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31 minute read
Kevin Brenner started his career as Dr. Brenner, destined to take over the family podiatry business. But he loved to swing a hammer more than he liked being in an office, so he jumped ship and landed in carpentry. His first company, Brenner Builders, started with a $627 job fixing deck stairs. It ended as Westchester County's premier high-end home builder, with an average value of $11M per project and doing $50M a year in revenue.
Kevin's journey did not end there. He had a passion for high-efficiency homes, so he started Healthy Home on the side, a company focused on whole-home performance contracting with pricing accessible to everyone. In 2017, he closed the doors on Brenner Builders and now focuses entirely on Healthy Home.
Healthy Home is a mission-driven organization. Kevin has grown his business steadily, adding services, hiring and training his staff, and leaving a wake of happy customers and healthy homes behind him.
Join us for Kevin's insights into:
- How building envelope work impacts heat pump design
- His mother's reaction when she learned he was leaving medicine
- What good heat pump installs look like
- Why he does NOT sell to customers who want a heat pump to lower their monthly bills
- What the media gets wrong in their heat pump coverage
- The importance of reading the manual (RTFM)
- Why he has started, stopped, and restarted his HVAC division multiple times
- How culture and mission are the cornerstone of Healthy Home's hiring and training
- ... and more
Show notes
- Healthy Home
- The smoking hot Chevy HHR
- The Energy Conservatory's True Flow Grid
- The Building Performance Institute
- National Comfort Institute
- HVAC School
- Ty Branaman
- Craig Migliaccio and AC Service Tech Channel
Transcript
The Heat Pump Podcast: Kevin Brenner
[00:00:00] Kevin Brenner: I made the decision, the painful decision, because at this point we had two HVAC vans, we had tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. I said, nope, I'm not in for this anymore. Then we took another year, shut down the HVAC department.
[00:00:20] Ed Smith: Wow
[00:00:21] Kevin Brenner: Retrained some of our employees to do heat pump work the right way
[00:00:28] Ed Smith: Wow.
[00:00:29] Kevin Brenner: and started it up again about two years ago.
[00:00:32] Ed Smith: Welcome to the heat pump podcast. Our goal is to make sure the transition to heat pumps goes well for everyone. Homeowners contractors and the planet. We cover all topics related to heat pumps, the science, the technology. And the business. Today, we talked to Kevin Brenner, founder and owner of Healthy Home, a whole home performance contractor in New York who's been actively building and rebuilding his heat pump business for years. So he and his team could do heat pumps the right way. In this episode, Kevin tells us his amazing and entertaining story from podiatry as Dr. Brenner into carpentry. He built Brenner Builders, which was a $50 million a year high-end home building business in Westchester county, New York. Then he shut it down to follow his passion in to whole home performance contracting and founding Healthy Home. Healthy Home looks at the home as a system. So we dig into technical building science concepts and discuss how our envelope work impacts heat pumps system design. We also talk about business building concepts, like employee training and how critical it is to inspire employees with the company's mission. And last, but certainly not least, Kevin tells some great stories. Enjoy the show
[00:01:43] Ed Smith: I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who doesn't have an interesting backstory, but I have to say, Kev, yours is unusually interesting. would you give us a sense of Kevin Brenner and his arc?
[00:01:57] Kevin Brenner: I don't know why you think it's interesting. most of the guys that I started with also started out as Dr. Brenner.
[00:02:04] Ed Smith: Okay, of course.
[00:02:06] Kevin Brenner: typical. I don't know why you would say that that would be interesting or unusual in any way, shape or form.
[00:02:10] Ed Smith: Redacted.
[00:02:11] Kevin Brenner: Okay, good, please. I went to undergraduate school at SUNY Binghamton and I, I had fun. learned a few things. I learned I was a psych major only because I had the most credits in psych.
So that was 40 plus years ago. I had a girlfriend in for the most of Binghamton, which is now my wife. So we met when we were 18 years old, started dating when we were 19 years old. When she says to me, you're such a child. I'm like, well, you kind of knew that 40 years ago.
But during college, I, I really didn't know what I wanted to do when I grow up. In fact, I'm still trying to figure that out. I had a really good relationship with my dad and my brother. My dad and my brother, were both podiatrists and I figured, Hey, I'll go to podiatry school, right?
In the interim, since I was 10 years old, I always had some kind of a job, whether it was delivering papers or fixing bicycles or, working as a, mobile DJ and kind of everything in between, I was always working.
And during college and podiatry school, I did a lot of carpentry projects. My father was very handy. I've had a drill In my hand, for a really long time. I would build a deck or in college, people would hire me to build platform beds for their dorm room.
[00:03:32] Kevin Brenner: I was never afraid to take on a project. I was also never afraid to ask for help. In those days you couldn't go to university of YouTube and say, how to build a deck. I kind of figured out, I read some books and I asked a lot of questions. during podiatry school, I was awarded a residency in Baltimore I just started to think about it more and I guess I was four years older.
I'm not sure I want to be in an office for the rest of my life. I've always been an outdoor kind of guy. I called the residency director, in May or June. And I said, Hey, this, and I know I'm supposed to start July 1st, but would it be okay if I started January 1st?
He said, sure, I get it, Kevin. No problem. do what you gotta do. I started doing carpentry full time and I absolutely loved it. Now, keep in mind, at this point, my wife was, 12 and a half months pregnant with our first child. And, I know that math doesn't add up, but you know,
[00:04:29] Ed Smith: got it,
[00:04:33] Kevin Brenner: she stopped working. I just said, Jill, I don't want to be a podiatrist. She was very supportive. My mother in law, believe it or not, was very supportive. my father had actually passed away on the day of my graduation from podiatry school, which might've been an omen.
And so he wasn't around. But when I said to my mom, Hey mom, I'm not going to be a podiatrist. Her reaction was something like this. Schmuck, we're gift wrapping a business for you and you're going to throw it all away and bang nails. It's like, mom, you always said I should do what I want to do. This is what I want to do.
She said, I know, but I didn't think you would do this. So I kept my license up for a couple of years. I obviously never did a residency. I remember my first check as Brenner Builders was 627 for building a staircase on a deck. The staircase had gotten knocked down by a tree. Then I started doing some more decks and some kitchens and then small additions and bigger additions and then new homes.
The company was Brenner Builders, and when I closed that company in 2017, we were doing about, $50 million a year in new home construction for, you know, really, really high end construction where the construction value, not land acquisition, it was all custom work.
The average job was, I think $11.5M per job. These were, significant homes for really pain in the butt customers typically. Some of the customers having said that were really, really nice and really, really appreciative. In fact, I would say 80 to 90 percent of them were that way.
But then you had the 10 to 20 percent that just ate your heart out. In about 2007, so this is pretty typical so far, isn't it? Podiatry to building stairs, to building houses, to you
[00:06:35] Ed Smith: and just, so the timeframe on, Brenner Builders. So you closed it down in 2017, you started it in
[00:06:41] Kevin Brenner: 1989.
[00:06:42] Ed Smith: 19, oh, you ran that business a long time.
[00:06:44] Kevin Brenner: Now again, in 1989, it was building a deck. a big job would have been a $10,000 kitchen install.
[00:06:51] Ed Smith: I was gonna say from a $642
[00:06:54] Kevin Brenner: $627.
[00:06:55] Ed Smith: me, $627 to $11M homes, that is, that's quite a run.
[00:07:01] Kevin Brenner: yeah,
[00:07:02] Ed Smith: And
[00:07:03] Kevin Brenner: lot of blood, sweat and tears.
[00:07:04] Ed Smith: your wife was supportive when you said, no podiatry, I'm going to be a carpenter. What were the reactions when you decided to shut down your construction company?
[00:07:15] Kevin Brenner: I always, and still do, enjoy going to work. I really believe it's not just a cliche for me that if you don't enjoy what you do, you're going to be pretty miserable.
And, My chemistry or my DNA doesn't do miserable real well. it takes actually a lot for me to get to that level.
But, the last few years I had a couple of run of some really not nice people. She saw how it was wearing on me. It wasn't like, in 2017 I said, okay, I'm done and now I'm going to start Healthy Home or some other business, right? , Healthy Home came out of Brenner Builders in another kind of weird way.
In about 2007, I was a builder and I cared about the environment. I cut down plenty of trees, but I tried to repurpose those trees. I tried to be selective about those trees I cared about, energy efficiency and how the house is performed. I couldn't find anybody that could help me with that.
I wanted to learn more about that. And so I started doing some research. I got my ResNet HERS rater accreditation or whatever. I never practices that. Then I learned about BPI, which was a little bit backwards. And I started testing the homes that I was building for energy efficiency for no other reason, nobody paid me for that, nobody said, Oh, I'm really curious. unfortunately, when you're building for that market.
Whether you're heating bills or $20,000 a year or $40,000 a year, they don't really care.
It wasn't like I was asked to make this more energy efficient. It was just something that I had a passion about.
[00:09:05] Eric Fitz: And for testing, do you mean you're doing blower door test you take to static pressures on duct systems? What do you mean by
[00:09:11] Kevin Brenner: Great question. blower door for me is the basics of all this stuff. And we still do a lot of blower door testing, obviously. I was doing a lot of duct testing, basically thinking about, duct leakage to the outside. In the early days of testing the homes, I didn't actually even gather the importance of having the duct system in the conditioned space and the HVAC guys, as we all know, they always do perfectly sealed ducts. So there was a lot of duct leakage to the outside. And I'm thinking this can't be good on so many levels, right? So we did a lot of that. And I did a lot of, infrared thermography to visualize where all of these leaks were coming from and, also combustion safety.
So I was kind of doing my own Kevin Brenner audit. Very quickly. I said, this is a separate business model. The volume of work we do, at most, we were building six houses at a time usually about four. I'd like to be able to help, the normal community, the people that don't live in, you know, 10 and 20 million houses,
[00:10:18] Ed Smith: Yeah.
[00:10:19] Kevin Brenner: It was an adventure because then I said, I'm going to offer my services as an auditor. This is literally 2009, so 15 years ago, I was getting $2,500 for an audit that has 10 percent of the information that we provide now for our customers where we're charging $500.
[00:10:41] Ed Smith: Oh, wow.
[00:10:42] Kevin Brenner: That has come full circle as well, but I very quickly realized that the business model is not in auditing.
You're not going to make a living out of this if you want to make it a separate business.
Again, pretty weird that we didn't get into air sealing and insulation first. I went out and I bought a spray rig. Which is also a little backwards, it spent a hundred thousand dollars and bought a spray rig and started with, spraying our own Brenner Builders projects, and then we would spray a project and the spray rig would sit there for three months.
[00:11:12] Ed Smith: Strong utilization.
[00:11:13] Kevin Brenner: Exactly. Yeah. But I had a spray rig, so I was good. and that was the birth of Healthy Home. I also bought a car to carry all of our blower door stuff in. And it was, you guys remember that the Chevy HHR,
[00:11:26] Eric Fitz: No,
[00:11:27] Kevin Brenner: That's, you know, you may want to get an image of that on the podcast cause it's pretty cool.
At that time we were, borrowing, employees from Brenner builders to serve Healthy Homes needs. So a lot of people were cross trained. while we needed somebody to spray, five of us went down to Delac in Dallas and got trained on the spray rig down there.
And then when we didn't have spray work, then one of the guys was a machine operator, the other guy was a carpenter, and so there was a lot of back and forth. Then in about in 2000, so that was 2009, 2010 or 11, we had a nice little trajectory there, and then we had dedicated. Healthy Home employees.
[00:12:08] Ed Smith: Like separate LLC formed around that
[00:12:10] Kevin Brenner: Yeah, I think we're an S-corp, but S Corp. Totally separate company.
[00:12:13] Ed Smith: Okay. So then when you wound down Brenner Builders, you had Healthy Home ready to go that had already had, several years of track record.
[00:12:23] Kevin Brenner: I would say I shut the doors.
[00:12:25] Ed Smith: Okay. Clear.
[00:12:26] Kevin Brenner: I finished the projects that we are on.
[00:12:29] Kevin Brenner: I made sure that. my employees at Brenner Builders all had jobs or at least potential for jobs. And I shut the doors. I mean, it was really that abrupt. There was no phase down.
There was no wind down. It was like, We're done. Don't know if that was smart or not smart, but it was what it was. Right.
[00:12:51] Eric Fitz: can clearly drawn to something that you are really interested in that, in order to have a really successful business from the outside, at least financially to close those doors, you clearly weren't happy about it and you're ready to move to the thing that was going to make you happy.
Not only did I have a run of some pretty self centered, self impressed customers. but a lot of their, philosophies really took a separate path. They really went separate ways. I was getting more and more into trying to save the earth. And it seemed like a lot of the customers just didn't care.
[00:13:31] Kevin Brenner: And there was literally a straw that broke the camel's back. Which was, we were building a house in Connecticut, a 120 acre estate with a 12 car detached garage that had an elevator that moved between floors.
[00:13:48] Ed Smith: Oh my
[00:13:49] Kevin Brenner: And then there was a detached two car garage, which was for their everyday cars, I'm going to say a hundred feet from the front door of their house.
This was in an area of Connecticut on top of the hill where. Used to snow a lot, not so much anymore. But, and they said, what do we do about that? And I was like, you have a groundskeeper, a full time property manager. We could shovel it. How's that for a concept? They're like, nah, I don't want to do that.
Okay. they do have snow melt, which, Turns on based on, a sensor that senses a certain amount of humidity, it'll turn on, it heats up. The snow hits it and melts.
But it has to be on for a period of time that it senses based on atmospheric pressures and humidities. I don't want that either. Here's what I want. I want you to put in whatever size water boiler you want and I'm going to turn it on October 15th and I'm going to shut it off April 15th and let it run continuously.
So the sizing of that boiler. Turned out to be two 500,000 BTU boilers, a million BTUs running continuously 24/7 so that their property manager wouldn't have to shovel the path.
[00:15:08] Ed Smith: Wow.
[00:15:10] Eric Fitz: Holy
[00:15:10] Kevin Brenner: Now I'm thinking that people who are listening to this podcast know what a million BTU's is. But just as a comparison, I built and lived in a net zero energy house that was about 4, 000 square feet where the heating load was 22, 000 BTU's.
For a whole house. As compared to a million BTUs that was literally hitting the atmosphere. Of course, the fossil fuel that we were burning there was oil because there was no natural gas there. There was no propane. And that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I said to, Jill. my wife. I said, I can't do this anymore. I just cannot support this behavior.
You know, I don't want to do it for my kids. I don't want to do it for my God willing grandkids. I cannot do this anymore. And besides the fact that this particular couple, let's just say we're not the nicest people on the planet. Nor did they care about the planet when I suggested to them that we put in, you know, that 120 acres, a lot of it was field. I said, let's put in a solar array at this part of the property where you can't even see it.
Their response was that stuff doesn't work.
I'm like, really? It's kind of powering my house.
So I closed the doors and I focused 100 percent of my energies on Healthy Home,
[00:16:37] Eric Fitz: All right. Let's focus on Healthy Home.
[00:16:41] Kevin Brenner: even though those are good stories.
[00:16:45] Ed Smith: Those are incredible stories.
[00:16:46] Eric Fitz: remember hearing a little bit about, the name Healthy Home, but why Healthy Home?
[00:16:52] Kevin Brenner: I had to come up with a name and very early on in my own research, I discovered that tie between energy efficiency and the health of the home. I thought it was kind of catchy. A lot of people said to me that Healthy Home, is this like a geriatric center?
What does Healthy Home mean? I'm like, I'm going to stick with it.
So that's what we're called.
[00:17:17] Eric Fitz: Got to get that indoor air quality, the energy efficiency, the comfort, they're kind of all interconnected.
[00:17:24] Ed Smith: got to think about all of them. Nice. So how has Healthy Home evolved? You said you started with a spray rig, and earlier on you gave us a sense that now you're doing heat pumps. How did the products or services you offer at Healthy Home evolve from when that started to now?
[00:17:42] Kevin Brenner: Not your typical thing. The first piece of equipment I bought was a spray rig. I laugh at it now, but that's where I saw an opportunity. and then obviously we had, air sealing equipment? It's a caulk gun. And if you're really good, you get the, one part foam spray applicator.
Then we very quickly got into cellulose because we saw the need for cellulose from a sustainability point of view, and there's applications for loose fill We saw very quickly our housing stock. In Westchester and Putnam is really varied, which kind of always makes it exciting, but we have a lot of antique homes that have no insulation in the walls, balloon frame, and we could literally, as long as there was some sheathing, we could literally stuff that whole wall from the attic.
All the way down to the rim. Now we want, we do like to use closed cell foam around the rim. So we had the rig for that, but sometimes if you can't get in a driveway or it's a small enough space, we do the, the low pressure foam. And then we saw the need for, ventilation. We were making these homes.
Much tighter than they were we got below the building airflow standard and whether it's ASHRAE or BPI or whatever there is a building airflow standard and our name is Healthy Home. It's not really the health of the home It's really the health of the occupants, right? So we didn't want to bring it down and cut off the appropriate amount of air exchanges.
So we started researching, ERVs or HRVs. We kind of landed pretty much on ERVs and that was our first besides bath fans. Right. that was our first, mechanical equipment that we installed on a regular basis. we saw, a for one to one ductless heat pumps. I don't like to use the term mini split because I don't even really know what mini split means.
I know what I think it should mean, but people use the term mini split for anything that's revolved around an air source heat pump. So we're going to say a ductless heat
[00:19:53] Ed Smith: this? Eric hates that term too.
[00:19:55] Kevin Brenner: No, Eric and I are very simpatico,
[00:19:58] Ed Smith: on a lot of stuff. It doesn't mean anything. So
[00:20:01] Kevin Brenner: you can quote me on this.
There's no such thing as mini splits. it's a terrible term.
[00:20:09] Ed Smith: It doesn't mean anything
[00:20:10] Eric Fitz: Right. so ambiguous.
Yeah.
[00:20:12] Kevin Brenner: We saw a need for it and we thought, rightfully so, that we'd be able to sell it, and in order for us to sell it, we didn't really have to know that much.
Now I am not condoning this behavior. you need to get your EPA 608 so you can buy the refrigerant. That's it. Because with those one to ones, as long as you're not adding any more refrigerant, you can pretty much gas and go.
And we did that for a while. not saying that was great practice. I look back at it now and did we make some mistakes? Absolutely. But that's what we did for a while. And then about five, six, seven years ago, we said, we gotta do the right thing here. This is not the right thing. We always, however, recommended to address the envelope first. Now that doesn't mean that every envelope needs addressing, but we at least had to test to understand what was going on there.
So if somebody called us and said, I want a mini split in my bonus room above my garage, we would not put one in unless they addressed typically the garage ceiling slash bonus room floor
[00:21:28] Ed Smith: great.
[00:21:29] Kevin Brenner: I think one of the reasons why Brenner Builders was successful and Healthy Home is successful is we had a set of core values. We never made exceptions to. Does what we're about to do here meet our core values? Is it something, or are we taking a turn? I like, no. So it was very easy. And actually it's one of the first things we teach our new employees when onboarding them is that I know you may not understand this right now, but the answer to every question that you'll have in the field. Here's the equation. Building science plus Healthy Homes core values equals the correct answer, or at least a choice of correct answers.
We spend a lot of time onboarding teaching about building science, which can be boiled down to one simple thing. More goes to less. It's the same analogy in, computer science, zeros and ones. More goes to less, everything can be boiled down to more goes to less. You take a Healthy Home core values and there's your answer.
I'm not sure everyone would understand what you mean by more goes to less. Would you just expand on that in the context of building science? We focus a lot when we're teaching, either other industry people or our own employees. the basic tenant of building science is more goes to less. And that means if you have more of something here, Mother nature wants to reach equilibrium and send it to here. So more heat goes to less heat, more moisture goes to less moisture.
So when, more pressure goes to less pressure in a natural state. And then we talk about, how do those things affect? And then, how do they work together? And then we go into the stack effect. What's the catalyst there? Okay. The catalyst actually of the stack effect is during the winter season, the heat going on, you turning the thermostat to 68 degrees and the heat saying, Hey, I got to heat this place.
And then how the differences in temperature relate to the differences in pressure and the direction of the pressure, but it's constantly more heat. Not temperature, more energy, more heat going to less heat, more pressure going to less pressure. you obviously can't go from more of something to less of something without going through some zero neutral plane, but it's the way you think about it.
[00:24:13] Ed Smith: if you boil it down to that. And everything can be boiled down to that and building science. And then you build up from there again. it's a really cool way to understand that. And that's the way that we teach it. And we start with very, very simple concepts.
[00:24:28] Eric Fitz: I love that. Kevin. Just, you know, I couldn't agree more on from a building science perspective of just you focus on these most basic principles, then the rest of building science kind of unfolds from that starting place.
I also, I that connection too, to your business that youhave, you say we combine. building science and our core values, our principles. A couple of relatively simple frameworks and say, this is how we work. And then you have a guide post for any situation, any challenge, any customer.
Um, it's beautiful. Love it.
[00:25:01] Kevin Brenner: But you know, what's beautiful about it is that it's simple.
[00:25:05] Ed Smith: Yep.
[00:25:06] Kevin Brenner: It's, really not complicated. That decision that you made on that job site, did it equal good building science principles and our core values. If it did, then you made the right decision. Maybe there's another decision you could have made, but you didn't make the wrong decision at that time.
[00:25:25] Ed Smith: There's some quote, I forget who made it, but it's I'd give everything for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Like you've got to go through the complexity to be able to boil it down to something that you can just execute and build a business around.
That's what you did, which I can see why that's so powerful and has led to success for Healthy Home.
[00:25:42] Kevin Brenner: it's not that complicated.
[00:25:44] Ed Smith: take us back to, You were just starting to install one to ones. You saw the demand there
[00:25:50] Kevin Brenner: ductless or ducted.
[00:25:53] Ed Smith: assumed you were doing ductless, but tell us, tell us more about that starting point and what you learned and how you built up from there.
[00:25:59] Kevin Brenner: Okay. So we started installing one to one ductless units, pretty much only wall mount units, not any ceiling cassettes and not any floor mounts and definitely not any ducted. But very quickly you learn there's an opportunity there to expand beyond that, the one to ones and, into ducted, and then not only is there an opportunity, but there's a need becauselet's say a lot of the houses that were built here or anywhere, probably, in the, seventies and eighties, sixties, maybe, there was a forced air system.
You know, a furnace gas fired forced air system, with a duct system in place.let's pretend for a second that the ducts were sized with foresight and, a heat pump can actually fit those sizes, a properly sized heat pump can have the correct amount of airflow based on what a furnace was.
You have a good opportunity there. But the nice thing is. Is that your typical HVAC contractor, by the way, that's the other thing that we teach at Healthy Home. Very specifically, we don't want to be like the other guys.
There's plenty of those guys. So when, somebody comes in a typical HVAC guy, we'll see a four ton system in there and they'll replace it with a four ton system, not. address anything about the envelope, not even take out a blower door, not even look around. They go right outside to the condensing unit.
They see R22, 48, 000 BTUs. Hey lady, I'm going to replace this with a 4 ton unit. Yeah, no problem. Now you take that hot air furnace and you replace it with, let's just say 400 CFMs per ton. That it needs, it's not going to do the job. Now, does that mean that the ducts aren't going to work? Yes. But does that mean that you have to replace the ducts? And the answer is no, because if we do the envelope work, we've reduced the load to such a certain extent that maybe.
That the existing duct system will work. Well, how do we know if that existing duct system will work? We test the duct system, right? We literally test the duct system and we measure static pressures and we measure airflow.
We use the true flow grid from, The Energy Conservatory. I have no stock in the energy conservatory. I think that's a great product. And that's what we use to test the overall capacity of that duct system.
Now it's very often, we're taking those ducts and now we're bringing them into the conditioned space because we've taken the envelope that was at the attic floor and now we're moving it to the roof. Now there's even less of a load that's required for all that. So can an existing furnace system work?
Yes. Can it work if you don't do any of the calculations and you're replacing with the same amount of BTUs? The answer is no. You're doing your customer a disservice. And when you don't address the envelope with your customer, we have walked away from jobs because we've said,
Happy to put a heat pump system in here, but we have to address the envelope. And then we give them a proposal for the envelope work. And we give them a proposal for the heat pump work. I can't do this. because Joe down the street said he's just going to put the heat pumps in.
Great. So Joe down the street puts the heat pumps in, doesn't address the fact that they used to have these beautiful old cast iron radiators with a steam or a water boiler and how that heats differently than, air blown convection heat pumps. And that air is literally going through the walls and through the windows.
And then the customer says, heat pumps don't work. Customer's not going to say to their neighbors, Healthy Home told us that we really should do the envelope work. And we didn't cause some other guy said we didn't have to, they're going to say heat pumps don't work. And that is an awful, awful, awful problem for the heat pump industry.
[00:30:10] Eric Fitz: Yeah.
[00:30:11] Ed Smith: that was so well said Kevin. Holy smokes. That was like a Masterclass in why this matters. I
[00:30:21] Kevin Brenner: well, Ed, I mean, I know the behind the back, you keep saying it Fitz that like Kevin's just a pretty face, but I'm not just a pretty face. Okay. Can we, can we be,
[00:30:33] Ed Smith: Oh man, that's gonna by the way, I expect to see the outtakes on YouTube. I was gonna say, like,
[00:30:38] Kevin Brenner: see
[00:30:38] Ed Smith: it's gonna hurt to edit that out,
[00:30:40] Kevin Brenner: So we quickly learned as we were putting in one to ones that this is, we're narrowing an opportunity here for ourselves as a business and for the community to service them. But. I didn't feel comfortable that we knew enough to go ahead and do whole house heat pump systems, whether that's, multi head units where you have one outdoor unit and multiple indoor units, whether that's ducted system, whether it's more likely than not a combination of ducted and ductless, we didn't know.
So I spent about a year educating myself. Applications and what makes sense and what doesn't. And then came the trials and tribulations of the Healthy Home heat pump division.
What we learned is that for us to do it right, we had to train our people ourselves because the industry does not. Train people typically to do it the right way. And so we hired people that came from the traditional HVAC world.
And I could not get some people when I wasn't looking to test the system to 600 PSI They thought the system was going to explode, even though. It says in the manual to test it to 600 PSI. I couldn't get them to do a triple of evacuation I couldn't do all the things that I expected.
Again, this is not a magic formula here. This is another really, really Crazy concept, read the manual,I tried that for about a year with people who came in from the trades and then I made the decision, the painful decision, because at this point we had
two HVAC vans, we had tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. I said, nope, I'm not in for this anymore. Then we took another year, shut down the HVAC department.
[00:32:40] Ed Smith: Wow,
[00:32:41] Kevin Brenner: Retrained some of our employees to do heat pump work the right way
[00:32:48] Ed Smith: Wow.
[00:32:49] Kevin Brenner: and started it up again about two years ago.
[00:32:52] Ed Smith: wow.
[00:32:54] Kevin Brenner: I just wasn't willing to accept to be like all the other guys out there. That's not what we at Healthy Home wanted to do. decisions. Painful decisions.
So now we do our duct work in-house.
We obviously do all of our installs in-house. And even if we have to core drill through a stone wall to get some refrigerant lines in or out in a 1930s basement, we have a Hilti core drill that I kept from Brenner builders. the only licensed person that we need to hire to do our HVAC installs or any other subcontractors, just the electrician and one of our HVAC standards is, or heat pump standards is whenever we put in a new outdoor unit, which is often, we have a surge protector slash voltage monitor on that system.
We had to teach, the electricians how to wire it. Cause they were wiring it a certain way. I said, no, the, actually the manufacturer says you need to put it this way in series. Well, I've never done that way before. I said, I don't really care that you've never done it that way before.
This is what the manufacturer says. This is how it says their equipment is going to work and how it was tested. So this is the way I want you to put it in. You're going to make me rewire it. Yeah, I'm sorry, but you'll know for the next time you won't make that mistake again.
[00:34:10] Eric Fitz: Man, there's so many nuggets that you just shared.
So it's read the fucking manual, RTFM,
[00:34:18] Kevin Brenner: that is a Brian Orr quote, although I don't think he would ever use that F word.
[00:34:23] Eric Fitz: And, yeah, it's so important to read the manual for sure. Um, I find it fascinating and amazing just as a whole home performance contractor, where you have, you have so many tools. At your disposal to deliver the right solution. Um, you mentioned when you were talking about your existing ductwork, the ability to say, hey, let's just encapsulate the attic. Now, all of a sudden, the loads are way lower. We've got no problem with his existing ductwork. Great. can put a central system in to have that flexibility. that's amazing. because then you
[00:34:56] Kevin Brenner: And just to be clear, it's not just encapsulating the attic. You know, typically with a job like that, we're doing perimeter air sealing with caulk and We're also typically doing the rim joist. Exterior walls, sometimes yes, sometimes no, but that's not where we're going to get the biggest.
You know, when we do the energy modeling, Oh, there's another concept. We actually do energy modeling and we say to the homeowner based on your utilities and what we plan on doing, you should be able to save this amount of money at the end of the month, if they are a market rate customer and they're looking to put in heat pumps to get a return on their investment, we say, it ain't going to happen.
You are not going to get that money back over the lifespan of you being in this house. It's just not going to happen. any business that anybody's in, it's really about managing customer expectations. if somebody calls us in the phone and speaks to one of our customer service specialists and says, Hey, I heard I should use heat pumps because I'll be able to, they'll pay for itself in seven years or like, well, I don't know who you heard that from now, if they're getting some, Income based financing and incentives and rebates, different story.
But if they're paying for it, market rate, it is not going to happen. Even with that whopping 2, 000 federal tax credit, not going to happen.
[00:36:19] Ed Smith: you've done an awesome job, Kevin, of laying out some of the challenges you faced and how you got around them. What's the thing to solve today? Based on where you've gotten to, what's the issue now to overcome to take Healthy Home to whatever the next level is as you think of it.
[00:36:41] Kevin Brenner: that's kind of a trick question. a major perspective is. You need to create need and the way that you create need, my view is through customer education, particularly as it relates to home performance,because home performance has been around a lot longer than heat pumps, but heat pumps are getting all the press,
[00:37:02] Ed Smith: Hmm.
[00:37:03] Kevin Brenner: heat pumps are sexy and you have these huge companies like, Mitsubishi and Daikin and Fujitsu.
we know all the names, right. And they're marketing and marketing and marketing. And even with the IRA coming out. people are focused on heat pumps. Just yesterday I got, an email from, one of my team members saying, this prospective customer, read about heat pumps in the New York times and what the IRA might have for heat pumps didn't say anything about home performance.
There needs to be an understanding that these two items, home performance and heat pumps, live together. You could easily, and I built a business on it, do home performance without heat pumps. In my view, you can't do it the other way. Or at least not understanding what your envelope is. There are houses that we come to and we put heat pumps in.
Without doing any envelope work. We would do that only if we determined through testing, not through guessing, and not through looking at the serial numbers and matching, you know, whatever. Through testing, we've determined that While it would be better if you did some home performance work, we're okay putting in a heat pump or when, by the way, the heat pump that somebody else proposed for you, it was about two tons oversized than what you actually need.
You know, we know how that goes. We know that story.
[00:38:30] Eric Fitz: thinking about the home as a system. That's where you come in from that approach to find the right solution. You're not saying I have a product. I'm going to sell this product. It's a thing about the system and then deliver the right solution to solve that problem.
[00:38:44] Kevin Brenner: So that's, that's one angle. None of us have businesses if we don't have customers. So that's a very important angle is the customer and their education. It really is about education. our sales people are not sales people. They're educators.
Before somebody calls Healthy Home or any of our other people in the industry, it would be really helpful if there were stories, outlets, about what this means in terms of home performance and the connection between home performance and heat pumps.
So that's what I mean by creating the need. And I think that, institutions like, I love NYSERDA, I think that they could do a better job of educating people on this and the importance of it and, you know, trusted sources, what's a trusted source, is the government to trusted source.
I don't know somewhere to get that word out. And then from the other angle is we need as an industry, as a community, as a country, we need people to understand that this is a good way to make a living. We need employees who are drinking the Kool Aid.
The first thing that we show during our onboarding, a new employee at any level, we show them the why, why are you here?
And we're hoping that they're here for the why. And that a paycheck is just a little extra bonus. Obviously we have to feed families and put food on the table and drive a car. Hopefully it's an EV and, do all that stuff. But if our employees aren't buying into the why, we haven't done a good job.
And that's the other battle I don't know which is more important. I guess again, here using the term, the building science term catalyst, the catalyst is the customer because the customer Is the one who's signing all of our paychecks ultimately.
And if they don't have a need or a want for this stuff, then we don't need employees, but the employees need to understand that when they go to work every day, they're helping to save the planet, our company mission or tagline is improving your family's health and comfort while saving our planet. It kind of says it all there.
You'll notice it doesn't say anything about energy savings. It says health and comfort and our planet. and we believe that. Got to do something for my grandkids, which I don't have yet.
[00:41:10] Ed Smith: Soon. I
[00:41:11] Kevin Brenner: September.
[00:41:12] Ed Smith: you just mentioned you want to make sure everybody understands the why. That's fantastic. What else do you do from a practical standpoint to help them understand the business and the pain points that your customers are feeling or that all the employees at your company are feeling?
[00:41:27] Eric Fitz: what's your orientation look like for your employees?
[00:41:30] Kevin Brenner: for our employees, we start with the why, and then we pretty soon go into our process. Now, by the way, this is for any employee, the first three to four days of training for any employee at any level is the same. It is identical. Nothing changes. We go into the process from how does somebody get our name, what happens when they pick up the phone at the office, what our sales process is like, what our solutions look like to our customers.
And we describe the customer experience. So we're starting from the why to the customer, who's the most important person in the room. And then we go right into building science. one of the first few slides is that more to less slide. And then we talk about equilibrium. So give me an example, Joe, of something going from more to less in a natural state.
Then they typically look at you like you got two heads and then you kind of draw it out of them. what's an example of more to less? what are we doing here? when you explain to them that more molecules of something goes to less, they, and searching equilibrium and the picture of the equilibrium slide is a seesaw, right?
There's equilibrium. If this guy weighs more, he's going to push it down. we talk about, the eternal search for equilibrium and how that relates to more to less from building science, we go into,the stack effect and then from the stack effect, we'll go into different applications for how we reduce the stack effect.
And once we reduce the stack effect, maybe we've made the house, where we need some more fresh air and then we go into that and then it splits. the training becomes much more specific to either their home performance technician or heat pump technician or their admin, what we call a Healthy Home specialist, which are the educators that go out to the customer's houses.
So. that's kind of what the first few days of onboarding looks like.
[00:43:29] Eric Fitz: Awesome.
[00:43:30] Ed Smith: Kevin, last question. A tactical recommendation for other contractors looking to build heat pump businesses, like a training, a book, a podcast whatever, but like something really specific because one of the things we're trying to do here is spread the word on good resources to make more really good contractors who are putting in heat pumps and doing it the right way for homeowner, health comfort planet.
[00:43:58] Kevin Brenner: I mean, that's a huge question. I know that, Peter Troast and I are talking about putting together a session for next year's national conference on exactly that. You have an existing home performing business and you want to branch out into the heat pump market.
First go back to this company's core values and say, does doing heat pumps fit your core values? Does it fit your demographic? maybe if you're doing work in Northern Alaska, maybe heat pumps isn't the right thing,
There are certainly plenty of the 48 contiguous states that heat pumps will work. we know, from our friend, Brian Orr in Florida that he's putting in a lot of heat pumps, they get those cold snaps and people want heat
Number two, think about how your business is structured. Now, there are home performance contractors that sub out the majority of their work and that works for them. It doesn't work for us, but it works for them. It's not right. It's not wrong.
It's different. maybe you have a model there that says,we can sub out. Then you have to ask yourself the person or persons that you're subbing this, this, uh, heat pump work to, does it, do they match your core values? Are they doing it right? Assuming anybody that's listening to this podcast or anybody that goes to any of the conferences that we all go to, they want to do it right.
Problem with that is they don't know what's right. So where do you find out what's right? There are plenty of institutions, podcasters, books that talk about doing it right. Brian Orr is a great guy as a YouTuber, as a podcaster, doing it right. Craig Migliaccio, great guy about doing it right.
Ty Brenham, great guy about doing it right. Then you go to organizations like ACCA, like ESCO, NCI like BPI. you need to educate yourself. Whoever is spearheading this for that particular company needs to really be educated. Do they need to know how to evacuate a system?
Exactly what the steps are in that. No, but do they need to know that a system needs to be evacuated before you just dump a refrigerant in it? And it needs to be pressure trust tested and what those pressures are. They really should know that because how are they going to know if the employee or the subcontractor is doing it right?
If you decide to take, the employee route you got to educate yourself first. maybe you hire people from the field and ensure that they're doing it right, or maybe you do the route. I think the route that we took, which is. Educating in house. is going to be a very small of people who want to go into this business or extend their business into heat pumps.
That's the way I'm wired. That's the way we did it. We have the Healthy Home Academy, which is set up just for training. It's a separate company, but it's set up for training. That's all that we do there. We were able to get a grant from NYSERDA to train people, but we, as a community, Particularly where we are in Westchester County, where people don't understand that they can actually make a living being a tradesman, where we are, you have to be either a doctor or a lawyer or a Wall Street guy.
So that's another battle that we need to fight. But, pick a lane, how do you want to do this? And just like me, you may not pick the right lane the first time, but understand what you, what your expectations are, what are you trying to do here? Subcontractor model for this stuff hasn't worked for me through most of my career, but it works for a lot of people.
There were a lot of builders out there. who subbed everything out, including the job site supervision. They made a living. I don't know if they did the project as, if they built a project as well as we did, they probably didn't, but they made a living at it.
So what do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? And figure out, what do you think is the best way for you and for your audience and for your customer base and for your employees and for your cash flow? I mean, ultimately it is a business, so you need to make money. So I don't know, there isn't one single answer except the answer is figure out what works for you and what has worked for you in the past.
[00:48:31] Ed Smith: It's great.
[00:48:32] Kevin Brenner: Kevin, this was awesome. Thank you for joining the heat pump podcast.
my pleasure. Thank you guys.
[00:48:38] Eric Fitz: Yeah. Thanks, Kevin. This was great.
[00:48:42] Eric Fitz: thanks for listening to The Heat Pump Podcast. It is a production of Amply Energy. And just a reminder that the opinions voice, 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.
