·
29 minute read
Adam Mufich is a multi-generation HVAC entrepreneur and now trainer for the National Comfort Institute. What does Adam like to do in his free time? Talk about HVAC.
Adam first caught our attention with his HVAC School article Good COP - Bad COP. He impressed us again with his presentation at the NCI Summit "How to Properly Design with Today's Heat Pumps." We highly recommend both.
On this podcast, Adam dives into his educational journey, sharing how he finally stopped delaying his learning and dove in feet first. He started down the rabbit hole with a Manual J class by Alex Meaney and reading Nate Adams' book. As he went deeper and deeper, one of his first big realizations was: properly done load calculations can be nerve-wracking (at first) when you see how much smaller they are than expected.
What makes this episode particularly fun is Adam’s story of applying his newfound knowledge to his own home. He installed a Daikin SkyAir heat pump and then tackled infiltration by meticulously hand caulking his roof, leak by leak. As a result of his efforts, he significantly reduced his home’s load. Taking it a step further, and with advice from Roman Baugh, Adam reprogrammed his Daikin SkyAir to function as a 1.5-ton heat pump instead of its original 3-ton capacity.
The results? Even at half capacity, the system performed beautifully.
This podcast episode strikes a perfect balance between theory and practice, offering invaluable insights for contractors looking to improve heat pump performance. Whether you’re just starting your HVAC learning journey or looking for actionable tips, this episode is packed with inspiration and expertise.
Show notes
- Adam's LinkedIn
- National Comfort Institute
- Good COP - Bad COP
- Daikin SkyAir
- Alex Meaney
- Nate Adams' book
Transcript
HPP: Adam Mufich
[00:00:00] Adam: when you take that first step and you start paying attention to the load of homes, and you're used to sizing by rule of thumb or replacing like for like equipment.
It is terrifying. It is so scary. especially a heat pump, because you remove a 100,000 BTU furnace and you install a two or three ton heat pump, and then it's zero degrees outside, and you're like waiting for the phone call. You're like, this is not going to work.
You just have to start doing it. and the sooner companies get on board with load calcs and that, customers are going to be happier and homes are going to be more comfortable.
[00:00:37] Ed Smith: Welcome to the Heat Pump Podcast. Our goal is to ensure the transition to heat pumps goes well for everyone. Homeowners, contractors, and the planet. Today we have Adam Muffitch on the podcast. Adam is a multi generation HVAC entrepreneur. He's worked in other people's businesses. He started and sold his own.
He's now an awesome instructor with the National Comfort Institute, as well as a regular voice in the HVAC space on podcasts, on Facebook groups, writing articles, and more. On that topic, I highly recommend Adam's article, Good Cop, Bad Cop, or Good COP, Bad COP. We'd link to it in the show notes. I saw Adam give a great presentation at the NCI Summit on how to properly design with today's heat pumps.
We dig into that topic deeply with Adam, as well as bringing those best practices to life when we discuss the experiments he's been running on his own home. This is another one where we get deep into technical heat pump design and installation best practices. So if you want to get nerdy on heat pump nitty gritty, tune in.
[00:01:43] Ed: Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump Podcast, where we tell the story of entrepreneurs who are leading the charge to fully electrified homes. I'm Ed Smith.
[00:01:51] Eric: And I'm Eric Fitz. We are co founders of Amply Energy.
[00:01:54] Ed: Today, we are excited to introduce and invite.
Adam Mufich to the podcast. I had the privilege of seeing Adam present at the NCI Summit in September, as well as Adam reading some of your articles on, HVAC school and seeing some of your YouTube videos, your podcasts. You're out there, and we're excited to have you here. We're going to get deep into some good technical heat pump questions.
But to start, we'd love to get to know you and hear the Adam Mufich story for, how you started out to how you are now at the thought leader in this space working for an organization like NCI.
[00:02:31] Adam: I've been in HVAC in one way or another my entire life. multi generational in HVAC.
My grandpa started off, he was a chief engineer in some of the big buildings downtown. one of the notable ones was Palmer House. so my dad told me stories as he was growing up. He worked alongside, my grandfather and,hand in hand, they both, installed a boiler system in their house in Chicago.
and he would bring home, bags of pipe fittings. from work, from the supply house. And they would just go at it day after day. He actually installed a super rudimentary, snowmelt system in the house back in like the sixties. my dad worked alongside him and when he started getting older, he started working for the train company in the seventies and he started off sweeping floors in the warehouse and he just worked his way up
when I was around the age of 10, 11 years old, my dad started his own company and I would follow him on weekends and just hand him tools. I would learn the names of tools and hand me the Schrader core tool. I'd do that, learn all these different terminologies in that.
Summers, when I was in high school, I worked with him full time. And my plan was when I graduated high school to take a year off. And then to go to college. so I worked along with my dad, straight out of high school. And I decided that it was better for me to just stay involved with HVAC.
I really liked, the change of scenery. Everything's different on a day to day basis. There's no cookie cutter jobs. I worked for my dad. From around the year 2000 up until 2012 when he sold his company,the people that bought they cut my hours down.
I don't know if it was like a, they did it on purpose or what. I had a family at the time and I was working eight to 10 hours a week. And so I put in my notice, I took a bunch of scrap metal into the scrap yard, recycled it, and bought a beater of a truck. And I started my own company in 2012.
A Team Heat and Air. We were based out of Downers Grove and then Carroll Street, Illinois. And then I just sold my company this past June. And I started working for National Comfort Institute. I'd say like in the mix of all that with A Team,I've been involved with multiple different YouTube and, different podcasts, HVAC Overtime, HVAC School, Cooler Heads Podcast.
I have written several different articles for HVAC School. NCI's High Performance, HVAC Today Magazine, and Contracting Business as well.
People have asked me like, what do you do in your free time? Like, Talk about HVAC, you know, that's my, that's my hobby.
[00:05:10] Ed: it is not typical to work as hard as you do in HVAC. And carve out the time to participate in podcasts, YouTube, write articles, let alone to like, think as deeply as you do.
Like the math you lay out in Good COP, Bad COP is awesome and you make it so understandable. But where in your journey did you say, I want to help educate the industry. Clearly that's a passion for you.
[00:05:38] Adam: When I was working for my dad, I learned how to fabricate sheet metal and I developed a sense of pride and I started trying to make all of our installations look really professional, just really neat and doing the best job I possibly could.
And I was really naive at the time. Even though my jobs looked nice, I never thought about proving performance and I never thought about taking it to the next step. for years and years, these classes would come through. I know you guys had Alex Meaney on. Alex Meaney is a, uh, an awesome trainer for Wrightsoft, right?
I remember seeing him, his classes come through so many times and I'm like, I'm going to go to the class. this is something that I want to do.and I would make an excuse and I just wouldn't go.
And about five years ago, I made a decision that I'm not going to put off my education anymore and I just started going to and attending every single class I possibly could that I was interested in and the more I learned, the more I noticed that technicians, installers, company owners didn't know, there's like gaps in knowledge in the industry. I thought it would be really cool to try to give back and just share what I've learned and try to elevate the industry because we are growing and you can see us moving in the right direction, but we're not in the best spot right now.
You seem passionate about heat pumps, just from what I've seen. One article, one YouTube and a great presentation at NCI. What is your feeling about heat pumps? and where did that come from? And where do you think? Okay.
We're going to transition over to heat pumps. If we like it or not, it's just going to happen. Cool. The thing that got me started on heat pumps originally was, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Nate Adams and HVAC 2.0, So I met Nate and I started following him and I read his book and it blew my mind and that was the first step and he's the reason why I bought my first blower door and I started testing building tightness, I struggled for years wanting to learn load calcs and I wanted to learn like as much as I possibly could on it.
So I took my first class through ACCA's online series, design series. It was a Jack Rice class. It's hard to sit through it. It's hours and hours and hours. it's not a bad class. It's just like dry. I mean, you guys know manual J, It's your business. It's dry content.
There's not, it's not exciting. So what I went, yeah, I went through that and I got certified in that and then I wanted to take it to the next level. And I ended up going to, Ed Janowiak had a class in DC, and I did his class, and I started gaining more and more knowledge as far as that goes. I started off with WriteSoft, and then I switched over to QuickModel with Energy Gauge.
And I noticed that the loads were so low, like the heating loads. I'm in the Midwest, in the Chicagoland area, and all these gas furnaces are so oversized. It's unbelievable, I do understand that not every house. You could just stick a heat pump in and call it a day. There's dual fuel possibilities that you could explore when you're looking at the load of a house.
But if you're looking at the total winter, fall, and spring where you would need heating, The majority of that time a gas furnace is oversized, especially if it's a single stage. So if you can get a piece of equipment that is smaller. It's, and an inverter is even better where you could load match.
the needs for the house on a longer window of the heating season,
[00:09:18] Ed: so the load calcs, the insights that they're oversized, the fact that inverter driven technology can just do a better job of matching kind of led you down this path to. heat pumps Exactly.
[00:09:30] Adam: Just basically understanding the load of the house and trying to figure out like I need something that will work better than what we're currently using.
[00:09:38] Eric: you know, some things are dry. I actually love manual J. I'm a weirdo. And when it comes to this kind of stuff. I remember being on a trip with a friend, years ago and, I decided to, I didn't have a book with me. So I found a, a manual on diesel marine engines that was just laying around.
So I just picked that up and read it, but I love this stuff. but I hear you. It can be tough to listen to someone talk about it for a long time, but man, it's fun to understand like what's behind all this, what's going on in a home, why are we doing these things that we're doing? it's fascinating.
[00:10:12] Ed: I need to out Eric. The trip he went on with a friend was his honeymoon where he did that.
Sorry Eric, go ahead.
[00:10:20] Adam: My wife and I took a trip down to Costa Rica and, we were on the beach and, we're days and days on the beach, I started reading through manual D, manual S. I started going through all the academic manuals laying on the beach on a, Perfect beach
[00:10:36] Eric: material. I love that. Yes, that's me too. you prompted another, something you said About the thing that really got you going was just kind of understanding like the building science side. You mentioned, Nate Adams is fantastic. he's been on the pod with us.
We're hoping that episode will come out soon. talk a little more about the kind of the building science side and why that's so important to be an element of.heat pump design, like why you need to understand the building, not just the equipment.
[00:11:07] Adam: a lot of the industry sizes equipment, especially cooling equipment, They size them on square foot per ton. That's like what has been done forever. And like the magic number that 500 square feet per ton. but, If you start thinking about that and the different types of houses that you apply that to, it just doesn't make sense.
You could have a house that's 80 years old, or you could have a really nice and tight, insulated house that's six months old. You can't use That math, it just doesn't add up, when you start taking a look at what the R values are, or the use of different,surface materials and building assemblies of the house, and then you look at how tight a house is, and I know some people might not understand what I mean by tight.
it's basically like when you have little holes all over in the house, you have air leakage. Either cold air leaking in and warm air leaking out or vice versa, depending on the season. And the more holes you have, the more unconditioned air is being sucked into your house. and that could, that poses a problem for indoor air quality and everything else.
when you start looking at how tight a house is and you test it with a blower door, and you seal up those gaps, you could start doing some amazing things. With improving indoor air quality, reducing the load, the heating or cooling load on the structure and just being really accurate and providing a nice comfortable space for your customers.
[00:12:35] Eric:
[00:12:35] Ed: That's a great segue into your house. we've heard you're a man who puts his money where his mouth is. we talked to Alex, we talked to Nate, who I know you're close with both of them and They both said we should ask you about your house, because what you did is pretty remarkable.
tell us about what you did, what equipment is in there, what did you do to prep it, and how's it been performing?
[00:12:57] Adam: So it's, it was definitely a learning curve, and it's not perfect, But I'm still moving in the right direction. my house, it was built in the 1960s, and when I started, when I
I was at a just over a 3000 CFM 50. My house is roughly 1900 square feet with a basement. it's pretty leaky. I had a 100, 000 BTU furnace that, I will admit I installed. 15 years ago or something like that, which I'm pretty ashamed of. That's before I started diving into all this. I had a company come in and remove all the insulation out of the attic.
There was probably six inches of fiberglass insulation in the attic. And you could see there's mouse nests everywhere. The insulation was black. You could see, air leakage coming through all the different points in the attic. I considered just blowing insulation on the top and I'm so happy I didn't do that.
And then instead of paying somebody to air seal, I spent probably about a week up in my attic, just trying to figure out exactly where all the leakage points were. And I bought a case of caulk, and I just went to it, and I left the blower door running, and I had it connected with my, the Bluetooth or Wi Fi on my phone, and I was just controlling the blower door, and locating the different leaks in my attic.
I got the number down to just over a thousand CFM 50, which is a drastic reduction, and in the mix of all that, I removed all my duct work in that a hundred thousand BTU furnace. And I installed new duct work and a three ton Daikin SkyAir heat pump.what I decided to do after I installed the heat pump.
was I decided to encapsulate my attic with closed cell foam, which drastically reduced the load of the house. the one saving grace that I have, because I know like a big misconception that I've actually written about and I'm going to have an article coming out shortly.
A lot of people think inverters can't be oversized. You can always go with a larger size heat pump or condenser, whatever. it's just going to ramp down. That's what all the HVAC contractors say. That's true. It will ramp down, but it will only ramp down to a certain point. And it's not The thing is a lot of these heat pumps like you, you can't really gauge what your latent removal is going to be because it's not published data onthe lower settings,
So you don't know what it's going to happen. What's going to happen as far as am I going to be able to dehumidify, So that's a big concern. I was really nervous about that. I have a friend, Bryan Orr, Kalos his company, HVAC School. One of the guys that works for him, Roman, he used to work for Daikin.
And I found out that I could reprogram my heat pump. To run is a ton and a half. And that's what I did. So now I have a ton and a half heat pump. cause I guess all Skyair heat pumps are all the identical compressors. They're all a five ton compressors outside, I have 5kW of backup on my ton and a half heat pump now.
And it was funny before I told the control that I had the backup. The resistance. I just let it run. And the first night that we had sub zero, I just stayed up until two o'clock in the morning. I was watching the outdoor temperature and I was watching the thermostat.
I'm like, I want to see how low I can get this thing. You know what I mean? And I left it off the entire night. And I think that the house dropped down to about 63 degrees when it was negative 15 degrees outside. in the morning, my wife was a little cranky. And at that point I, I told the control that I actually do have resistance to eat and warm the house back up a little
[00:16:39] Ed: That's an awesome experiment.
[00:16:41] Eric: Just to clarify, you encapsulated the attic. Did you have duct work in the attic space before So then all of a sudden No. You didn't have any, okay. No. Okay. I was gonna say that was gonna be even like more reduction loads. if all of a sudden you, the duct work had no losses, at least from a heating perspective or cooling perspective.
Wow. That's, that is wild though, to.
[00:17:02] Ed: And so you've got a ton and a half. What does Manual J say you need for your house?
[00:17:07] Adam: I am just over a ton and a half. maybe 20, it's 20 some thousand, at design, which our design is two degrees outside.
The one thing that I did, which I'm happy. If I would have known I would have encapsulated it in my attic, I would have done it slightly different. Is I installed a Panasonic ERV stand alone, not connected to my HVAC system. And I'm using that for the bath fans, and I'm bringing fresh air in directly to each one of the bedrooms.
since I tightened up the house and I have the ERV, I don't need a humidifier anymore in the wintertime. It's awesome. think of it like we're repurposing the humidity when we're showering and cooking and all that. we're saving the house.if I would have known I had encapsulated the attic, I would have stuck it up in the attic and saved some space.
[00:17:55] Eric: separate issues you flagged is this issue around latent capacity. one of the other benefits of air sealing, not only are you keeping up a sensible heat loss, heat gain, you are reducing latent loads, which you mentioned, like you now you've got a tighter house.
you've got the ERV. now you've eliminated another piece of equipment potentially you may have. Had at one point or considering installing of having a whole house humidifier. That's awesome. How have you dealt with this issue around the lack of latent capacity data for equipment?
we're trying to follow manual S to select the right equipment. But how do we do that? if we don't have this really granular data, what's your best practice for handling that?
[00:18:33] Adam: I think it's tough. most of the ratings are at 100 percent capacity, when the inverter is running at full bore. But the problem is if you look at like the design dehumidification day, that's not your design conditions for cooling. I know that now Manual S is changing and they're allowing, ACCA allowing you to oversize heat pumps and inverters even more than you were able to in the past, as long as you have some way of dehumidifying the house.
So I think that if you don't have the data, and the tighter the house, it's almost getting to the point where you might need to recommend a dehumidifier. because you have to take care of it. you can't maintain a high, relative humidity for a long period of time.
Otherwise, you're just going to start having issues.
[00:19:19] Ed: are there other things you learned from this experience That were eye opening or would be eye opening to others looking to do, cutting edge, building science optimized HVAC work.
[00:19:31] Adam: So one thing that I did learn, which, my wife will argue me to the death about this. she has a theory, but, she says that I'm wrong. I'm like, okay, but like we do still have, I have a, an IQ Air Merv 16 filter, It's one of the best filters you could possibly buy. And our house is still relatively dusty.
the way it's ducted is I was trying to save as much space as possible. It's an older house, so we have low ceilings in the basement. So I have a central return. in the basement and then transfer grills in each one of the bedrooms, so what I've noticed since I have reduced the size of the equipment is we're not moving as much air.
We're not mixing the air as much. We're not keeping the dirt entrained in the air long enough for it to hit the filter. So we have dust upstairs. And if you think about it, my hundred thousand BTU furnace just moved so much more air. So we were filtering so much more air. We had so many more air changes per hour in each one of the rooms.
So now we have a much lower airflow. I'm just, we're not moving enough to filter the air as much as I'd like. that's something that manufacturers are probably going to have to look at in the future Is it better? With if you have an inverter system to ramp the blower motor down when the inverter ramps, I question it might almost be better to keep that blower motor at a high setting and only ramp it down when you have to go into a dehumidification mode, When you want to dehumidify, just to keep the air changes up and keep filtering the air.
I'm probably going to install an air handler or some kind of air moving device. I'm not sure what it's going to be yet up in the attic and have it set up for several different. amounts of airflow and, have a Haven, indoor air quality monitor, basically looking at what's going on in the house.
And when an event occurs, I'm going to trigger moving more air, and just cycling more air in each one of the spaces so I filter it. And then possibly also maybe bringing in more outside air as well. But that's a big one, is the reduction in air changes, you might not be keeping the air, you might not be mixing it enough to filter everything that's airborne.
[00:21:40] Eric: And what about, you have the Panasonic ERV, so you're getting, that's got filtration on it, it's not your MERV 16, but it's, that's still helping to move air, and then aren't you still, also with the heat pump, that's variable speed, I don't know, if you, I assume it was a single stage furnace that you had before?
[00:22:03] Adam: it was a two stage.
[00:22:05] Eric: Two stage? Okay. at least with the variable speed heat pump, aren't you now just running that equipment way more than potentially your furnace was cycling on and off? So shouldn't that, some of that be balanced out?
[00:22:18] Adam: It is running a lot more. But in shoulder seasons, like right now, it's still cycling quite a bit.
You know what I mean? And I do set the fan to on, but you have to remember something. the bedrooms and all the different rooms had ducted returns in the past. So any of that dirt and dust that was entrained in the air would make it back to those returns. Now it has to make it through the entire house and down the stairs and over to that central return.
[00:22:43] Eric: Yeah,Yeah. Through the transfer grills and everything else.
[00:22:46] Ed: Yeah.
[00:22:47] Eric: Okay.
[00:22:49] Ed: That's it. It's fascinating. It highlights how multifaceted these questions are, Like it's, you got to wrap your arms around the home as a system to know what's going to happen to the, to homeowners.
And it might take them four seasons to really figure it out or more to figure out that there's an issue or not or a question that they have. super interesting.
[00:23:10] Eric: you wrote an amazing article about, I think it was titled, Good COP, Bad COP. So Good COP, Bad COP.
And it really gets into this question around emergency heat versus auxiliary heat. And this idea of a thermal balance point and heat pumps. Can you just share a little backstory about that?
[00:23:28] Adam: I'm in a, a Facebook group where it's geared towards homeowners asking questions to HVAC professionals. there was several different homeowners asking when should I use my emergency heat, on an all electric system. And overwhelmingly, most of the answers in that group, everyone said around 32 degrees.
And I remember responding, and I'm like, no, keep it running. You want to run the auxiliary heat on top of your heat pump. That's going to be more efficient, you can't argue on Facebook. There's so many, it just doesn't work. And I was called names in that group. And, there was a, just a big response saying that I didn't know what I was talking about.
I got out the, ACCA Manual H book and I started going through and I wanted to show the math. So I just broke it down, bit by bit and, showed that, almost any heat pump is more efficient than, if you run an emergency heat, electric heat by itself,
You always want to run the heat pump.
[00:24:30] Ed: You got the facts, you got the numbers, you got the calcs. What was the reaction you got to that article?
[00:24:35] Adam: I didn't really hear much to be honest with you. after I started working for NCI, I when we were talking about heat pumps, I showed the caption, the image, the illustration from that article.
And I said, if you guys want to learn more about this, check this out. Oh, that was you who wrote that? And they're like, that article was awesome. So it was like, people were connecting the face finally with who wrote it. but I didn't realize how many people actually read it until I started traveling around the country.
So it was pretty cool.
[00:25:05] Ed: tell us a little more, we'll definitely share a link to the article in the show notes,what was the issue that you really wanted to drill into and how, why were people reacting so strongly, as you've been traveling around?
[00:25:16] Eric: oh my gosh, that was so great.
[00:25:19] Adam: my brother moved down to Louisiana, and that's a big heat pump market, So he had a heat pump for the first time ever when he moved down there. And the association that, he lived within that community that he was in.
they would send out notices every year like an email, they would say, it's going to be below freezing tonight. Turn on your emergency heat. And I'm like, that's interesting. And I think that's like one of those rules of thumb that a lot of HVAC contractors tell their customers.
Heat pumps, there's so many misconceptions. They need to, they need a break. They can't work below freezing. there's no heat outside below freezing. They're not efficient below freezing. There's all these things that people, they keep telling themselves, or they've learned bad information over the years.
I just wanted to show it with math and numbers Ed Janowiak actually said that to me at one point, I think it was during his class or one of his sessions or whatnot, but he said, every decision you make in HVAC should be made on data, math and numbers, and I think that really probably sticks with people as they read that article.
It's because you could actually look at the data,
[00:26:25] Eric: Yeah, totally. So just to highlight that when, even a single stage, maybe two stage heat pump, not, not cold climate rated, it's not until you're into like into negative Fahrenheit numbers where you might start to approach a COP of one or where you're, 100 percent efficient.
but for like cold climate heat pumps. Often, the equipment needs to, it'll shut down before it even gets anywhere near, a COP of one. cold climate rated equipment, they'll often run minus 15, minus 20. There's, new equipment that's coming online with the A2L refrigerants.
They'll operate, that minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and they'll still be greater than one COP. we got to get this, misnomer about heat pumps. and not being efficient below real freezing outta people's heads for sure.
[00:27:12] Adam: Yeah. and COP for anyone that doesn't know it's coefficient of performance,
And resistance heat has a COP of one, so it's a hundred percent efficient. And heat pumps, if you didn't know, heat pumps are more than a hundred percent efficient. So it's if you think about it, for every dollar you spend in heat, on a heat pump, you know you're getting more than a dollar of heat in your house versus resistance for every dollar you spend.
In heat, you're getting a dollar of heat in your house. So that's the point behind it.
[00:27:40] Ed: Adam, so we heard from a mutual friend, that you have strong perspectives on sales tactics in HVAC. tell us what's good, what's bad, what makes good or bad. love to hear your thoughts on that.
[00:27:55] Adam: it's funny you're saying this now because there was, there was like a, a little back and forth thing that actually happened recently online about this.
there's a handful of the, the sales trainers. And I guess my thing is, I've witnessed this before, which it was really weird. It was awkward. I was actually checking airflow. In a basement of a customer's house with the TrueFlow grid by the Energy Conservatory, and a very large local competitor, one of their technicians walked down the stairs.
They do plumbing and heating, and he went to look at the water heater.they were having an issue with the water heater. He came downstairs without any tools, and within three minutes he told them they need a new water heater. Without even looking at it, without touching the water heater, they need a new water heater.
And I kind of laughed.but I think that, and then he's look, can I see your sump pump? And then he was trying to sell him a sump pump too. And I think the thing is like a lot of these sales trainers, if they're just teaching you how to sell and they're not teaching you why or what you should be selling,
that's the issue. you, a lot of them are not capable of fixing problems. And a lot of times if you just sell a box, you could be creating all new problems, we have ECM blower motors now, so in the past with PSC blower motors,our static pressure wouldn't be nearly as high.
We wouldn't be moving the correct amount of airflow. And now all of a sudden we're throwing a variable speed blower motor in and the static pressure goes through the roof. Now we have a noisy system. We have blower motors that are going bad. There's all kinds of issues you create, but I think that like you need to be able to identify problems, look at the house as a whole, look at the house as a system.
And when you're looking at the HVAC equipment. Everyone calls the equipment the system. You need to add the ductwork into that. The HVAC system is the equipment plus the ductwork, you need to basically have a holistic approach at trying to figure out what's wrong and why. and don't just put band aids on things and,don't treat the symptoms.
Try to figure out what the problem is and find the problem,
[00:30:06] Ed: How does a homeowner figure out who's the right company to work with? That homeowner, they just had an expert come in who looked at it and says, you need a new one. they just, so many homeowners don't have the tools or the language to, have the right conversation.
what should homeowners look for to know that they're getting the right kind? Of company in the door to fix their home.
[00:30:27] Adam: if we're talking about fixing a home, I think that anyone that's going to come out and try to sell you a box and I'm going to sell you this piece of equipment, it's high end.
This is going to fix all your comfort issues. It's probably not going to do anything right. if you are replacing HVAC equipment, you should have a load calculation done. You should do a manual J in your house. you should be looking at manual S to take that data from manual J and figure out what piece of equipment actually will work with your house and what your airflow setting should be on heating and cooling.
that's a big one. And I think there's a huge chunk of contractors out there. that are just scared of load calcs, and they're just not trained in it. So I think that's step one, for sure. And then looking at building science, room pressures, house pressures, that's another big thing. And I know that's a large step.
It's a pretty big step moving over into the HVC design side, but it's even a larger step moving over and, purchasing a blower door and or a duct blast or micromanometers and that. But, if you want to solve problems, a lot of it stems from home performance, And sizing the equipment.
[00:31:42] Eric: I like that.
That's a good one. just ask for the manual J. That's a great starting point. ask for the load calculations, and even better, have them, have the contractor walk through. Some of their top level assumptions that they made in their load calcs. I feel like for a homeowner, they're going to hear a lot of things that are reasonable or things that are totally unreasonable if they actually sat down and did that and it gave them a sense of who they're working with.
[00:32:08] Adam: if you have somebody do a load calc. It might not be accurate. you need, they need to actually look at, and I think homeowners should try to do a little bit of research and try to figure out what your design conditions are, because those should never be changed.
Those are set in stone, unless your local jurisdiction requires otherwise, your code officials. but then also how many occupants do you have in your house?I know Brian Orr has 10, but most people don't have 10. I talked to somebody yesterday that,they were looking at a load calc and they put 16 people in the house, and they were wondering why the load was so high.
a lot of ways you could falsify a load calc. there's gotta be a way for their homeowners to educate themselves a little bit and just make sure they're buying correctly.
[00:32:53] Eric: You remind me of something that comes up often, just around using design conditions versus changing the design conditions, whether it's indoor conditions or outdoor conditions.
Will you just say that one more time? When should we be changing those, if ever?
[00:33:07] Adam: Never. Never. Never. Absolutely never. Never.
[00:33:11] Eric: That's right. Awesome. And yeah, I can't tell you, quite often we, there are folks out there that are like, the homeowner says they like to have their thermostat at 72 degrees in the summertime.
And therefore, shouldn't I be changing the indoor design conditions to be 72 degrees, not 75? Which is the standard for manual J.so what do you tell to a contractor who might be, have learned that, or thinking that's what they should be doing, or they're hearing this from the homeowner, and they don't, they want to show the homeowner that they're, they understand how they live in their home, but how do you explain that it's like, when you're doing load calcs, it's a different process that isn't necessarily about your, where your thermostat is set.
[00:33:52] Adam: So I'm just going to probably regurgitate some of the stuff I've heard from people that are a lot smarter than me. But, if you think about it, the design conditions are 1 percent of the summer, Which is what, roughly 80 hours a year. and so the rest of the time it's oversized. So 99 percent of the time you'll be able to hit 72 degrees.
no problem whatsoever. And then also when you look at the worst case scenario on that one percent, design day, the warmest time and the most time you have the heat gain coming through a house is usually at the end of the day when the sun's going down, It's all shining on the side of the house.
it takes time for that heat to transfer through the walls. So at that point, it's not that it's not as hot outside as it was earlier in the day. So now if you look at the performance data for equipment, the cooler it is outside, the more output your heat pump or condenser will have in cooling mode.
So now the sun's starting to set, it's getting a little cooler outside. So you have like backup capacity, even that, in my experience with heating or cooling, even if you're at or above design conditions, if you did a fairly good job of your load calc, or You could push the thermostat a little bit.
It's not like you're setting stone at that number, there's a lot of rounding in manual J too. there's some hidden BTUs in there.
[00:35:13] Eric: All right. I love that. So don't mess with design conditions. They're there for a reason. yeah, there's a lot of thought that's gone into manual J and manual S for that matter.
[00:35:22] Adam: To add one other thing to that. I remember, something that Ed Janowiak said to me is,if a homeowner questions the indoor design temperatures, and your sizing. he said something along the lines of, I can make you mad at me of one of, one of two ways.
And one's going to be worse than the other. He's maybe the 1 percent of the year or less than 1 percent of the year, you're not going to be able to maintain temperature at your set point in your house. You might still have one or two degrees. So you might be irritated with me at in those times,
Or I can install an oversized piece of equipment in your house and you could start getting mold developing, on walls and moisture issues and high humidity in that. And you're going to be more likely to be irritated with me and, you're going to damage property and everything else.
So I'd rather you be mad at me 1 percent of the time versus the whole summer.
[00:36:15] Eric: Nice. That's great.
[00:36:17] Ed: Ed Janowiak has a way with words. That is, I did a poor job of quoting him, I'll tell you that, but it was good. It was really good. Yeah, that was great. And a way to go. That is one of Eric's favorite soap boxes for manual J design conditions.
So that was awesome. Eric is very happy right now.
[00:36:33] Eric: thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that.
[00:36:35] Ed: Adam, we've asked a bunch of questions. This is the heat pump podcast. Is there any question we haven't asked you that you want to speak to?
[00:36:43] Adam: when you take that first step and you start paying attention to the load of homes, when you're an HVAC contractor and you're used to sizing by rule of thumb or replacing like for like equipment.
It is terrifying. It is so scary. You know what I mean? When you first do it, especially a heat pump, because you remove a 100, 000 BTU furnace and you install a two or three ton heat pump, and then it's zero degrees outside, and you're like waiting for the phone call. You're like, this is not going to work,
you just have to start doing it. People need to start practicing this and the sooner companies get on board with,with load calcs and that, customers are going to be happier and homes are going to be more comfortable.
[00:37:22] Ed: Great answer. I'm so glad I asked that shockingly open ended question because that was a great answer.
[00:37:28] Eric: You know, when we think about the process of designing and selling You know, retrofit of a heat pump or really any kind of HVAC equipment.
If you get that design part right, you do the right load calcs, you select the right equipment, it gives you all kinds of flexibility down the road. If you have terrible load calcs and you pick the wrong equipment and you install it beautifully, like textbook, everything's perfect.
you commission the equipment exactly the way it's supposed to be. It's charged, you got the right airflow, you Then the homeowner is in their home and it's massively oversized. You're going to have problems that you really, it's almost impossible to adjust unless you've got very special equipment like the Daikin unit that you mentioned, where you can reprogram the compressor to operate it at half the size that it was sold as.
That's pretty, that's very rare. There's any equipment like that out there. So you're pretty much left with, Just like pulling out the equipment and starting over, if you've screwed up the design. On the flip side, if you've got that design right,you selected the right equipment, and there's some kind of an issue, maybethe charge wasn't quite right, you didn't evacuate quite right, the airflow's not quite right, you can tweak those things.
And hopefully save that project and make the homeowner happy.moral of the story is, get the design done That's the first step, that's the foundation for all of this. And, obviously, installing and commissioning equipment the right way is very important.but start with that design and then everything else will flow naturally from there.
[00:39:01] Adam: In the beginning when I started doing load calcs, I would be right on the cusp of bumping up to another size And i've done it a few times right and that's like another rule Don't round up, if anything, I try to find ways to, to cut it back and to make it smaller, just because I started following runtime data and I started figuring out, even if you size it perfectly with manual J you're looking at design conditions and it's still not running, as long as I would like to see it.
So you could always bring the house to the equipment. But you shouldn't try to size the equipment to a leaky and bad house. Because if anyone makes any changes to that, their system needs to be replaced. There's just like what you were saying, there's nothing you could do.
[00:39:50] Eric: That's right. Yeah, Manual J says early on in the book, be aggressive, about your assumptions.
[00:39:56] Ed: there's some, factor of safety that's built into Manual J, so don't add in your own extra layers or else you're going to end up with really oversized equipment. Awesome, Adam. This has been great. Thank you. The question we'd like to end on is for folks out there looking to build heat pump focused, profitable businesses. What resources, whether it's an organization, a book, a podcast, whatever. What resources would you recommend so they can get up to speed on what they need to do to delight homeowners and build successful businesses?
[00:40:33] Adam: if you're not familiar with load calcs, I would look at ACCA training. That's number one. That was awesome. And if you don't have, the resources, the travel to go to the training, they're, they have online training as well, too.Alex Meany does Wrightsoft.
any of these softwares, your software, I know you guys, and you have a competitor as well, too. Pretty easy to use. I do think you should have a fundamentals in manual J to understand what different settings do in a load calc before you start running a software program. but looking at, home performance, Allison Bales, he has a, an amazing following.
He has a blog. He has a book. Nate Adams as well, too.and then, National Comfort Institute, we're actually in the process right now of writing a heat pump retrofit class. So second quarter of next year, we're going to have a class that you could sign up for, and it's going to be a one day class.
And it could quite possibly be followed up shortly thereafter with a full three day class, including home performance in that.
[00:41:40] Ed: Awesome. Great recommendations. Yeah. And Allison Bales is Energy Vanguard. Exactly. Awesome. Great recommendations. Adam, thank you so much for being on the Heat Pump podcast. Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.
[00:41:56] Eric: Adam, so much fun. Thank you.
[00:42:00] eric outro: Thanks for listening to The Heat Pump 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 in 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. No .com, just .energy. Thanks a lot.
