list, it's a great example of me of like you just do things. You put that you've got that list of HVAC contractors who respect the design process, they do manual j.s.d, etc. when two years ago, when we had a barely functioning piece of software that was not yet approved, that we just had the vision for. The only way I could get people to talk to me, I did door to door sales. Like I literally got in my car and I just drove around. I did Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and I was about to do New Hampshire, and then things started to take off. I would also cold call people that list. At that time, you had 25 guys on 25 companies on it. It was like it's way bigger now. I used that as my cold call list, and we had some of our earliest beta testers because you saw a hole and you're like, I'm just gonna do a Google doc, and people can write in their names, and I'm very glad you did that. And for me, there's like just one of those examples of like how you roll.
[00:15:45] Corbett Lunsford: Yeah. No, I'm so happy to hear that. And yeah, it's not QC like I don't know most of the people on that list. And that's okay.
[00:15:51] Ed Smith: Having called all 25 of them there's good ones on there.
[00:15:54] Corbett Lunsford: Yeah there's like I think 100 and maybe approaching 120 now.
[00:15:58] Ed Smith: Yeah. There's way more now.
[00:15:58] Corbett Lunsford: Something like 35 states I think so. So anyway, the point is that you don't even have to do the manual. J all we need is people who believe in science and math, which right now, unfortunately, like the fact that we even have to ask normal people that or contractors is insane. But like that, honestly, that's the first question. Do you believe in math and science? And if they're like, yeah, I would believe math. If you had math, great. That's what manual J and D and S is. So let's just do that. And then like of course we know that manual J overestimates in certain ways that you need to then adjust for. And that's the art. But if they just believe in math that's enough I feel like to begin with. So that list is actually just installers. They don't even have to do manual JS as long as they're willing to follow one.
[00:16:38] Ed Smith: That was awesome. Background. I want to start getting into some of the meat of stuff in doing that. When you were on stage in Florida midway through your presentation, you stopped and you said, I'm an envelope guy. And it was like it was an important line because it said a lot about how you view the home and everything that falls from that. Would you just explain what that means to be an envelope guy and why that matters so much? Sure.
[00:17:07] Corbett Lunsford: I think especially right now, semantics are very important. Like the rhetoric, how you talk about something is tells you a lot about people. So I think that a lot of as we know, HVAC professionals are trained to look at the box. The box is the most important thing. The equipment and then everything outside of that is an accessory to the box. And really, once you start looking into it, you find out that not only are the ducts super important and the things like the filters and the, you know, whatever things not to add, like blue lights and ionizers or whatever, we can talk about that more if you want. But also the rooms themselves are a part of the duct system. Technically, the way that I came at it was first blower door testing and infrared and all that stuff. I was a hers rater. That was my first certification. I ended up getting a ton of certifications. I have no certifications now, by the way. I'm totally outside the box, and I like that because I can see inside those boxes and see what how they're the assumptions that they're making. But I think that the thing that I come to is when I was troubleshooting problems, I was using enclosure testing to look at the problems.
[00:18:12] Corbett Lunsford: And so I came to a philosophy of home problems with physics mostly, which is heat bleed, air flow and pressure, moisture and contaminants. That was addressed by testing and then solving via the enclosure. And one of the first things that I realized is that most of the problems that my clients were having in Chicago were based on a room that was confused about what it was. It was kind of inside and kind of outside. And I so early on I was just like, look, if we want to just get this thing solved and not Band-Aid over it a bunch of times, you just lock every room, including garages, attics, crawl spaces inside or outside. Once you do that and you really lock them one way or the other, they're not going to be a problem. And by the way, there are buffer zones like a vented attic is technically a buffer zone, which you might think is a gray area between inside and outside. And I think this is where people who are not enclosure testing experts get into trouble because they'll think, okay, there's outside, there's vented attics and vented crawl spaces or God forbid, encapsulated attics, kind of in between, inside and outside. That's a problem. And really those buffer spaces should be exactly like outside in every way except no animals, precipitation or wind boom.
[00:19:24] Corbett Lunsford: So same temperature, same humidity. When we get into that gray area then problem is not energy efficiency. And the problem is not necessarily comfort. The problem is dew point. We don't know when we're going to start making things wet and therefore growing mold. So that early on for me was important. And now what I recognized looking back at that, is that I am on this track where I do not think that modeling this is a very specific nerdy. You said you wanted to get into the details. I model attics if they are encapsulated, meaning insulated and air sealed at the roof. They are a room in the house. Period. Therefore, they get entered into manual J. They get a BTU assigned to them and I will deliver the CFM that is needed by that attic with a manual D calculation. Every single one of my designs is that way. I would never say that an attic is encapsulated and then just let the software be like, okay, it's up there. I don't know what temperature it's going to be, but we'll kind of make up a number based on whatever. Like I think that is insanely risky to me.
[00:20:25] Corbett Lunsford: And that's where you end up installing a 1500 or excuse me, $2,000. Dehumidifier. That's just for the stupid attic. That's literally one room. No walls inside of it. If I literally cut a hole, cut, not even add anything, I cut a hole in a duct. Like, ideally, it would be an engineered hole that was based on calculations from a software like yours, and then put a damper on that with a collar. That is the alternative to installing a $2,000 piece of equipment that we all know is not going to cost the homeowner $2,000. It's going to cost them $6,000 because you got to run a condensate line, you got to blah, blah, blah. And now they have to maintain a thing that's got a filter and they've got maintenance costs. I think it's just crazy to not just is it a room in the house or is it not? And if it is, treat it like that. Don't treat it like it's a like people who used to have babies out of wedlock. Oh, that's not my baby. And it's like it is. But you could pretend like it's not. It's just ridiculous. And now looking back, we're like, those guys were full of crap. Maybe a little off color analogy, but.
[00:21:23] Ed Smith: Hands down the best analogy that's ever been on our podcast, though we're only on episode like 20, but that is the best one. Well done.
[00:21:29] Eric Fitz: I love this stuff you're pointing out. I've had lots of conversations with folks about encapsulated addicts and what's really going on there and how you treat them, and I love that. You just nailed a very interesting topic. And we're actually participating in partial rewrite of manual J right now. Thank you. We're on the you're welcome. We're on the technical committee. And with ACA and there's a bunch of interesting things that we're talking about. I'm hoping to potentially raise this as one of the issues. That's very confusing. And I feel.
[00:21:58] Corbett Lunsford: Like the safety this is where at that conference, actually, I was really proud. I have not felt I don't because of the way that we got into this. And I don't have an academic background and all this stuff. I'm not I don't fit in very well with the crowd that I come from, so I can bring information to the HVAC crowd or to the homeowners, the normal people that I talk to generally, which is our our main audience, is split between those two. But with the enclosure crowd that was there at that conference, there were two old guys who were there, John Tully and the head of Tech Energy Conservatory, You can look him up. But anyway, they're both legends, and it felt good to have them flown down there to give the information that, like hers, raters know about. Like, those guys are at our conferences all the time talking about the same stuff, but it was the first time that those guys had ever heard of this kind of thing before. And to watch them get so like, oh my God, this is amazing.
[00:22:57] Corbett Lunsford: Because if you can protect yourself with a blower door, the facts of the attic is actually not truly encapsulated. Is not your fault. As an HVAC contractor. That is the spray foam guy's fault or the builder's fault. And if you can test it and prove, hey, not my system, not my problem, you should fix the spray foam job. That was hack. Which, by the way, you can't tell by looking at it. You have to test it. And this is where the testing thing just comes in so handy because it's like you have a free pass as an HVAC contractor. If you can prove that it's an enclosure problem, it's not your problem. And I know people are like, but I don't want like I don't want my clients calling me. Yeah, of course they're going to call you. But there's ways to protect yourself against that. And there's ways to sell your time as a consultant instead of just going out there for free, because it's like, if you could do one test and find out, like, not my problem. Happy to help, but I'm not paying for this.
[00:23:43] Eric Fitz: Then it makes everything easier. Yeah, I love that. Like and it's you're not trying to like. Your point is, it's not my problem. Like I'm not going to touch it or think about it. It's like, hey, there is this issue. It's not related to what the typical work that I do or like my equipment. It's an interesting constraint that we need to be aware of as we're thinking about doing XYZ with your HVAC equipment. And or we should consider changing these things about the building envelope, because it will make our job focus on the HVAC equipment like way easier. We can reduce the size of the equipment. We can do X, Y, and Z.
[00:24:16] Corbett Lunsford: And all the stuff generally that you're going to do to fix an enclosure way easier than fixing HVAC, and you do it one time. It works forever. It doesn't draw any energy to do its job right. It's the baby stuff. Like doing that stuff is easy and it's permanent.
[00:24:29] Eric Fitz: Yeah, totally. All right, so, Corbett, we just started kind of getting into more of the kind of HVAC stuff. You know, a lot of our listeners are HVAC professionals. They're business owners. They're the comfort advisors that are out in the field doing designs. And they're really mostly focused on heat pumps. Can you think about them and how they're working with homeowners? And, you know, you're often advising your clients who are homeowners. What are the things that you tell them? Tell your customers, your clients that they need to be aware of when they're interacting with a contractor? What are the questions that they should be asking? What are the things that you come across that that are really important to to make sure that the homeowner is aware of and that the contractor is aware of for when they're doing a heat pump retrofit.
[00:25:13] Corbett Lunsford: I will say, anytime I hear a homeowner say that a HVAC contractor recommended a blower door test, I'm like, green flag, huge green flag, I will blanket statement say people who know and these are people who have gone on and watched maybe ten YouTube videos from our channel or from any of the other ones that are floating out there. They will talk with someone and know within five minutes whether you actually know as much as they do. And it is frightening that so many people know that they know more than their HVAC contractor about these aspects of the home performance. And by the way, we're talking about five factors here. So the H and the AC heating and cooling your software and manual J generally and Ashrae right handles that. But the five factors inside of V that are hidden in there are not just dilution. They're in fact dilution. Air, which is actually 62.2 is the fourth factor on my list. Circulation is something that's not handled by mini splits. So if you just did whole house mini splits, you have no circulation system between rooms. That can be a problem for for the down the line, because we don't want many microclimates building up inside the house for mold mostly capture of pollutants where they're created, which is bathrooms and kitchens. Not part of manual J or S or D, and also filtration. Not really part of that. It's part of Ashrae 62.2 now in the newer versions.
[00:26:34] Corbett Lunsford: But like you don't have to necessarily meet that depending on which state you're in. Humidity control, adding humidity, subtracting humidity. One of the main drawbacks here is that we're talking about like when I see people adding humidifiers to homes in manual J, they're doing it with the evaporative humidifier, which dings you on your heat, and you have to add more heat now. But if you add a steam humidifier, it actually subtracts and there is no way. By the way, guys on the technical committee, there's no way to subtract from the equipment load with that steam humidifier. So I'm just going to park that right there. And the ERV, the dilution air, the air coming in from outside is going to have an impact on that because now in a tight home like mine, for example, which is a 0.4 ACH 50, if you know what ACH 50 means on a blower door test. Very tight. My blower door test is 300. Therefore, if I ran a dryer, a vented dryer in my house which is not part of manual JS or D for me to even mention a clothes dryer to my clients. Like what? That's not my job. That's half of a blower door on my house. If I run that one time, I'm going to have massive problems with pressures in my home. And also that dryer is not going to dry clothes. And I don't know if anybody else out there has heard that complaint, but like this is a big problem because the first door, by the way, that you're going to close, even within this very airtight home, is the door of the laundry room.
[00:27:47] Corbett Lunsford: You're not going to do laundry in an open room, like you're going to close that door. So you're going to have to listen to it. So anyway, there's all these pressure things that are at work. And then that leads to the last thing past dilution air, which is the fresh air that needs from outside is pressure relief for any one way exhausts, which a dryer is one of. There's a solution to that, which is heat pump dryer period. Only correct answer. The last thing though is kitchen exhaust. You got to have a kitchen exhaust that goes outside and you use it every single time you cook. I don't know how we make normal people do that, aside from talking to them and tell them how polluting their cooktop is and also their oven. The oven shouldn't be on the other side of the room from the cooktop. But often an active makeup air system is required. There's a calculator that you can use to do this, and you can find out that, like where a lot of guys out there and I'm talking to you, if you're listening to me about makeup air, you'll go into a house and they'll say, oh, I think we need makeup air for this hood.
[00:28:37] Corbett Lunsford: And you'll either say, oh, that hood's not 400 cfm, so we don't have to add makeup air. I'll remind you, my house has a blower door test of 300. So if I installed a 300 CFM kitchen hood without makeup air, I'm doing a blower door test on my house every single time I run it. That would be a mold disaster, guaranteed. And if I want to save the family from that, then I'd say makeup air. Even if it's 300, because it's code doesn't know anything about pressures. And at that point I'm going to say, I know the solution is a single eight inch round from Broan or Aprilaire because they make them one off. You can buy one and you install it and that. Yay! Good job! Made me feel better, when in fact you'll do the calculation and find out you need ten eight inch holes to open up simultaneously in the wall in order to relieve the pressure to the level that you want to, or more, ten or more. So those are the kinds of things that I think are really we're like so quick on the trigger to to prescribe. You got you want to look smart. And so you're like, oh yeah I got one of those I got that, I got the blue light, I got whatever like the things that are supposed to solve things. Then they just don't. You got to do math.
[00:29:39] Eric Fitz: Totally, man. Yeah. Makeup air is definitely a whole big topic. Because if you don't have that makeup air, what you're talking about is you're going to depressurize the house in a massive way, and that's going to create all kinds of issues.
[00:29:51] Corbett Lunsford: Yeah, we basically can't predict what's going to happen at that point.
[00:29:53] Eric Fitz: Yeah, yeah. It gets things get really weird. And to your point, like the dryer, it just dryer is supposed to be exhausting at say 100 or 150 cfm if it actually is working against all of your really high performance home, it might only be able to draw because the pressures have gotten so high, it might only be able to draw like 50 CFM. And that's your point about it won't actually dry your clothes because it's just moist air that's just staying inside the dryer.
[00:30:20] Corbett Lunsford: Yep. And in case you think, by the way, that you're not working in airtight homes, I've found lots of them that are accidentally airtight. And that can be an existing home that just has been improved and improved and improved. New windows, spray foam insulation in the attic. They're doing air sealing packages, whatever. And it just gets airtight eventually over time or new home. And they don't think that it's airtight, but they hire somebody to come out and do and they do a really good job. And I've tested builders the first time out and they're blowing a two ACH 50, which is very airtight. And I'll say, what did you guys do different on this house? And they say, what do you mean? We've been building exactly this way for 20 years, and this is their first blow orders that they've ever had. So all these I don't know how people aren't getting sued like crazy out there these days, but, I mean, you find out the blower door is as old as I am. I'm 46 years old. It was invented the year I was born. Like, I shouldn't have to tell people like, this is a thing that exists. It's just so important.
[00:31:12] Eric Fitz: So I think you get actually one on the contractor side. I think it's very important to ask the homeowner, hey, have you done some kind of professional weatherization work at some point? Because that's going to at least directionally tell you, hey, if this home was built in the 70s or 80s, you might be thinking in your head, wow, this is going to be a pretty leaky home. But if there has some kind of professionals come in at some point and done real air sealing work, you might have a dramatically different envelope performance and you got to at least adjust your assumptions around that. Even better, see if the homeowner actually has a blower door test that's been done in the past. Or do one yourself. You really want to know what you're working with instead of guessing. So what are some of the most common mistakes that are made at the design phase? So where you got into some of them? I'll say a lot of our listeners will be like, hey, we rarely go into someone's home that's blowing a CFM 50 of 300. What about, I'll call it a slightly more normal home that's out there. More typical projects. What are the more common mistakes that you're seeing.
[00:32:13] Ed Smith: For a heat pump system?
[00:32:14] Corbett Lunsford: Mistakes of the HVAC system.
[00:32:17] Eric Fitz: Yeah, for someone who's proposing a heat pump, in particular for retrofit.
[00:32:21] Corbett Lunsford: Okay, interesting. I think knowing how to install them. Like to get back to your question from earlier, Ed, like how did I accelerate through the thing? I swear to God, I became a trainer and a proctor, which is a person who administers exams and giving these exams to guys who are older than I am. I grew a beard pretty early on. I started when I was 28 and people were not taking me very seriously, so I had to swear a lot and grow a beard. And people were like, okay, great, you seem to know what you're talking about. Anyway, these older guys would come to my class and then they'd take the exam and I would have watched them through the class. And anybody who's trained you learn more when you train than your students do, generally because the questions you're getting and things like that. Then I would give the exam and these guys do not follow instructions. That and I'm not trying to say that we should, like, make all of our schooling about just following directions, but like, it is a very universal thing that people just do not read the manual. And then if they did, they did not follow the manual. And just organizing your brain, knowing how to read instructions, understand the instructions and then apply those instructions is foundational to doing a good job in any of this stuff. And I find that is something that is missed a lot more than we would assume. So if you just happen to be a kind of person who will open manual J and read it, and I will admit I have not been through the entire thing.
[00:33:44] Corbett Lunsford: But you can see mine is like pretty freaking used at this point. You just level up like there's you get the extra mile going the extra mile. There is no traffic beyond the extra mile. You're all by yourself out there because no one else does that. So that's one of the things that I'd say is just reading the instructions on this stuff, knowing what a makeup air system looks like installed, knowing how to put it together, knowing how to wire a wiring block for controls. Things like these are all things that HVAC guys are supposedly taught and know how to do and be above and beyond that. The invisible stuff is the first big point that I'd come to, which is pressure and airflow. If you're not testing pressures and air flows, I don't think that you could be a very effective HVAC professional. If you're trying to troubleshoot anything at all or verify anything at all, you could put things together and wire them and then connect refrigerant lines. But like, that's it. And then you just walk away. I think that there's generally things like spray foam, for example, which is a whole big topic that we will not get into. But spray foam is something that even the best installers, after they're done, done, they will test their work, find the mistakes they made, which is always there. It's like anybody who's built a house knows mistakes are made every single day. Things go wrong every day on even the best build sites. And then you find those mistakes and you fix them and that urge to find your own mistakes so that you can fix them is so scary for most people that they will not take that step to start testing their work.
[00:35:14] Corbett Lunsford: And therefore, if you're the kind of person who is interested in testing your work and finding your mistakes immediately, you are better than at least half the contractors in the world. I would say, because that first half is too scared to even start looking at their own work again and see if they did it wrong. It's just too frightening. So have the the gumption to get out there and really find out. Like, do I do a good job or a bad job? And often you'll find out like, whoa, I did not do a good job on that one. But if you then make that a habit, you start doing a great job and you can prove it. And then when people come back to you, you say, my house is feeling weird again. And you're like, okay, well, I'll go back and test it. And you find out that the numbers line up perfectly. Now, you know, it's that, that your clients reset their expectations because they live in a much more comfortable house. And now that, like, you delivered this amount of comfort to them and they reset it so that now if I'm at the bottom of that range, I'm unhappy. And if I'm at the top of it, then I'm happy. So those are the kinds of things that I think would be important. On that note of pressure, this thing the regulator. Have you guys seen this? Yeah.
[00:36:13] Eric Fitz: So this.
[00:36:13] Corbett Lunsford: Is $5. You could actually I mean, like you could just print this out, but it's useful because it's plastic. But it's a very simple tool you use with a pressure gauge. Incidentally, most pressure gauges that are owned by HVAC professionals are designed to work in inches of water column and kilopascals. And we use manometers that are for pascals, which is 1/250 of an inch of water column. So really one that you're using that you got at the HVAC supply house is really not what we're talking about. When we say use a pressure gauge or a manometer on a home performance issue, it's something that can measure to a 10th or a hundredth of a Pascal. You don't need to do a hundredth, but that's just a point. You use that in conjunction with this, and you can find pressure problems in rooms that are based not on air leakage at all. In fact, it doesn't even matter how leaky the house is at that point. Your HVAC system because of room returns Turns and blockages in ductwork and constrictions. And somebody, the cable guy, stepped on a flex duct up in the attic and nobody said anything about it. Those kinds of things can start to add up and then create really weird pressure imbalances within homes that can have some pretty weird side effects, and knowing how to track those down.
[00:37:21] Corbett Lunsford: Like, literally, you can test anything in a home that's I could find out anything I want to. And that was one of the things that I found early on. I feel like I'm blabbing now, but I was winning arguments with mechanical engineers. I would win an argument with anybody, and that was really scary to me, because I was a guy who would stand up in front of my trainees and my when I would present and be like, hey, everybody, raise your right hand with me and repeat after me. Sometimes. Sometimes I'm an idiot and everybody would be like, okay, cool. It's cool. You're nobody's a genius. We all are figuring this out. And I would win because I had the test data, just knowing stuff, having been out there for 50 years, and I've done this for whatever. Like it doesn't matter if you were doing it wrong the whole time, who cares how long you've been doing it? So I think that's a lesson that was like a real hard one for me to watch people learn from me because, like, I was not the guy who should have been teaching them those lessons. But it's really not hard once you have some data to start really owning any conversation.
[00:38:16] Eric Fitz: Really. And I'll give a shout out to John Semmelhack, who we interviewed just a few episodes ago. He's a great example of an HVAC contractor who is constantly learning from his mistakes, or at least checking his work. He'll do a full install and then he'll go. Often they're putting in some kind of smart thermostat into the home for their projects, and they'll go after they finish the install. They come back like a year later, six months later, and they look at the runtimes of the equipment and compare that to their manual J, their manual S, and they figure out, oh, actually, we really dialed in our manual J or manual S, like we hit this on the nose. Based on the runtimes, we can figure out what's the true loads in the home. Or like oh we actually missed it here. Now we're going to learn what we missed and we're going to do better the next time around.
[00:39:03] Corbett Lunsford: And that is how you get a master's degree or PhD in building science. And by the way, Semmelhack did my own Homestuck design. He's great.
[00:39:13] Ed Smith: So there's four things we touched on over the last course of however long we've been talking that I want to get your reaction to rebates. Fear the lizard brain for homeowners enclosure and heat pumps. So there's a bunch of states that are driving the heck out of whole home heat pump systems. I live in one. Eric lives in one. Massachusetts. Maine. Colorado. Sometimes enclosure work is done, sometimes it's not. Blower doors are not required, and the rebates are driving folks towards a whole home heat pump system. And sometimes they're saying like, you got to shut down the old one, there's no backup, etc., etc. you dangled something out before about fear, but what should a homeowner be afraid of if they get someone who comes in is like, great. The rebates here, they don't test the home and they're just like, I can put in a whole home heat pump system. Don't worry, you're going to be comfortable for seasons like, what should they be worried about?
[00:40:04] Corbett Lunsford: I think assuming that you know what the air leakage is for your manual, J is really risky because if you slide that scale, you guys give like five options in manual J defaults. Right. And I've built out what those are. And they're like pretty loosey goosey. I don't know that I would feel comfortable ever being like, oh yeah, I'm gonna install a piece of equipment and I'm going to stand behind the fact that this is the right piece of equipment for you. I like the idea. I have a video actually on replacing a furnace AC combo with a heat pump. It was a Mitsubishi, so it's like a pretty high end piece of equipment. But it took away my hypothesis was that it would take away a bunch of the static pressure, the total external static pressure on the system, because you're getting three heat exchangers out of the way, the two inside the high efficiency furnace and the AC coil, and replacing it with one. I also replaced the filter with a really nice big four inch pleated Merv. 16th April air. And at that point, my hypothesis was that we would drop the static pressure. And it really like way beyond my expectations, actually. But I had to do that manual J and all the things. So I think that the first thing that I would say is be afraid on a house by house scale, that the heat pump is not going to deliver. Be afraid that your client is going to do a five degree setback at night. The next morning, my dad, I replaced the system in that video that I'm referencing is at my dad's place. Mom and dad.
[00:41:27] Corbett Lunsford: But he's the one that I talked to about this technical stuff. And he said, yeah, it had some problems getting back to temperature in the morning. And I was like, what? Tell me about that. What did you do? And he was like, I set it back five degrees and I'm like, yeah, you can't do that. This thing is like engineered to be perfect for the house. Please don't set it back five degrees. So on a grander scale, I think we're at risk of these. And I've seen this happen a number of times so far in my career, where a bunch of money gets pumped into something, and the people who are giving you money for this Do not give a crap. Excuse me about whether the thing lasts. Works well for you for ten years. Their job is to have a checklist. And they check that you put a heat pump in there. And therefore we met our goal. And we get our money from the whoever is giving it to us. And then I just pass through and I look good. Now it's your client's fault if this thing goes bad. Which is why I'm generally always cautioning people if they're involved in some rebate program. This is a homeowner's. The no one's looking out for them. All they want to do, the people who are giving the money, the contractors, they're all kind of part of this, like fast. What essentially ends up being a loophole in some cases, which is really bad for the whole industry, because at that point, what we need to be afraid of on a grand scale is that people decide in ten years, after all these heat pumps got put in with no data at all and no verification testing that heat pumps don't work.
[00:42:48] Corbett Lunsford: Heat pumps suck and that might happen. Tight homes. Same thing in the 70s and 80s. They were building tight homes. And then we decided in the 80s, 90s 2000, 20 tens, and here we are in the 2020s, that you don't want to build a house too tight. People are saying that right now. That is the stupidest thing that you could say about a home enclosure because like, yeah, you want to build it really tight. My home has no pest control necessary because there is no way for pests to get in. I've never had bugs sprayed for inside my home and I never will. I live next to the world's busiest airport in Atlanta. You have not heard an airplane on this call. Neither have I, because the house is airtight, like you want air tightness, trust me. But at that point, you need to do these five factors of ventilation that we're talking about. And so not knowing what you don't know, I think is the thing that I would say to the contractors to be afraid of, to the homeowners knowing that the contractors and the rebate managers and the utilities and the state governments and the federal governments that are supposedly watching what's going on, are actually not watching the things that you think they are. So I think that this is everybody should be watching out for themselves. And the way that you do that is you get information about what is actually you make informed decisions every day, and there's no way to do that without testing, essentially.
[00:43:59] Ed Smith: Testing is the thing. Well, first, watch ten of your videos before you talk to a contractor and then see if you know more than them. And good for our customers. Like you've got a big audience for the contractors who use our product. Like this is, you know what you're going up against, what questions you're likely to get and get up that learning curve.
[00:44:20] Corbett Lunsford: People like each of the I happen to start at 17 years ago, our YouTube channel. So of course it's like as big as it is now. But anybody can do that. It's really not like you said, it just made an Excel spreadsheet with a Google form and said, hey, if you believe in math and science, sign up on it. And now it's called The List and people are like, hey, that list is great. I didn't even do anything like I wrote my book in Microsoft Word. I didn't have an editor or a publisher. I order it 30 books at a time and then ship it out. So it's like, just do the things. And I think also educating people, just get out there and start teaching people about this stuff. Once you teach somebody something about their home, when you're doing this at their house and you're running a pressure test, call them over and say, hey, I want to show you this because this is important. And then you teach them that and you're not going to be good at it for the first 50 times. They'll be like, okay, got it. Thanks, man. And you'll be like, wow, they did not get that. And it's not them, it's you. So talk about it for 17 years and you'll get to the point where you're just like, oh yeah, I can explain this really quickly because I understand where your keyhole is, like where your pain point is. So anyway, when you're teaching people this stuff, they will never call anybody else.
[00:45:27] Corbett Lunsford: At that point. You could be everybody's like, oh, lowest bidder, blah, blah, blah. I have to compete with these people. I thought about quitting in 2013, and instead of just saying no to jobs, I got my employees hired away by other companies and we got rid of our office space. And I moved into my condo with my office, and I tried to just get people to go away. And I started making up numbers that were two, three, four times more expensive than I had been charging. People went nuts. They were like, well, we have to hire you now. You are clearly totally different than these other guys, these schmucks that we've been talking to. So you're the one that we want. And I literally had people like, I would say it'll be $3,500 for me to come out today and do this thing. I really do not think I'm the right person for you. I really you should find somebody else. And they would be like, no, it has to be you. Please. Because you just talk about this stuff and you teach people something and they're like, oh my God, that was really useful conversation. And I will remember that anytime you can teach people about how this stuff works by understanding it yourself first, by asking the right questions of the right people, it's that is. So again, it's 50% of my job is explaining the stuff, not not doing the technical stuff.
[00:46:37] Corbett Lunsford: And I am a technical person. That's what my services are as technical. But whenever I do a manual J, I have a half hour call that's required where we go through the manual J report and I show you where all the important numbers are. And I say what they mean and we talk about what the assumptions mean that way. I mean, I hand it to my client who's not in the same city as I am. They can go have an argument with their HVAC installer, which happens 100% of the time, and then they can say, if you don't believe the math, show me where in the math we're wrong. And then they can easily find a guy who just doesn't believe in math. Easy. Great. I'm moving on. Or somebody who, like, believes in math and is willing to walk through the report and be like, oh, okay, I see what happened here, and this isn't the assumption I would make. I would do this. And then we're in a conversation. And that's the kind of thing that these clients, these like educated. Very good. You ask any contractors who've been working with these people, they're great clients because they know that it costs more money. It takes more time. It takes more planning to do any of this stuff correctly. And that's the real fear that I have for these rebate programs, is that they're just so fast that there's no way anything that moves that fast cannot possibly work.
[00:47:44] Eric Fitz: Yeah. Corbett and you hit on so many great things here. The point in particular around asking questions and pulling out the emulator or these other little tools. Not only are you creating an opportunity for you to engage with the homeowner, which helps build relationship and trust, you're actually learning something yourself about the home, so that not only are you going to make sure that you're doing the good design, homeowner is like learning that, oh, you are going to deliver the good design like everybody is winning. So it's like, oh my gosh, just you just got to do those small things and it really makes a huge difference. We've I think we've man, we hit on so many different topics. I think we're at a good spot to kind of wrap up the conversation before we do that. We just love to ask, are there any particular resources that have been really helpful for you over the years that you would recommend our listeners check out? Could be a book, could be a recent episode that you've done. It could be anything like what's what do you recommend?
[00:48:45] Corbett Lunsford: Show is called Home Diagnosis. It's on PBS. We did that on purpose so that we could then own the copyright and publish it completely on YouTube, so you can stream the whole thing for free from our YouTube channel. So there's that. Those episodes are meant like I've had contractors call me and be like, hey, just FYI, I was in somebody's house today and they were watching your show on TV while I was telling them about what I was, and they were like, oh my God, you're saying the thing that the people on TV say. I believe you now. And that was one of the things like, a prophet is not without honor, except in his own hometown, with his own family. Right. Everybody who's in your town knows you. Therefore, you can't possibly be the expert on this because, like, you just live down the street from me, Donny, or whatever it is. So use those episodes, be like, hey, you don't have to just take my word for it, because I'm the only contractor in this entire city who's telling you that this is the thing that you need. Watch this. Which is on PBS. It's the show about building science. And da da da da da. So you can hear it from somebody else on that site.
[00:49:47] Ed Smith: What an intimidation factor and negotiating tactic that is by a homeowner. Have the best building science show on TV, on your TV, while the contractor is there. I'm doing that next time. That is a great idea. That is a.
[00:50:01] Corbett Lunsford: Know what it was, but.
[00:50:03] Corbett Lunsford: Intimidation is a good word for it, because I found pretty early on that my job is half cheerleader and half intimidator. You have to be more technical. Like, I don't use the word delta t with everybody, but if I'm talking to a contractor who's giving me some some crap or a mechanical engineer, more likely I have fights with mechanical engineers sometimes who think they're going to win, and then you start whipping out a little bit of technical stuff and it lets them know, hey, you know what you're talking about. So yes, use it whether you're a professional or a homeowner. But the other thing is that on that website is where you can sign up for the list. So if you're an HVAC contractor, you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I believe in math and science. I would like to get some of those people who are watching the show and then being like, where can I find HVAC guys who can do that? That's where you can. And you sign up for free. You use it for free. I don't want any money. I don't want you to talk to me about it. You just. It's an honor system to sign up and be on that list. And then I would say also free calculators when I do zoom consulting for people for several hundred dollars an hour on zoom, I do not have to wear pants.
[00:50:59] Corbett Lunsford: It's like this exact format. Most of what I'm doing is free calculations that I show people how to use on my YouTube channel, and they have seen those videos, and they still want me to run the calculation for their house, because they just want to make sure that somebody who really thinks about this all the time is on the case for an hour. And so anyway, Department of Energy owns Red calc. Residential energy dynamics is what it used to be called, red calc. Look it up. I also use bronze at bronze tools, and it's like in their resources center. They have a passive makeup air damper sizing for kitchen exhaust hoods. That's a really useful tool. I use that basically on every single consult that I do, along with Red calc, I would say looking at psychrometric o. This is a free download from my website. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but it's a Psychrometric wheel calculator is what it's called. You'll find them for $35 from Walmart on their website. And of course they're not stocking it. They just know where to get it or whatever.
[00:51:57] Corbett Lunsford: I was like, that's ridiculous. This needs to be free. So I made one and you can download it and you print it out and you put a little pin through the middle of the two pieces of paper, and it'll tell you a lot about how humidity acts at different temperatures, because relative humidity is what most people know. And it doesn't it won't help you predict problems. So little things like that. I've got downloads of like universal ventilation layouts and things like that on the website as well, which is Building Performance Workshop. But I think that just the more conversations we can have and also remembering that I'm an extremist at and Eric are extremists. Matt Riesinger is an extremist. Anybody who you're listening to in this space is has their own particular perspective and their own door. They came into this room through and it's going to color everything that they're saying. So just having a breadth, understanding what everybody's extremism is. So you're looking into their box and you're like, okay, I can see in their box I see these are the things that they're assuming I'm going to live out here instead. And that's cool. As long as you're making that decision consciously, that's a smarter way to go about it.
[00:52:55] Ed Smith: Thank you so much for bringing your extremism to the Heat Pump podcast today. It was.
[00:53:00] Corbett Lunsford: Pleasure. Thank you guys very much.
[00:53:02] Eric Fitz: Yeah. Thanks, Corbett. It's been great. Thanks for listening to the Hip Hop podcast. It is a production of Amply Energy, and just a reminder that the opinions voiced were those of our guests or us, depending on who was talking. If you like what you've heard and haven't subscribed, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to reach out! You can reach us once again at hello@amply.energy. Thanks a lot.
