We (Eric and Ed) started the Heat Pump Podcast on a whim. After two years immersed in HVAC, heat pumps, and home electrification, we had a realization: there’s a lot of great HVAC content out there, but heat pump-focused conversations? Surprisingly scarce.
This didn’t sit right with us.
So why was the discussion around them so… occasional?
To see if we could change that, we launched the Heat Pump Podcast as an experiment. What’s happened since has blown us away.
After 7 months, 15 episodes, a rapid rise in listeners, and great feedback from heat pump-focused entrepreneurs, we took a moment to reflect. In this latest episode, we compare notes and share the biggest lessons we’ve learned along the way. Such as:
1. We love it. Turns out, we’d do this even if no one listened. Every episode has been an incredible learning experience.
2. There are way more heat pump-focused entrepreneurs than we imagined!
3. Designing for heat pump systems is way harder than conventional equipment
4. You can't make up for bad design
5. Focusing on heat pumps creates a winning business
6. Heat pumps. Are. More. Comfortable. Period.
Tune in to the episode for our top 10 lessons from the Heat Pump Podcast Season 1!
To our incredible guests: thank you for taking a chance on two heat-pump-obsessed entrepreneurs with a niche podcast idea. Your time and insights have made every episode richer.
We’re just getting started. With more episodes planned for 2025, we’re excited to keep growing the conversation around heat pumps, HVAC innovation, and building science.
🎧 Tune in to this special reflection episode and join us on the journey!
Eric and Ed's end-of-year pod
[00:00:00] Eric Fitz: I actually, I have a different take, on,saying that like a, a hundred thousand BTU furnace, they were reliable. I would say that they're reliably uncomfortable. That equipment, that, that equipment yeah, when it's minus 20 out or it's 40 degrees out,your pipes are not going to freeze.
So it's reliable from that perspective. people have been living in a uncomfortable home. so long that people don't even know what real comfort is about. that unit's so oversized that it's just cycling on and off for 99. 5 percent of the year. sure pipes aren't freezing, it's not dropping below 60 degrees in their house at any point. but they're actually pretty darn uncomfortable.
[00:00:50] Ed Smith: Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump Podcast. I'm Ed Smith.
[00:00:54] Eric Fitz: I'm Eric Fitz, we are co founders of Amply Energy.
[00:00:57] Ed Smith: Okay, so it's just Eric and I today. we were talking about how we wanted to tackle the end of the year and we decided to do a pod where we talk about what we've learned. And so we have each prepared our top lessons learned insights gained from the podcast this year.
Cause it's been an incredible learning experience for both of us. we both wrote down our lists and we did not share them with the other one.We're going to run through our learnings and we're going to trade off back and forth and David Letterman style. We're going to start with number 10 and work our way towards, towards our top one.
If we both have the same one, we obviously won't repeat it. So it's probably not going to be at exactly 10 number, but we came with our top learnings and we're just going to, we're just going to go back and forth from the first seven months and 15 episodes of the Heat Pump Podcast.
it's going to be fun learning for the two of us, because since we haven't shared what our insights are, I'm excited to hear what Ed picked up, and I hope I've got some nuggets that, will be good for Ed as well, and all of our listeners. All right. So this format was my idea and what you all didn't hear was just how nervous Eric is about exactly what I was envisioning for this. So I'm going to start. So Eric, you get to see how I do one and then we can go from there. all right. My number 10, is I love doing this podcast, which I, No idea what this would be like.
It was a complete lark and an experiment. We ginned up last winter, spring, and it has been so rewarding and I have personally learnedone of the fears was like, Oh my, this is going to take a ton of time. It's going to be really expensive. And both of those things are true. but we're like, look, let's do two or three and see how it goes.
And you and I, after the first one, Oh my God. And just the people we've had on. Whether it's entrepreneurs, first of all, everyone's an entrepreneur, but entrepreneurs doing heat pump installs or folks like Jim Bergman, Alex Meaney, Steve Rogers, like my God, it's just been such unbelievable learnings.
it's been super fun, super valuable. whether we had listeners or not, I think we'd probably still be continuing this because we're getting so much out of it. That's my number 10.
[00:03:23] Eric Fitz: Nice Ed, I didn't have that on my list, but I am definitely grateful that tried this experiment and, yeah, really grateful for everybody who was willing to join the conversation with us and share their learnings. It has been incredibly, insightful for me and it's been so much fun having the conversations that we've had.
Just a shout out to everybody that, joined the podcast this year and yeah, we're looking forward to meeting new people and having some more exciting conversations, in 2025 as well.
[00:03:53] Ed Smith: Alright, so my, bottom of the list, not that this is bad at all, but at the end of my list, one big takeaway I had is, and this was,honestly a hypothesis that we've had just from running our business for a while that really that the journey for any one of the companies that we interviewed, there is no one size fits all story is unique and there's some incredible. stories that we heard about this year, from Kevin Brenner, who is a former podiatrist who decided to get into science and heat pumps to, to someone like Matt Scott from Dave's World who started his career selling appliances and turn that into an incredible heat pump business. so really incredible stories from. folks from all different backgrounds and experiences and the common thread within that was that they're just passionate about homes and delivering great solutions to customersI encourage folks, if you really want to hear, read, listen to some of those great stories,Fortunat Mueller from Revision Energy who started a solar company that got into heat pumps, that's episode 10. We got Hal Smith from Halco, that's episode 4. Matt Scott who I mentioned from Dave's World, that's episode 1. We've got a bunch of great episodes around these sort of stories of how to get the business going and some of the challenges and how that turned out for these different companies. Great one. It resonates with me because I can't believe I'm going to do this, but I'm going to go ahead and give my number one now, because what you just said, I have the inverse of it, which is my number one takeaway was that entrepreneurs speak a universal language. So everyone's specific story, super different, right?
Like Jim Bergman, um, starting at what a dentist's office. Um, And so, but what I found was everyone, literally everyone, the entrepreneurial spirit is identical. That independence, that vision, the belief in the vision, the willingness to sacrifice. Alicia Stenson went two years without a salary. Matt Scott telling the story of running credit cards to make payroll.
I don't, I should have anticipated this. We're entrepreneurs too. And so like their stories were an inspiration for me and you and us in trying to start Amply. It's like that was my number one and hearing the diversity of story. They're all different and they're all the same, like the challenges and the, you only experience two emotions, euphoria and terror.
And you basically whipsaw between those two all the time, like just made me feel better about what we were doing. So anyway, so now I offer up my number one, because it, I think it ties in so nicely with the one you just listed.
[00:06:58] Eric Fitz: Nice. Love it. All right, next on my list, it was kind of split between two areas. so one thing from an overall, Business strategy or sales strategy that I feel like we heard over and over again, especially when folks were talking about, how to sell homeowners on a solution.
And especially when you're thinking about your competition, whether that's, Jan in the van or Chuck in the truck, that you have, you are doing yourself and your customers a disservice. If you don't sell the true value of what you offer and the complete solution that will address the challenges, the problems in the home. the time.use your skills, use the tools you have to understand what the homeowner is dealing with. what the challenges are with the building envelope, with, the existing equipment and offer them everything that you can dohave great outcomes for your customers and great outcomes for your business.
[00:08:06] Ed Smith: bunch of people talked about this, but Joe Wood's line stands out for me on this one, where he says, a lot of contractors feel like they feel bad about offering anything other than the cheapest solution.
[00:08:16] Eric Fitz: Yeah.
[00:08:16] Ed Smith: we are in a solutions business. You should put a array of things in front of the homeowner and let them decide.
but do things that deliver on their need, and let them decide what price tag is right. I found that super powerful and echoed across a few different episodes.
[00:08:33] Eric Fitz: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:08:33] Ed Smith: Joe
[00:08:33] Eric Fitz: Wood covered it in detail in Episode 3. Hal in Episode 4. Just amazing insights around this. his business is just a story of, oh my gosh, trying to serve the homeowner for 40 years is what he's trying to do. And he does every service from heat pumps to solar to gutters to, basement waterproofing.
he's done it to the nth degree.
[00:08:58] Ed Smith: now that I gave my last and my first, I'm somewhere in the middle. my next one is heat pumps. Easier in some ways, harder in others. This has come up a bunch. There is this perception that, inverter driven technology It's variable. It'll modulate, it'll adapt. Don't have to worry about it. Mike Capuccio talked a bunch about the unit economics of a ductless install versus a ducted.
And I know heat pump does not equal ductless, and we're totally on board with that. But the unit economics of a ductless install are pretty darn attractive. you know, you're in and out in a day. And every day you're there, you're installing, you're selling both, labor and hardware, right?
just changes the fundamental economics of your business that way, and yet these things are tricky, If you were just installing a heat pump for the summer, you know, like that simplifies things a great deal, but if you're putting in a heat pump to do four seasons of duty and. Even if you're doing a dual fuel system and you're integrating the controls, et cetera, et cetera, there's a whole lot about heat pump installs that are much more complicated.
I think Alex Meaney had the best articulation of this, which was it's 10 times more complicated. If you only had to solve two max of two problems in the past, and now you have to solve three heating, cooling, latent, you are increasing the complexity of your design and the things you need to think about by an order of magnitude, actually.
So it's one that. I found that to be a very reassuring thing because it's a little bit It's not overly simplistic and it's beyond what you hear all the time and it gets into the nuance of what's required. And so I've been glad to hear that over and over again, because frankly, that's what, that's the problem we're trying to solve.
It's not fair to, for your typical comfort advisor to have them spend the time to do something so darn complicated and nuanced. this is a problem made for software. And we're trying to build the software to do it. it's been great to hear that reinforced over and over because it just means that, you know, the mission of how you and I spend our days is.
Useful for contractors and for homeowners.
[00:11:16] Eric Fitz: Yeah, a hundred percent that was in my top three. I think it's worth double clicking into because it's, yeah, such an important aspect. so not only a heat pump doing three jobs, it's got to deal with heating loads, sensible cooling and latent cooling. It's also, unlike conventional equipment, it's the performance of the equipment is changing with outdoor air temperature.and then. It is also, the performance is changing depending on the speed at which the equipment's operating, whether that's fan speed or compressor speed. there's multiple variables with the equipment that just makes it, impossible for a human to do this quickly,without software.
and. It just makes sense that, given the nature of the heat pump technology, that you got to use more sophisticated tools to do proper design. And, yeah, Alex Meaney in Episode 9 went into great detail on this. Episode 13 with Steve Rogers, oh, man, some really fantastic insights around some of the ducted specific challenges and complexities with heat pumps. Kevin Brenner as well in episode six. touched on the nuances around heat pumps in particular. because of these nuances with heat pumps, just many more trade offs that you need to manage and why, it's so important that you really goldilocks the size of the equipment. you understand the loads of the building. You select the right equipment to, to match those needs. otherwise you can all kinds of bad outcomes. higher operational costs, utility bills for the homeowner.equipment life, can be impacted if you're oversizing or undersizing. yeah, there's just a whole range of issues. heat pumps are complicated. If you design them right, it can be amazing. But they're definitely, it's more, more complicated than conventional equipment.
[00:13:17] Ed Smith: All said,
why don't you do your next one?
[00:13:18] Eric Fitz: So there's a couple of different things that I really took away as key gotchas or things that in a home, that if you see them, if you observe them, you notice them that like little, the yellow light or maybe a red light should be flashing in your brain, Hey, watch out, there'll be dragons here, pay attention.for example, you've got a ducted project and,there's existing conventional equipment. You're thinking about putting in a ducted heat pump system. If you've got ductwork in unconditioned space, say, in an attic, an unconditioned attic, I need to have eyes on that. So I can see, is it all fully connected? any obvious issues with the ductwork? And if at all possible, I do something that will, improve the insulation on that ductwork? Or even better, a little bit more to get that ductwork somehow inside the building envelope. if you're in an attic, encapsulate the attic. So that would require some weatherization.Because so many of the problems with ducted systems in particular, ducted heat pumps, are related to problems with the ductwork. And the most basic thing you want to know before you try to sell a homeowner a project is the ductwork in okay shape? Because if it's not, you want to know about that as early as possible.you've got to measure for ducted systems. You've got to measure the static pressure and the airflow, or you're in for a world of pain. If you don't have sufficient capacity in the ductwork to do what the heat pump needs to do to deliver comfort, yeah, you're gonna have all kinds of challenges.
[00:14:57] Ed Smith: I had hoped you would go into something just like this. Cause this is one of those places where I'm grateful for your brain and how it works differently. Like you, know, building science in a way I never will. and there was so much of this.
Technical building science stuff that came up, the stack effect, what do you, can you do the envelope? How does that interplay? all of this stuff that,I am getting more up to speed on, but I know you hear it and you're like, oh, yeah, amen. and, you know, like the math behind it, so I know, keep going on this stuff because I think there was 15 episodes.
And for many Heat Pump entrepreneurs, some of that was the most. Valuable stuff that came up.
[00:15:40] Eric Fitz: All right. So when we talk about. Duct capacity in particular.basically you don't have sufficient capacity in your duct work, to be able to hit airflow that is necessary for the equipment you're proposing, you're going to end up with a constraint on how much airflow you can deliver. If you can't deliver the airflow that you need in a duct system. You're going to have poor comfort. You're going to have unhappy homeowners because if you don't have enough airflow, you can't get BTUs into or out of where you need them.and then that's in the short term, like immediately you're going to commission the system. going to be high fiving because you just did a great, beautiful install and you're going to get a call back within a few days or a few weeks, depending on what the weather's like.in the longer term, if you've got insufficient, Duct capacity. you're maxing out the airflow.
the motor's working really hard. You're working up against really high static pressure. If you're using a modern of equipment with ECM motors, you're gonna get motor burnout.and if you don't get motor burnout, you're gonna hit other limits on the equipment. if you're not hitting the air flow that's necessary, you're not enough, energy, enough heat out of the coil. Or it's not cooling it down rapidly enough, you're going to hit high head limits on the compressor, and you're going to get lockouts from the outdoor unit.motor burnout, tripping, all kinds of bad things when you don't have sufficient capacity.
[00:17:12] Ed Smith: And on the lockouts, cause I remember Steve Rogers hit on that one. A question I meant to ask, but I didn't get to do most units not tell you the outdoor unit is locked out.
[00:17:26] Eric Fitz: so all equipment has they have different ways of communicating error codes. and they're You know, so for some ductless units, they'll have a small display with,an actual, list of numbers. That's really helpful. there are many, ductless manufacturers that, they basically blink Morse code at you. It's not actually Morse code, but it's a series of lights turning on and off at a certain speed and you have to decode that. Um, or, uh, yeah, really. Yeah. That's that was like the best practice for many years for ductless equipment
[00:18:01] Ed Smith: That's wild. Okay.
[00:18:03] Eric Fitz: for inducted units. You don't typically have any kind of normal display.
the more modern air handlers they have, in some cases, they'll have some kind of, LCD or led display that give you a little more information, but often order to really understand and diagnose the equipment, you got to, again, it's a modern piece of equipment. You got to plug into the unit.with a special tool to actually read error codes off of it
[00:18:28] Ed Smith: Interesting.
[00:18:28] Eric Fitz: and work through a troubleshooting
[00:18:30] Ed Smith: so if you're doing ducted heat pumps, don't wave your hands at the ductwork, actually measure the static pressure, measure the airflow, and there are great tools out there, like from the team at TEC, Steve Rogers, who is on the pod. Amazing product that helps you get insight into what's going on.
[00:18:52] Eric Fitz: Critical insight. and, they originally built their product thinking it was going to be for technicians. They're really realizing that it's really an incredible tool for a salesperson and that they should have, with a tool like that, you can understand really basic things that are pretty easy to address. So one of the most common gotchas or issues around static pressure is just a filter box, a filter that's just too small. So if you can put in a larger filter, a good four inch filter, you can larger surface area that reduces the static pressure. Reduces the losses, so you can then get more air flow in the system.
Just simply a bigger filter can get you into a threshold where you've got sufficient capacity, in the ductwork for your new equipment. So it's not crazy stuff. it can be a small amount of, additional, price for the project.
[00:19:47] Ed Smith: I'm going to give the next two, hand in hand, one is coming out of the woodwork. There's a lot of folks shifting to heat pumps. It's been fascinating to talk to them on this pod, but also put the pod out there and start getting outreach from people who are saying, I'm building a heat pump.
Or I just struck out on my own, or I'm seeing heat pumps take share just inside my existing business and need to be thinking about it differently. Or, we just got outreach from a large high end. HVAC installer in Massachusetts who reached out and was like, I want to start a ductless branch. what should I be doing and thinking about?
It's been fascinating to see that. So we hypothesized that was there, Eric, from our early days when we were doing sort of the first incarnation of Amply, which was very different. but it's fun to see that. And then I'm just going to go ahead and dive into my next one, which is, Which is fear about going all in.
And that's at the macro and the micro. There is still some fear about, what if I start a heat pump focus business? Will that work? so even as people are doing it, they have some hesitation because it's still pretty unusual. There's a ton of benefits to it. We've heard that about the focus, about the expertise you can build on the equipment.
if you start doing it right, you can really do it right and have some thrilled customers. But then there's also this fear at the micro level, of what if I take this house and put it just on heat pumps, 120, 000 BTU furnace. Was always going to work. Didn't matter what happened outside.
there was that sort of reliability piece. And then people look at what they have to do for a heat pump. And know, it has to carry for four seasons. And know, it has to be Goldilocks sized, which means, getting to the edge of both what you need at that, at the winter temperature, and what you need at the summer temperature.
and that can be risky. but that Ed Janowiak, quote has come up a few times, which applies to all equipment, not just heat pumps, I can either make you happy 99 percent of the year, or I can make you happy 1 percent of the year. which would you rather me choose? And that was a trade off that was always there before.
It was a little less in people's faces when it came to, the equipment that they were putting in. So it's feels clear to me. That heat pumps are the future and there'll be more and more companies just focused on it, and that'll be more and more of what goes into people's homes, but there's still a fair amount of hesitance.
In the market. That's just going to take experience and knowledge and education and, and seeing it work, over and over again,
[00:22:36] Eric Fitz: Totally. And, I actually, I have a different take, on,saying that like a, a hundred thousand BTU furnace, they were reliable. I would say that they're reliably uncomfortable. That equipment, that, that equipment is, yeah, when it's minus 20 out or it's 40 degrees out,your pipes are not going to freeze.
So it's reliable from that perspective. that piece of equipment, particularly a, a single stage, 100, 000 BTU furnace, are just, people have been living in a uncomfortable home. so long that people don't even know what real comfort is about. that unit's so oversized that it's just cycling on and off for 99. 5 percent of the year.sure pipes aren't freezing, it's not dropping below 60 degrees in their house at any point. but they're actually pretty darn uncomfortable. And so it's, he
[00:23:37] Ed Smith: Yeah,
quoted Jim Bergman, he had the best line on this, which is when he got his heat pump, he learned what real comfort was. like it was just, it was so well said. So yes, thank you for clarifying. that is a great double click and better articulation of what I was trying to express.
[00:23:55] Eric Fitz: not necessarily something that was mentioned, as much in the podcast itself, but another example of like people coming out of the woodwork, things that we're just observing in the market. I take a place like Maine. We got, climate zone six and seven. In the state of Maine, it gets wicked cold up north in particular. Of the roughly 800 HVAC contractors in the state of Maine, about 700 of them, all they do is install heat pumps now.that transformation has happened over the last 10 years, and I think all the places to prove that, hey, there's people coming out of the woodwork to install heat pumps, and also that heat pumps work everywhere, in all climates.
that's just a great data point that, there's proof that's the case.
[00:24:39] Ed Smith: Good addition.
[00:24:40] Eric Fitz: my number three was actually that he pumps work everywhere.
[00:24:44] Ed Smith: And maybe just,if you want to go back and remind yourself of a little more of the story of Maine in particular, our first episode with Matt Scott from Dave's World way into this. And, Yeah, heat pumps are here and now.
[00:24:58] Eric Fitz: They work. they create a lot of comfort. they are the whole industry is going to move towards.
[00:25:04] Ed Smith: Both of our houses are heat pumps.
[00:25:07] Eric Fitz: Yep.
[00:25:07] Ed Smith: All right. I think I only have two left. is you can't make up for bad design. It is. Yeah, it is upstream of everything. A good install cannot fix a bad design, And so it is important to get right. and it lays the groundwork for everything else. We have been talking to more and more distributors and we're hearing the number one cause of poor equipment performance out there once they dig into it is Bad design.
Missized systems. Oversized systems. and it's particularly an issue for, for heat pumps, but you've made this point to me many times. I don't think ever on the pod, but this issue is coming for everything else in HVAC. High efficiency boilers and furnaces are getting more finicky and like they don't work the same way old ones did.
And so you're going to have to look at duct design and all of this for any cutting edge equipment. It's all getting better, but more specific and finicky too. And so you got to know what you're putting in there. And so this isn't necessarily something that's just heat pump focused, but it's where a lot of people think about it.
but the design is becoming more and more important. And so for those comfort advisors, those comfort engineers, like they really need to know building science and their equipment and what are they recommending and is it actually going to solve the problem that the homeowner has?
[00:26:37] Eric Fitz: Totally. Yep. Yeah, I love that. gotta get the design right. That's the foundation of everything. you can have most beautiful install. If you don't have sufficient duct capacity, you're going to be in big trouble, and if your load calcs are way off, holy cow, you're going to be in really big trouble.
I think in many ways, what you're just saying is, was my number two.I've got or three left. My number two was just that home is a system. You got to have some basic understanding of that system, and that, that's the building envelope. you gotta know a little bit about building science, so you can use the right tools to solve problems at home.
You don't have to be a weatherization expert, but just having some basic understanding that the building envelope combined with the equipment and the ductwork, that is the system. And they work together.there's a great quote. I think it was from Alex Meany.he says that HVAC is the only trade that gets blamed for everybody else's mistakes.
[00:27:36] Ed Smith: That was Alex. All
[00:27:38] Eric Fitz: if we, I think part of the reason why that stereotype will continue is if we try to solve all problems in the home with the HVAC system. There are some things that you just, you have to address the building envelope, or you gotta address the ductwork in some way.
You can't just throw a bigger piece of equipment at it, or a new air handler.Episode 6 with Kevin Brenner, he went into this in great detail. it's a fun episode, so check that out again. But yeah, home is a system. Treat it as a system.
[00:28:09] Ed Smith: my top one was entrepreneur speak universal language, but I already did that one. So this is my second, which is the times they are at changing. There is a lot going on. Advances in equipment, refrigerant change, new administration, rebates evolving in real time, private equity, hoovering up HVAC companies, new entrance.
In HVAC. We had, Mark Kasdorf, the CEO Forge on. And the reaction to that was super interesting. It was like for a lot of our listeners, they are like, career HVAC folks, it was very different. this, it's a very different play.and then, other technology changing, like LIDAR coming on the scene.
There's a whole bunch of startups that are trying to do completely remote designs. it's just, it's fascinating to see what's going on because
was always like in the background. For me, you know what I mean? It's like, if it works, you don't think about it. And if it doesn't, you try to get it fixed as you possibly can. But it's importance in terms of how much energy it uses in the home. It's cost, how much it impacts your health every day, your comfort every day.
Like it is massively important. And, a lot of companies that are different than your traditional HVAC company are waking up to that. and so I think you'll just see more. Innovation, more change, going forward. And I think that's exciting. 'cause everyone we've had on this podcast, one of the things that they all share, like they embrace change, they were all leaders, in jumping on the heat pump bandwagon early.
This is some decades ago, Mike Capuccio, like 1999. like I didn't know anyone who had a heat pump in 1999. so it's fascinating to see and I think the rate of change is just gonna increase. that's a little bit scary. It's also exciting.
[00:30:07] Eric Fitz: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's wild. looking at the AHRI shipment data for the last two years, heat pumps have outsold gas furnacers. like that trend is continuing. And so there has been a real shift in the market. And, yeah, changes are happening and they're happening faster than ever, for sure. I have two more. Although I'll call it one and a half, because we've touched on them already. number two was that heat pumps are about comfort. People like to talk about all the other benefits of heat pumps. There are many. But it's really about comfort. Yes, heat pumps are incredibly energy efficient. Yes, there are situations where they can reduce utility bills. But holy cow. They are about comfort. Inverter driven, variable speed heat pumps are able to match the exact loads in the home that are changing in real time the exact right amount of heating and cooling. And that just creates more comfort.
That means that equipment is running all the time or close to all the time. And people, homeowners, this is, one interesting. Challenge with homeowners. People think, oh, my equipment's running all the time and there's a problem. For a heat pump, that's actually a beautiful thing. If your equipment's running almost all the time, that means you're getting more air filtration, you're getting better indoor air quality because your fan is actually operating, it's circulating the air, it's going through the filter, it means that you're not getting this episodic, experience.
Nate Adams talks about this a lot, that if you're using single stage equipment or even two stage, it's like trying to take a shower, using a bucket where you just pick up the hot water, you dump it on your head, and then you refill the bucket and then you dump it on your head again.
doesn't feel very good. heat pump, you can just turn that temperature to right where you want it and you just get this nice flow and it's just comfortable and you're happy. So heat pumps are about comfort. that's the thing we should really be.and yeah, we've mentioned Jim Bergman's episode several times, but oh my gosh, his story around getting religion on heat pumps exactly around this is incredible and worth,listening to a first, second time.
[00:32:25] Ed Smith: Yeah. It's such a good point. at the NCI summit in September, David Richardson had a great presentation and he showed, survey after survey shows that The things homeowners care most about are, health, safety, comfort, efficiency, in that order. And he said, who in here wants to guess what we typically sell?
and Tim D'Eustassio raised his hand and said, uh, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, and sometimes comfort. Now, Tim was not saying he does that. he's saying that's typically what the industry does. And it's such a good point. and that heat pumps are, God, it's all we talk about is efficiency and. The fact that they're just better at comfort should be what we talk about over and over.
[00:33:14] Eric Fitz: Yeah.
[00:33:15] Ed Smith: Yeah, that's super well said.
[00:33:17] Eric Fitz: Nice.
So call this my number one.
[00:33:21] Ed Smith: Okay.
[00:33:22] Eric Fitz: Focusing on heat pumps. A winning business. There's so many different stories from the folks that we interviewed. And the focus on heat pumps. just, there's amazing stories from who are just getting started. I think it was David, who's about to launch his brand new heat
[00:33:41] Ed Smith: Oh yeah, dehar.
[00:33:43] Eric Fitz: To hearing, story about, from Halco who he's been in, in this business for 20 plus years.
He's now tens of millions of dollars in revenue, for his business. And. The focus around heat pumps, it just simplifies your business operations. You don't have to have gas analyzers and all these other specialized equipment. It's easier to train your team. It's, there are fewer SKUs to worry about.and it ultimately, it just leads to profitable, great businesses. that's what we heard over and over again in these stories. we hoped to hear those stories and to share those stories through the podcast. I think, me, it was a resounding, yes, that's the case.
and we heard that over and over again through, through all of our episodes.
[00:34:43] Ed Smith: Oh, I'm embarrassed. I didn't have that one on my list. That absolutely should have been on there. the most amazing example was, Joe and Laura Wood, right? Running one traditional HVAC company and then running one heat pump focused company and just saying the heat pump focused company is more profitable.
and a variety of reasons for that. but that was fascinating to hear. and probably one of the best examples you could possibly ask for. All right, good. That's your list.
[00:35:09] Eric Fitz: That's my list.
[00:35:10] Ed Smith: That's a good list. That's my list. to anyone listening, this is the longest, by far, Eric and I have ever talked one on one without devolving into a fight about something.
We believe that's actually what partnerships, entrepreneurial partnerships should look like. but this is, this is definitely one of those. So, thanks for joining. Thanks for listening to the Heat Pump Podcast. However often you do, we're amazed that anyone listens to it. If you have questions, comments, feedback, we would love to hear, where we should take it in 2025.
would be absolutely grateful for that. You can reach us on our website, on any of the social media platforms we're on, whatever, but hello@amply.Energy. Again, that's just hello@amply.energy no. com. Eric and I both get that email and we'll respond right away and We'd be delighted to hear from y'all.
Thank you so much.
[00:36:09] Eric Fitz: Yeah, it was great to have this conversation. I learned a bunch and, yeah, again, we're grateful for everybody that's been listening to the podcast, this year and to all the folks that,were willing to, do an interview with us. it's been fantastic and I can't wait for next year and what we're going to learn from, from everybody in this industry and through this podcast.
[00:36:33] Ed Smith: All right. Signing off.
[00:36:35] Eric Fitz: All right.