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51 minute read
In this episode of The Heat Pump Podcast, co-hosts Ed Smith and Eric Fitz welcome Silas Hoeppner, a building performance expert and resident “Air Space Archaeologist” at Modern Heating and Air Conditioning. Silas shares his journey from working in his family’s insulation business in Iowa to becoming a leading HVAC consultant. He delves into the importance of airflow, designing efficient heat pump systems, and how connecting emotionally with clients and asking question after question builds trust and enhances the customer experience.
The discussion emphasizes actionable strategies for simplifying technical sales, improving system performance, and overcoming myths about heat pumps. Silas brings a wealth of field-tested insights to inspire HVAC professionals to elevate their craft.
📚 Expect to Learn
- Why airflow is the foundation of high-performing heat pump systems.
- How smaller, well-designed heat pumps outperform oversized systems in modern homes.
- The power of asking questions to uncover customer pain points and build trust.
- Practical tips for simplifying complex HVAC concepts for homeowners.
- Strategies for addressing heat pump misconceptions, especially in cold climates.
Connect with the Guest Silas Hoeppner on
Transcript
[00:00:00] Silas Hoeppner: In the last 5 or 6 years, started to learn that in a valuable way is try not to make any statements. End everything with a question mark. And if they ask you a question, ask them a question back. But I've had people say to me that they perceive us and me as different than the other people. They're like, you're asking questions that nobody else has asked, and you're you're talking about things other people don't talk about. They're going to tell me what they want. And sometimes what they want is a good idea, and sometimes what they want is not a good idea. And then whether or not they take a drink out of the river or they piss on my foot is up to them. And at a certain point, you know, I don't need a lot of piss on my foot. And that's not probably a good client for me. This would be a great client for my competitor.
[00:00:54] Ed Smith: Hi, and welcome to The Heat Pump podcast. I'm Ed Smith.
[00:00:57] Eric Fitz: And I'm Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amply Energy.
[00:01:00] Ed Smith: Today, we are very lucky to have Silas Hoeppner from Iowa. Silas was just on Bill Bowen and Eric Kaiser's building HVAC Science pod. It was episode 193 and it was awesome. We'd scheduled this with Silas a while back, so we're happy to welcome him on to another pod. We're gonna do something a little different since Silas did an incredible job with Bill and Eric giving his backstory and how he got to where he is. So highly recommend to go check that out. But given that we'll do less time on Silas's background than we normally do, and then dig into some meaty technical stuff that we're excited to chat about with them, but to at least let folks know if they don't go and listen to Bill's pod. So give us a little bit of who you are, what you do, and then we'll go from there.
[00:01:52] Silas Hoeppner: So I grew up in northwest Iowa, up in a town called Spencer And in Iowa. Iowa is split in half by US highway 20. Everything south of US 20 is climate zone five. Everything north is climate zone six. And I feel like there should be a little circle around Spencer. That's like climate zone 12 or something, because the wind blows a thousand miles an hour and it's always like 400 below zero, and it's the worst and simultaneously the best. But, uh, my dad, my family owns a very small insulation contracting business up there. And so I kind of got my start in the building performance and energy efficiency world, mostly being a gofer for him, dumping bags of of insulation into the hopper and running them tools up to the attic and spending a long time in the back of a really hot trailer or really cold trailer, depending on what time of year it was. And then I sort of fumbled my way through four and a half year marketing degree at a small private university about an hour south of where I grew up. Uh, Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, where I majored in football and minored in not doing much of my schoolwork and just barely skidded out of there by the skin of my teeth, if you will. But through that process, they have you do an internship, and I worked with a connection that dad had with a small spray foam insulation specialty contractor down in central Iowa.
[00:03:20] Silas Hoeppner: And, uh, did an internship with those folks. And, and when I was ready to graduate and get out of my own, they had a job waiting for me as the sales manager there. And so I kind of got into immediately going from kind of 0 to 60 on the, you know, importance of insulation and the building envelope and how buildings work. And, uh, through that, I just kind of found out that I was way more interested in how the buildings work and how we can solve problems and kind of the puzzle part of building performance more so than, you know, the sales and marketing that I had gone to school for. In fact, I found that I was a really poor salesperson. I kind of was of the opinion that like, oh, hey, this one's better. Um, so since it's better, you should pay more money for it. And when can I accept the check? And the builders are like, you should get out of my office. So it really just was kind of a it was kind of a mess. But you learn a lot from failure. And that's really the best way I can describe that. First, you know, probably 2 or 3 years was just a lot of failing and doing good enough to kind of keep the wheels rolling. But, uh, through that process, I met a couple of guys that were doing home energy ratings, and, um, they were kind of trying to build their business and came to us and said, hey, you could really, like, get a long way with your clients if you were to show them that it's not just a sales pitch, you know, we could do some testing, find where the problem areas are, you could offer tailored solutions, and then after the fact, once you guys have done your work, we'll come back in and test it again and show them, you know, the before and after.
[00:04:53] Silas Hoeppner: That way they don't take your word for it. Proof's in the pudding stuff. And that all sounded like, you know, genius stuff to me. It was all new to me, too. I didn't even know that that was such a thing. And so I got to be working with those guys. And I eventually just said, guys, I just want to do what you're doing, you know, because I have this one really cool, expensive tool, you know, the spray foam. So if somebody calls me up and I can't solve their problem with spray foam, then just not very helpful. And at the time, they were just kind of like, yeah, you don't want to work here. This is just glorified data entry. And you're so smart and you're a great salesperson. I'm like, I don't know about any of those things. So I want to come there. And long story short, I ended up working there about a year later and learned a lot from those folks. And I think where I really lucked out was in addition to the traditional home energy rating, you know, blower door, duct blaster, 95 Afue, you know, 0.30 solar heat gain, you know, whatever it was, all the nitty gritty stuff that you learn about home energy ratings and energy efficiency.
[00:05:53] Silas Hoeppner: These guys had a kind of a baked in partnership and had learned a lot from the folks at NCI, National Comfort Institute, and HVAC was a complete mystery, and I didn't know anything about heating and cooling. In fact, I purchased my first house in 2006, and I lived there for about a year before I figured out that there was a furnace filter that should be replaced sometimes, and I found that out because the furnace quit working. So I mean, gosh, you know, so we had the opportunity early on to, to do some utility sponsored audits in a town called Palo over in eastern Iowa. And those folks were really great to work with. They had experienced a flood that had destroyed something like 300 of the 310 homes in town. We went over there and audited probably 200 of them, and kind of helped them put stuff back together in an energy efficient, high performance way as best we could, given the circumstances. So that's kind of how I got into all of this, and then from there, the industry just kept basically opening up windows of opportunity of like, hey, there's this missing piece in HVAC. There's this missing piece in thermal envelopes. There's this missing piece in building performance.
[00:07:06] Silas Hoeppner: And since about 2008, I've just been going into houses testing things. So, you know, long story short, they're working with those folks. We were a third party independent home energy rating, company building, performance consulting. Most of our clients were home builders, and we were doing a lot of that early Energy Star program. So we just did a I got an opportunity to just do a bunch of testing and seeing how this stuff is built in the field and then measuring it. And when you do that, you get to see a lot of like other people's mistakes and what works good, what doesn't. And uh, from there it kind of progressed into system design. You know, before I ever designed a system, I had the benefit of being able to go through and look at how not to do it. Essentially, you know, go test a bunch of high static, low airflow, problematic buildings, look around and see what not to do later. So a lot of that stuff was kind of like learned in the field and supplemented, you know, late nights reading, building science, you know, reading energy Vanguard's blog, you know, just so much great stuff out there and great for a guy who's kind of out of school and at the time, early on didn't have a family. And coming home to a 700 square foot apartment, it was like I could, you know, watch TV or I could read about building science. And so here we are.
[00:08:33] Ed Smith: And so you're at Modern Heating and Air. And what is your role at modern heating and air?
[00:08:38] Silas Hoeppner: Yeah. So it's a unique kind of a utility. A lot of hats position. We're a small company, a family owned, locally owned. They started in 2010 with just a couple of partners doing all the work, doing everything, and brought it up from there. And today we're something like 15 to 20 employees. 6 or 7 full time service technicians. Three full time installation crews and then some, uh, just some office folks kind of overseeing business. And, uh, my role there is, um, I guess I'm sort of the resident billing performance guy. And so I have some input on anything from like, hey, we're doing this installation. It's going to be goofy. We've got a weird transition, like, how do we cut down the, you know, the restriction on the airflow? How do we, you know, how do we make static pressure work on the steel, you know, load calculations, sizing, design, anything new construction we do, which is pretty limited. Do all the design on paper on purpose for those things before we get started. I do some traditional sales. We have a specialized sales person on staff And he does, you know, the primary, the heavy lifting on the, you know, hey, somebody called in, wants to replace a furnace, wants to replace an air conditioner, whatever it looks like. And then he'll go out to those calls and kind of filter out, you know, is this a traditional sales call? Is this a problem solving, you know, kind of advanced, don't want to step in it technical sales call. But yeah. So you know, that's kind of the the business the way we do it. And uh, primarily existing homes, we do some maintenance and some repair and replacement on some small commercial buildings like storefront stuff. But, uh, I really would like to focus mostly on residential.
[00:10:25] Ed Smith: I know on, on LinkedIn, it's airspace archeologist, which is a great job of explaining that for Bill. And having heard this, I translate that to you. Love thorny buildings, science problems that orient around comfort and can handle almost anything that touches comfort. A lot of what you guys do is HVAC, but it's sort of this the puzzle of comfort for existing residential homes. You love cracking that in all its nuance and trickiness.
[00:11:00] Silas Hoeppner: I grew up in a home where we celebrated Harrison Ford's birthday with cake and ice cream, and Indiana Jones was kind of my the movie I grew up on. I mean, I've probably seen Indiana Jones 1050 times, and I really love, you know, Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, you know, procedural whatever. And you can really apply all that in reality to the House. And I got really interested in the house. But I think interestingly, as I've kind of gotten older and, you know, some more gray, I found that as much fun as it is to do the code cracking, puzzle solving stuff with the house, It's a way bigger challenge for me to interact with the client. And so I I'm a huge, massive introvert and it's really hard for me, you know, in a big group of folks to sort of get out there and get a conversation going. But I do pretty well when I'm one on one with the client or the client and their spouse or partner at the kitchen table, and I can start nerding out and digging in and asking questions. It was just learning that I need to ask those questions and presume that they may not be truthful with their answers, and sometimes that's not even on purpose.
[00:12:25] Silas Hoeppner: I think there's this natural, you know, defense mechanism where like, hey, you're a guy who's going to take some of my money and then you're going to theoretically give me something. So I need to hide certain things from you and keep those things close to the vest and being able to to suss that stuff out and get them to share those things and get them really into a place where they're comfortable. Being emotional is, I think, really important in this line of work, because what is more emotional than your biggest investment in your entire life, where you spend most of your time, where you raise your family, where your cat buddy jumps up in your lap while you're trying to do a podcast. You know, like, I kind of believe that your home is a sanctuary. It's where you can go to recharge. You know, being a person who's who's sort of social battery depletes very quickly, like, this is my safe place to come and just be like, okay, I can chill out after I get off this recording with you guys. I'm just gonna lay down for a while. It's gonna take it out of me.
[00:13:28] Silas Hoeppner: But the point being, like, you can do a really good job of that if you feel physically comfortable, if you're not worried about. Is my house harming me in some way. Do I have mold? Is there some toxic something or other? Something smells weird. I gotta call somebody and get this thing fixed. There's water leaking off of this. There's something dripping off of that. You know, Billy's bedroom in the northwest corner is super uncomfortable. He's sleeping in our room, and that's a major problem. He needs to get the hell out of here, you know? So all those things, like we tend. And I'm speaking when I say we, I guess, I mean, me, I tended early in my career for people to tell me, like, hey, I want insulation because I'm uncomfortable. And I didn't hear the because I'm uncomfortable. I heard the I want insulation. And then I get out my calculator and I want to do all the testing and the measuring and find out how much insulation, what kind, and like there's value in all that. But if it doesn't jive with what the customer perceives or thinks they want, it's a waste of time, really.
[00:14:33] Eric Fitz: So it was it was great. You hit on a couple of things I just wanted to comment on first, I love the Indiana Jones analogy. I think it's actually works really well because there's you're going in and exploring in a home and you find things you also run into, like technical booby traps. You also run into like booby traps with the customer. Like what you were saying, like sometimes like people either a lot of times unintentionally are giving you misinformation because they're they're guarded and they don't have a relationship with you yet. And you've got to navigate all of these different, these different elements, the technical side and this very non-technical, you know, human emotional communication side. And, you know, it, it um, I'm definitely a technical guy. I've got a, a technical background. And I remember, you know, I had an early sales role many years ago. And I think you mentioned something about this, um, just in your comments a few minutes ago. But like, I remember thinking, man, if I can just share all the technical details. The the end client. They're gonna. If I tell them all the performance numbers and like, everything is great. Like they're just going to love it and they're going to buy it and it's going to be great. Turns out, yeah, that doesn't work at all. You've got to tell a story. It has to connect with them emotionally. You can have the best product, the most amazing solution. But if you can't communicate it, if it doesn't resonate with that homeowner, you've got nothing.
[00:16:04] Silas Hoeppner: And that's about as well as I think I could have ever put it. You can be technically sound, you can know all the things about buildings, and you can lay out a perfect plan, you know, or whatever. But if that client perceives that there's something either that that they believe that isn't true or vice versa. It's just that you're dead in the water. And unfortunately, that kind of describes a lot of my earlier career. It was just a lot of testing, a lot of report writing, a lot of, uh, you know, how can I, you know, how can I write this in a way that I can try to convey five years of experience learning all this really cool stuff and these neat tools and all this cool testing to somebody who has absolutely, really no background or education in how buildings work. It's interesting, I did I was working for a third party energy consultant a few years back, and they were based in eastern Iowa. And so I was out there at like a children's camp, you know, summer camp, sort of a thing. And the guy that was kind of the manager of that facility was from, you know, Scandinavia, somewhere in Europe. And and when I went over there, they were having some trouble with some things. That's why I was there. I was kind of doing an initial walk through to see, are we a good fit to help you figure out these problems with your building? And they had this mechanical room with a thousand giant water heaters in it, and they're all natural draft. And and I said something like, hey, I know you got other problems, but we should really, like, make sure that this isn't an issue.
[00:17:35] Silas Hoeppner: And he goes, oh yeah, because of, uh, you know, the potential for combustion and carbon monoxide safety and back drafting. And then he just rattled off all this stuff. I'm like, do you need a job? I could use your help. How do you know those things? And he's like, I'm from Europe and just kind of looked at me like, why wouldn't I know that? I was like, ah, okay. Like interesting. So there's different culture, there's a different understanding, interesting there sometimes. So but when you're talking to clients and you're, you know, all this cool stuff you want to share, like I have this immediate thing where I want to evangelize, you know, like, oh, I learned static pressure. Let's talk about static pressure. Your filter drop is is way out of bounds. And then, like 20s in your client's eyes are just rolling in the back of their head and they're like, what are you selling? So even though it's really good information and informs us a lot about what the problems are and what things we could do to solve it, it is like brain Novocain to the client and they just check out like you think. Well, if I can sound really smart, surely they'll pick me over the other guy. But the other guy was $200 less. So sorry. You know, when you follow up a month later, you haven't heard from anybody and they're like, yeah, we decided to go the other way, right?
[00:18:49] Eric Fitz: Yeah. Especially if when those eyes glaze over, they're all the client is hearing is like the Charlie Brown like.
[00:18:55] Eric Fitz: Yeah. What, what?
[00:18:55] Eric Fitz: And all they heard from the other guy was price is lower. So that's what stuck in their brain. And you've just missed an opportunity and yeah, you know and.
[00:19:03] Silas Hoeppner: To their credit, the other guy talked about stuff the client cared about, you know. Oh, this is high efficiency equipment. It's super quiet. We're going to make you so comfortable. Like can they actually deliver on those things like, yeah, sometimes by like, dumb luck. Absolutely. You know, like, the standard scope of work is the standard scope of work because it works pretty good some of the time and often enough that at least in our marketplace, where people aren't getting into massive trouble and they do a really good job of advertising on TV and the radio and getting their logo out there. They do a really, really good job of calling people back, getting stuff on the schedule. You know, everything's professional and you know they're participating in all the right community events, but they just don't know design and they don't know airflow and they don't know performance. They don't know buildings. So other than that, it's top notch. And I'm not saying that to be pejorative. It just is the nature of where we're at, I think in the industry right now, like that's the more people that I talk to, like when we're interviewing folks to come be part of our team. Tell us about, you know, in your schooling experience, you know, how much time do you spend on system design? Like, what do you mean by that? Like load calcs? Manuel J. Yeah, that's part of it. And they're like, well, I mean, the professor pulled up right soft one day in our class and, uh, we drew in some rectangles and, uh, you know, 100,005 ton Just like that.
[00:20:30] Silas Hoeppner: That's the intro and the the exit of the entire conversation about design. And it's like, you know, oh, we talk about static pressure for a day. You know, you got to have enough static, you know, make sure you have enough static for airflow. It's like, okay, tell me more about that. You know, where how did they how did they present that to you? And it's like it's just a it's a hiccup in the process in most cases. And again, not to be pejorative. It just is what it is. It's we go just about anywhere and it's that case. And so and I got lucky really and fortunate that I was able to learn all those things without having the burden of understanding how to go diagnose a, you know, a widget in a furnace that was broken. Frankly, if you put me in that situation today, I'd go in. I know some stuff because I talked to some people, but you put me in a basement with a system and a bunch of sheet metal, and you're going to come back in three days. I'd be bled out on the floor and nothing done. That's not my skill set. That's not my thing. So that I didn't have to learn all those things. And I could really focus on the design and the airflow and the performance and how it all relates to the building was simultaneously kind of an advantage and a bit of a Achilles heel.
[00:21:42] Ed Smith: How do you find the middle ground today? Like, it sounds like you're still doing the right analysis to get the right design for the homeowner. And then how do you communicate it to a homeowner such that it meets them where they're at? But you also show that you're different, that given the average in the industry, you know, you guys are doing things that are differentiated and highly technical. How do you land that point? And without getting the glaze over face and so that they recognize like it's, gosh, this is a higher value contractor I'm talking to right now.
[00:22:17] Silas Hoeppner: I spent so much time in my career being like annoyed and almost cynical about like, oh, if people just knew what I knew, they would do what I do. And, you know, kind of back to what Eric was saying is like, if you kind of blow them out of the water with technical stuff, they'll have no choice but to say, yeah, that's the thing. And you know your stuff and you're smart and good and you're better than the other guy, you know? And for a long time, the bar was pretty low. I'd go to an estimate, you know, for a system or equipment replacement. And people were like, well, the other guy didn't even bring a tape measure. So the fact that you're going to spend some time measuring some stuff that's really cool and that just kind of like I kind of feel naked without a lot of the data and the information. You know, if I don't know what the air flow and the static pressure of the existing system is like, I just feel, you know, I wish I knew those things. And so I really want to like, I want to do that, you know, like, hey, let me test your system. And I've had people like, just flat out deny, like, no, we don't want you drilling any holes in our system. That's crazy. We had three other bids and nobody else even talked about this stuff. So it started out with something that I felt like I had to, like, apologize for the fact that I wanted to help them better because they just didn't know any better.
[00:23:32] Silas Hoeppner: And so I spent a lot of time just word vomiting on people about like, well, you should really do this and you should really do that. And it's best practice to have a load calc. And well, you should really have a blower door here. And uh, gosh, we need some static pressure and some airflow. And they're like, the other guy was here for 22 minutes and emailed me a price later that day. And we have been talking for 32 minutes and you've done nothing. You're still in my entryway, talking about, you know, BTUs and whatever else. And like, that is just not the way to go. I think if there's anything that I've learned, and I think I'm going to pause and say, this is going to be a very personal thing for the person who's doing this work based on your personality. You know, I'm an introvert. I'm a data guy. I'm a tool guy. I like to have information so that I can make wise decisions, all that stuff. But that's going to be not everybody's that way and it's going to be different. Your clients are going to be different. Maybe that's even more important is that you need to be able to talk to the client in a way that matches their personality and kind of what their expectations look like, but without giving up, you know yourself and your message. So the way I learned to deal with that and really have learned that in the last 5 or 6 years, started to learn that in a valuable way is try not to make any statements, end everything with a question mark.
[00:24:52] Silas Hoeppner: And if they ask you a question, ask them a question back. It's really hard if you're not used to that, if you kind of came up and you're trying to be the old dog with a new trick, which I kind of feel like sometimes it's hard. But I've had people say to me that they perceive us and me as different than the other people. They're like, you're asking questions that nobody else has asked, and you're you're talking about things other people don't talk about. And I feel like they're saying that in a way that you're actually trying to understand what it is I'm looking for, and not just tell me what you want to do to my house. And since I've started doing that, I don't have to convince anyone of anything. They're going to tell me what they want, and sometimes what they want is a good idea. And sometimes what they want is not a good idea. And if I ask the right questions in the right order and enough and I pry and I dig and I do those things, they're leading themselves to the water. And then whether or not they take a drink out of the river or they piss on my foot, is up to them. And at a certain point, you know, I don't need a lot of piss on my foot. And that's not probably a good client for me.
[00:26:04] Silas Hoeppner: This would be a great client for my competitor. So that's kind of what I've learned is if you can just make a good connection with the customer, ask lots of really good questions about what it is they think they want, and then lead them down that path with more questions. Well, you tell me that you want efficiency. Tell me what that means to you. Because that word efficiency is, is a proxy for literally every superlative you can think of. Uh oh. I want my house to be efficient. Oh, okay. So if we go 97% instead of 95, if we go three and a half cop instead of 3.2, if we go 17 instead of 16, that's what you're looking for. I don't know what any of that means. I just want my house to be efficient. Oh, okay. How do you find your utility bills? You know, you just keep asking these questions and get them to actually tell you what they mean. And pretty soon you find out that efficient to them means value for the dollar spent. And Billy's bedroom is uncomfortable. And we don't like that has nothing to do with BTUs or BTUs out and energy in. It has everything to do with you know, does the thing do the things we want it to do? But if you don't ask that question, you just hear efficiency and you start selling on afue and cop and sear. You're just like the other guy right out of the brochure.
[00:27:22] Eric Fitz: I love that approach. I'm curious to get like a more specific example. So, like, what happens? You're in a house, you go, you measure static pressure. You got it's like really clear. That filter box is just it's way too small. Like, you got static pressure issues all over the place. How do you then communicate that to a customer in a way that's accessible and easy for them to, to grasp?
[00:27:50] Silas Hoeppner: So I'm going to challenge you on that to begin with because that premise is good. Um, but I used to do block load calculations and airflow testing and static pressure testing, at least at the equipment level, sometimes even out into the rooms with flow hoods and that kind of stuff. Sometimes block load supplemented with blower door. And that's a that's been a really interesting hot topic here lately. Can you do a good load calc without a blower door and vice versa? And I try really hard because I really, really want to do those things. I try really hard not to do it until somebody is willing to pay me for it. Now I am the self-proclaimed OG of you shall have load calcs. You shall have a blower door. You shall do it per the code. But I just didn't experience much success with that, at least not proportionally to the time that I was investing in doing those things. And frankly, in my marketplace, there's like a handful of us that I can think of that I would feel comfortable in actually doing a load calculation and trusting the results. And lots of people that talk about load calcs. There's lots of load calc theater, you know, like it's become really popular in my marketplace to say we do we do everything the right way. We're going to do some load, you know, and then it's like, go around and measure the windows, tell the customer they're going to get their footprint and their square footage off of the tax assessor page, and then we'll run all the math, you know, and tell you what you need.
[00:29:25] Silas Hoeppner: Oh, you need a 3.8 ton. But I tell you they don't make a 3.8 ton. So we're going to round you up to a four. So you got plenty. You know it's like the actual load in the house is two and a half. I'm like sounds good. But I try really hard not to give those things away because there's a lot of value in that, especially in our marketplace where there aren't a lot of people that can really do that in a meaningful way. And I don't feel like consulting should be free. And I feel like if you ask the right questions and get to the bottom of what the call is about, that they're going to eventually say, well, is there some way to know how to do these things? Like, yeah, yeah, I'm glad you asked that. I've actually built my career on those things. That is my craft. And it just so happens that I am working for this, you know, traditional, very conscientious, high level of Level of craftsmanship. Hvac contractor. And so that's that's how we demonstrate that we're different is by asking those questions. And then and so now it's all that being said because that's not even your question I tend to do that.
[00:30:28] Ed Smith: But I love when someone asks a question. And the answer is that's not a good question. And let me tell you why. But yeah, that was a great answer. That was actually a fantastic answer to Eric's question. But but keep going.
[00:30:39] Silas Hoeppner: I hate confrontation. I have to because of just the nature of who I am. I have to remind myself that there are people that are successful because they are able to be like, I'm going to challenge you. I'm going to I'm not going to just agree with that. To be agreeable. That is not in my nature, I am. I was the kind of teacher's pet, mama's boy, very timid person growing up. And then I was able to grow into football, and that was a bit of a combat sport for me, and I was able to start kind of releasing some of Some of that built up tension. But through that whole growth process, from back then until today, I've found that the customer isn't always right and you can tactfully bring them along the road to show them how much they don't know without just saying, like, you know, that's not how this works. You don't know anything. Let me tell you how smart I am and how much I know that you don't know, because that's not gonna work. It doesn't work very often anyway. Ask me how I know. So going back to that is, if you're asking enough questions and you're digging to find what the pain is, they're eventually going to ask you, like, how do we solve for these things? Because there's some way you can know how to make all these invisible things that you're talking about visible. You know, you're talking about airflow and how you can't see that, and you're talking about heat and the movement of how heat moves. And you can't see that, and you're talking about humidity and moisture and how you can't see that. It's like we're chasing ghosts. Of course, if you can see the moisture, then you know it's a problem.
[00:32:11] Silas Hoeppner: Usually if you're not running the water out of the tap and you can see the liquid water, it's like, oh, we got a big, big problem here. But that, I think is the point is, if you can ask it up for those questions and dig into that pain enough, they're going to eventually ask you, like, what is the salve for this wound? What is the medicine for this ailment? And then you can say, well, you know, based on what you're telling me, these are your issues. You could either replace your filter rack with a bigger one. And immediately that leads to like, wait a minute. So the filter that I've had here in my house for 20 years, you're saying, is part of the problem. And your solution to that is to put a thicker one in. That doesn't make any sense to me. It's going to be harder to blow air through a thicker filter. Well, I'm glad you brought that up. Would it surprise you to know that if you were to stretch out that filter, that's 4 or 5in deep and compare that to the one you bought? That's a one inch pleat that it would be way bigger. Like, which one of those would you rather try to breathe through if you wrapped it around your head? You know, like it's gonna be a lot easier. There's a lot more surface area. So then you can start to do your explaining because they invited you to do it. But if you walk in the door and say you had an undersized filter rack, they're going to hear, I sell filter racks, right? Right. And that may or may not hit that. That's a hit or miss deal.
[00:33:37] Ed Smith: That was so well explained. I was just about to ask you, can you give us an example? And then you just did it.
[00:33:45] Silas Hoeppner: You know, I'm going to butt in here a minute. There's so much stuff, like if you cruise through social media and you're hanging out in Facebook or whatever and looking at all the groups that are in performance and whatever, and even just like HVAC school or wherever where there's, you know, HVAC contractors with all different levels of experience and Almost to a person. If you talk to somebody who understands, the airflow is a deal. And it can be a problem. They will tell you ductwork is undersized, period. Almost everywhere you go, without exception, we don't have enough return and the ductwork is undersized. And I would say that a lot of those people are probably right. I've moved to using the term under-designed because sometimes the duct sizing is maybe part of the problem, but there's some other stuff going on. I mean, just from a nerdy technical thing like an elbow is whatever it is, 100 equivalent length of duct or whatever. So if you can straighten that out, whatever, that's really great. You can also make that elbow a lot bigger. And then there's a lot less equivalent length because there's less friction and all the good things, all the nerdy stuff. So sometimes it's undersized, sometimes it's under-designed, it's almost always under-designed. But what I've found, at least in our marketplace, is that usually the ductwork matches the house pretty well. And if you match up properly sized equipment to the house, it usually is pretty compatible with the duct system, except for the one inch pleated filter, you know, hypoallergenic, purple, 7000 Merv 800 FPR.
[00:35:33] Silas Hoeppner: Yeah, whatever it is that somebody bought because they thought, well, this one's more money, so it's better. I feel a certain way because I bought this filter and look at what they're up against. You go into Home Depot or Lowe's or wherever your local hardware store, and there's like 17 aisles of filters, and there's every brand and color. And, you know, high efficiency is a really classic one. It's good. Not very few of them are talking about performance airflow, and nobody knows to ask those things. It fits in the slot. It's got to be the right one. So you're up against it from the beginning. And if you can just. I feel like in my marketplace, if you could just go door to door and right size or right correctly, design the filtration scenario, you could probably improve measured performance on these systems by about 50% just by getting the right airflow. And then that allows you to do the things that the thing should be doing to begin with. It allows you to dial in the combustion. It allows you to charge the thing properly and get the right air and pull the right humidity. And so even more importantly, I think at least in my market, and my anecdotal experience is the ductwork is the filter. It's a pandemic.
[00:36:53] Eric Fitz: You know, that gets me so excited because, you know, it is daunting to come into a house and to think about, oh my gosh, the ductwork is under-designed. I like that phrase and I think I need to go in. I gotta go in the attic. I gotta find new transitions. There's a whole bunch of, like, sheet metal work I need to do, and it's going to be labor intensive. I gotta find all the spots. It's going to be super complicated. It's gonna be really hard to sell a homeowner, but turns out like a huge percentage of the challenges are just right there, right next to the equipment. It's the filter. Like go there first and and that's it's an amazing opportunity. It's like not a whole lot of work. And you can have huge transformation for the homeowner for, you know, Jimmy's room. You know, the actually gets air to it for the first time.
[00:37:41] Silas Hoeppner: Yeah absolutely. It's crazy sometimes, you know, at a certain point, working for one of the third party energy consultants that I worked for in the past, we came up with a product service called an HVAC optimization, where we're not licensed HVAC contractors. We're not selling, we're installing furnaces, air conditioners, heat pumps, equipment of any kind, mini splits, nothing. But we're going to take what you already have, and we're going to make it work as good as it possibly can. And we find that enough. And honestly, the the houses we were doing that in were mostly five years old or less. And around here that meant they were probably hers. Rated Energy star rated probably between a 40 and a 50. Hers score. And those folks are calling and saying like, hey, we got uncomfortable spots in our house. We're worried about our air quality. Our furnace is super noisy. You know, there's literal trash in our ducts. You know, just all the dumb stuff that you wish wasn't true. Kind of about the everyday spec building market. And a lot of times we could walk in and you could ask a really brief handful of questions, you know, which rooms are the least comfortable. What's going on? Tell me what bothers you. And just be like, hey, when you walk into the mechanical room in the basement in the winter time, is that like the most comfortable room? Feels like a tropical beach. And they're like, yeah, like, oh, there's a real high likelihood that you have high static pressure, low airflow. And that's probably a big portion of that is the air filter.
[00:39:21] Silas Hoeppner: And then you'd walk in and there'd be a one inch 16 by 2010 by 20 drop on a 60 or 70,000 BTU furnace. And you're like, well, I could do a bunch of testing here, but I kind of know what's going to happen. I've got 150 of these under my belt in the last six months. So. And then you do and you put the the pretty report together with the, you know, this is in the red and this is in the yellow and, you know, show them all the stuff, kind of do the dog and pony show a little bit. It's like my friend Mark Parlee is a building performance consultant. And he stole. And he'll love this, that I said this. He stole this from Joe Lstiburek, who says, if you don't do the show, you can't get the dough. It just so happens that the show isn't really like snake oil or nonsense. It's I gotta turn the static pressure in this airflow and these CFM and these BTUs into something that's meaningful to the client. And if I can show them, hey, come down here, listen to this furnace run, and it's doing what it's doing. And then you just pull the filter out and all of a sudden you can hear this whoosh of air. And their complaint was like, you know, Billy's bedroom in the northwest corner doesn't get any airflow. Well, here you go. And we can fix that. And that's kind of the conversation you have to have not you know, we know all this technical stuff.
[00:40:42] Eric Fitz: So make the invisible visible, make the complicated, accessible and understandable. It's. Yeah.
[00:40:49] Ed Smith: Yeah, there's been some. Oh go ahead.
[00:40:52] Silas Hoeppner: That was the, uh I don't know, the dollar answer for the five cent question, I think. But you know, it's I think that's kind of the heart of it.
[00:40:59] Ed Smith: It's been awesome because all this stuff ties together like this is basically what you've been coaching folks on is how do we've great building science into a great sales process, when too often there's sales processes with no building science or hollow building science and building science is like really bad at sales. And I think you've done an awesome job of articulating how those two can meet in the middle in that phrase. Yeah, you can't get the dough without having the show or this is teed up for me. Like, this is The Heat Pump podcast talking a bunch about airflow, talking about sales process. I'd love to combine some of these and get into heat pumps. Yeah. So one question for me is what role does airflow volume play in equipment performance? And why is it especially important to understand when switching from fuel fire to heat pumps. And then if I could tack on something that then how do you sell that insight? But maybe go in that in that order?
[00:42:03] Silas Hoeppner: In my career, I have the ability, like I said, to sort of like partition off some of the traditional installation and, you know, repair and maintenance stuff because I'm able to rely on my team to be good at those things, and then I can really focus and specialize in some of the stuff, in my opinion, that is at the base layer of the pyramid. You know, if we're talking about a Maslow's hierarchy of heat pumps, I would argue that your airflow is going to be on that bottom layer and the ability to move the correct airflow, because, you know, one of the lessons we learned here in central Iowa, you know, we're climate zone five down here. Our our design temperature is zero degrees in the winter and it's 90 degrees in the summer. And maybe this is a good example of, you know, humidity is an issue here, but I can't rattle off to you at the incidental light bulb is for my location. It's off the top of my head. I'd have to go look. So humidity is an issue. We have corn sweat. That's what somebody said. Oh, yeah. Online. We have high humidity here, but it's for like two and a half, three months. It's not a constant barrage for seven months of the year like they have in Florida or Coastal Carolina or somewhere like that. So we have to be able to handle it. And those things are important. But it's a small enough part of the year where a lot of people can kind of get by making some mistakes.
[00:43:24] Silas Hoeppner: All that to say, there is this it's kind of a long held belief that if you're replacing an 80,000 or 100,000 BTU furnace gas fuel fired furnace, that you just got to have a 5 or 6 ton geothermal, you know, five ton air source heat pump, because that's 60,000 BTUs. And you've got, you know, you're taking out 80. So we've got, well, 80,000 BTU furnace might have 11 or 1200 cfm and a five ton heat pump is going to be 1800 to 2200, depending on what, you know, what you're trying to do. Those two things don't go together. And the other spoiler alert is the duct system and the filter and all the things that came with that 80,000 or 100,000 BTU furnace in the house are already under-designed for that equipment at 1200 cfm. And then you've got guys out there saying, ah, but the geothermal is going to save you so much money and it's so comfortable and whatever all the sales pitch is, and then they go execute the system that has half the return inlet opportunities that it probably needs. It has under-designed duct system. You know, sometimes the filter situation there is baked in and not a bad deal. But really the only reason those were absolute abject failures is because we removed the external coil from the equation.
[00:44:49] Silas Hoeppner: A lot of those systems got packaged. Geothermal heat pumps are packaged air handlers with, you know, electric resistance, heat and coil is built into that system. So somehow, magically and I still don't understand this to this day, there's an engineer somewhere who can tell me why a furnace that has an external coil is rated at a half an inch and maybe measured out to 8/10 or one inch is static, but then we take the exact same coil that we piled on that furnace, and we put it inside the cabinet, and all of a sudden I have an inch of external static or 8/10 of an inch of external static to work with, and we just pretend that coil doesn't exist. What's the difference there? Is it the blower? Is it the what? You know, what's the magic sauce there? That might be a good question for somebody who's a lot smarter than me, but you take that external coil out of the the situation. You've got a geothermal or an air handler blower that can handle all kinds of static. And that's really the only reason the thing doesn't just fail and freeze up all the All the time. It's loud, it's obnoxious, and it can cause a whole bunch of other problems. But it worked good enough. It kept the thermostat satisfied, at least in our market. That's what we see a lot of. Turns out, if you go through the trouble of learning more about the house, understanding what the people want, doing the load calculations, doing the airflow diagnostics, that usually comes out like, oh, hey, this house that had an 80,000 or 100,000 BTU furnace and a four ton air conditioner actually needs a, you know, if it were going to be a fuel fired system, it would be a 62.5.
[00:46:26] Silas Hoeppner: That's a thousand CFM. And I could probably do a pretty good job on this house with a two or a three ton heat pump and a right size backup, whether that's fuel fired or whether that's some auxiliary resistance, electric resistance heater, whatever that is, we can do a pretty good job with that. And now all of a sudden, I don't have to worry about a bunch of duct mods, maybe stuff I can't even get even get to. Anyway, you know, we're a basement market here. Lots of living space and basements, and everything's covered up with drywall. Truth be told, drywall, ripping out drywall and replacing ductwork really isn't hard, but it's emotional. I don't want to destroy their house and rip out drywall and deal with the dust and the whatever. I mean, you can have it all wrapped up and put back together in a week, but it's it's just cringe. Like, oh, that sounds awful. You know, my house is put together. I don't want to unbuild my house so that I have better ductwork. Who wants to buy that? You know, so.
[00:47:24] Eric Fitz: It's it's always scary to as a contractor because you, you know, sometimes you find stuff, you open up walls and you find stuff that you didn't want to be responsible for finding. So it's scary from that standpoint.
[00:47:34] Silas Hoeppner: You know, I used to watch a lot of the like the DIY TV, and I can't remember the name of the show now. It might have been Trading Places or something or whatever it was, but those, those folks, they were I think they were up in Canada and that woman would come up with a with a plan and they'd start ripping stuff and she'd be like, oh man, who could have ever known that? There was going to be framing and plumbing and electrical in this wall? Now we're up to triple your budget because we found a plumbing stack in your wall. It's like you didn't think there was going to be plumbing in this house.
[00:48:02] Silas Hoeppner: Oh.
[00:48:03] Silas Hoeppner: Get serious, but it's a good point. Like, you get kind of laser focused on like, oh, boy, if I could just make this a 24 by eight instead of a, you know, an 18 by eight, we'd, we'd be in business and like, oh, you know, then there's stuff in the way and you can't do that. You got to get creative.
[00:48:18] Ed Smith: Great answer. And that I think, tees up nicely. Sometimes the right answer is going to be a heat pump that seems fairly small. So I know you and I haven't talked about this a bit before, but there's a ton of contractors who are uncomfortable with equipment sizing. You also teed up like Manual J theater, so talk to us about like why some are uncomfortable with it and why it's not as scary as they should think it is and how to avoid Manual J theater to get to like the best answers, especially in the context of of heat pump retrofits.
[00:48:54] Silas Hoeppner: You know.
[00:48:54] Silas Hoeppner: Rules of thumb. A lot of the stuff that somebody did the math a long time ago and then said, most of the time, if you do this thing this many square feet, this many tons, you're going to be in good shape. And they were probably pretty good. Like, you know, 50 years ago, some of these rules of thumb made sense because there wasn't a lot of building insulation. Buildings weren't very airtight, at least not on purpose. And, you know, those things kind of made sense. But since then we've been on this like, crusade of, you know, every couple of years, we need more R-value in the attic, and we need a higher level of duct tightness, and we need a higher level of air tightness. I'm not going to say those are bad things, but I think we don't understand maybe as an industry what that's doing to the building. You know, the average house in Iowa that gets built new, which I would consider to be a standard operating spec home. I would consider to be a low load home. These houses are one and a half to 350. They have high levels of thermal insulation, are 45 or 50, in the attics, are 15 to are 23 in the walls, just depending. High performance windows. You know it's pretty common here for a standard vinyl window to be less than 0.30.
[00:50:18] Silas Hoeppner: Solar heat gain and u-value. High efficiency equipment. All the stuff. And you have this really big, you know, house, three 4000ft² of floor area. And it's really hard to split up a right sized piece of equipment, the airflow that's required for a properly sized piece of equipment and actually handle all of that volume and all that footage And, you know, it's it may be just as hard to do that as it is to take the oversize piece of equipment and make sure you get rid of enough air with the ductwork and all those things. So we have this, you know, kind of continual approach at more R-value, better building, more efficiency. And then on the equipment side, it's very similar. We have higher sear, higher sear higher sear. And what you see is that goes along is like your air just keeps climbing. You know, a lot of this equipment when I run a load calc around here, you know, we're running into the building needs a, you know, a .83 to a .87 piece of equipment and a lot of the equipment, when you model it out is like 0.910.92 under, you know, about as little airflow as you can blow through the coil without it freezing over. And it's just kind of like eventually these things just don't match. And you get into marketplaces where there's a lot of humidity, and now you're talking about like, well, this is just a piece of cooling equipment.
[00:51:41] Silas Hoeppner: Now I need a to pull separate other pieces of equipment to handle the dumb load. And so now we're, you know, you're purchasing another piece of equipment, you're installing it, you're maintaining it, you're repairing it, and you're replacing it in five, six, ten years. And it's just kind of like, you know, the old R 22 oversize system that had half the air flow is supposed to have was running at like 0.5 SR and took all the humidity out, and the utility bill was $104 a year. More like maybe I'd just take that extra $104 a year in utilities and be comfortable and remove the humidity and not have mold. And, you know, all these advancements and all these things that should be making the industry better. And all of a sudden the stuff gets harder. The tolerances are are more difficult. It's more difficult to install and commission these systems. The tolerances, the windows of how much airflow you can blow through. The thing is smaller, like it's just everything is harder. So that that contractor that had been doing it for 40 or 50 years and was good at it, as all of a sudden in a completely different world. And so all that to say that guys used to 600ft² per ton or whatever it is, and now he's got some Yahoo on a computer who does blower doors for a living, telling him, well, you should have a two ton on this 4000 square foot house.
[00:52:58] Silas Hoeppner: And he's like, we have done five ton all day long on this thing. So it's a major culture shock. Like, I don't blame that guy for being concerned because he's the one who's going to get the call on August 412th when it's 1000 degrees outside and the customers like it won't get to 62, and you're like, oh, Jesus. You know, like, I get it. I get where he's coming from. But like, the whole world changed around that guy, you know, in 40 years overnight, sort of. And it's a scary leap. But those of us who have been doing this for 15 years put in the equipment that Manual J. said we should put in, and then we go back and we ask some questions. We learned some stuff in like the furnace still only runs half the time. The properly sized furnace only runs half the time. All that to say, at least in my marketplace, you don't have to size your heat pump on the heating load. In fact, if you do, you're probably overdoing it and you probably don't have the ductwork to do it. And then you're spending the customer's money renovating ductwork that may not even matter to what they want to get out of their system.
[00:54:10] Silas Hoeppner: So here we have the benefit size the heat pump to the cooling load. Follow the old version of manuals. I mean, for those that are familiar, it's almost like the folks over at ACA are a bunch of smart people who know what they're doing. And that's, you know, the more you do that and then you ask questions and you track runtimes, you track utility consumption, you don't get complaints. And you find like, hey, not only is this not scary, but like, I'm still kind of over sizing it because I didn't follow the thing in the book that seemed even scarier. Take full credit for the insulation inside the cavity. Take full credit for the overhangs on the windows. Take full credit for the window treatments, and don't overdo all of the little electrical gizmos and gadgets and be like, well, there's 5000 BTUs of electrical equipment in this room. Like, yeah, but 90% of that doesn't run at the same time. And a lot of it's for an hour at a time, and it's not at 5 p.m. when you have peak solar. You know, just you gotta just kind of it's kind of the, you know, the leap of faith a little bit. You just do it and then you monitor it.
[00:55:29] Eric Fitz: And it's I mean, what I hear you saying is that homes continue to evolve over the last many years and a more rapid pace And in ways that, like, you know, the home that was built in the 1950s, the windows may have been changed out twice, given the life of a window being around 30 years since that home was built. And like holy cow, a window from when that home was built to a window, you know, that's NFC rated from ten years ago. Very very big difference. But like with all of these different changes in the building, it's just it's too much to try to like you can't pen and paper this. You gotta you need to observe what's going on in the home and like use some software to actually run the numbers and trust the process, and then you're going to have success. Is that is that right?
[00:56:16] Silas Hoeppner: It is.
[00:56:17] Silas Hoeppner: So there's this really popular. And this is probably something you guys don't know about. I'm going to tell you for the first time, there's a really popular theme right now in providing tools to contractors to be able to do all of the really important best practice stuff faster so that it's not a burden on the business to be able to do things like load calculations. So it turns out tell.
[00:56:41] Ed Smith: Us more about that. There's businesses out there that.
[00:56:44] Silas Hoeppner: Have literally developed digital tools that will scan a building and tell you how many BTUs of load you have. Did you guys know that?
[00:56:52] Ed Smith: That sounds.
[00:56:53] Ed Smith: Super cool. We should link.
[00:56:55] Ed Smith: To that in the show.
[00:56:55] Ed Smith: Notes. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:56:57] Silas Hoeppner: I highly recommend getting on those people's coattails ASAP.
[00:57:01] Ed Smith: Okay. Good advice.
[00:57:02] Silas Hoeppner: But, you know, and in the same vein, like folks like MCI folks over at the Energy Conservatory with their true flow grid and all these things, actually, I think I think where I saw that is from the Energy Conservatory said, you know, I'm going to screw it up, but it's like making doing it right, faster, easier, whatever it is. Like, yeah, that we need to do that. That's, that's part of the industry needs to develop those things so that we can arrive at those things better. But I would still argue that just because those things are faster for us to do shouldn't necessarily mean that we give them away. And I don't mean to gatekeep. It's not my thing. Like, oh, I know how to do this, but I'm not going to do it unless you pay me. That's not really the motivation. The motivation is using that kind of carrot, if you will, to get the customer to come along that journey and understand the importance and the impact of those things, because there's going to eventually be somebody in your marketplace doing load calc theater. We learned that here ten years ago. The guys would say, load calcs. You don't need load calcs. We've been doing this for a hundred years, and you know, we've got a 4.8 star rating on Google and da da da. And now they're saying load calcs. Absolutely. You gotta do a load calc. And we're going to take care of that for you. And guess what. No charge to you. And 12 minutes later the customer gets the entire load calc that they paid for. And it's nonsense and it's sales, and it's to convince the client that they've done something they didn't do. And I think even to be truthful, that isn't necessarily fraudulent behavior. It's like they believe whatever it is they're doing.
[00:58:51] Eric Fitz: Right.
[00:58:52] Silas Hoeppner: And that's problematic as well. But maybe a little bit better news than just leaping to like, everybody's trying to rip off everybody. You know, they think they're doing something that's providing value, but it's just confirming their bias of oversize equipment. Anyway, that last.
[00:59:08] Eric Fitz: Point about they're actually not only are the person that's doing the the load calc theater, they're potentially shooting themselves in the foot from like a sales perspective. They're also shooting themselves in the foot from customer callback, all kinds of service issues down the road. So like it's in the salesperson's the designer's best interests, so they actually understand what is a proper solution, and then the proper solution is actually delivered to the homeowner. So everybody's happy. You got a profitable job, you got a happy homeowner who's gonna then refer you to other clients. And it all goes well. And like the the thing you mentioned about, like feeling naked if you didn't have some kind of tools because like, I understand that feeling because if you are not doing some kind of measurement, whether that's low calculations, maybe you're doing things like blower door and static pressure testing. If you're not doing those measurements, you are just guessing. And guessing is terrifying. In a game of $15,000 projects, this is somebody's home that they raised their family in. Like, holy cow. Like, don't mess with that. Well, yes.
[01:00:20] Silas Hoeppner: So like, if you have a conscience and and you understand some of these things and then you're basically asked like, yeah, I don't want to do any of that. Just, you know, give us your best guess. Listen, you know, in 15 years of testing houses in one marketplace, like, I can guess with the best of them, but I still feel itchy doing it. You know, I just don't like to do it. And to that point, you know, back to that argument of like, can you do an accurate load calculation without a blower door? And my argument or my, my statement to that is, yes, it's possible to do do does your average practitioner have enough experience and enough knowledge about the building itself to be able to do that? I don't know. Or have they read through diligently, you know, manual J and looked at all the criteria of what is average mean? How do we translate that into each individual marketplace? What is an average house here? For me, compared to what an average house is to some of my friends who do this work in other marketplaces, I'm frequently blown away by how leaky some of the average houses are out in other places like so, and I don't know why. My hunch is that for whatever reason, we just did some stuff different here when a lot of these houses in the 60s, 70s and 80s were built. It's not uncommon for me to run into houses that can darn near pass, you know, a 2018 or whatever energy code as is without having to do anything based on air infiltration around here. But then I hear folks from like, Ohio or, you know, somewhere else in the Midwest and they're like, yeah, this, uh, you know, this 1200 square foot ranch has, you know, 4700 CFM 50. I was like, did they only build three walls?
[01:02:07] Silas Hoeppner: Like what? How how did that happen?
[01:02:10] Silas Hoeppner: So in some ways, you know, this marketplace can be pretty easy compared to like, somebody like Jerry Garcia that's down in Florida or, um, some of the talented folks down in Louisiana who, you know, a little bit of age, 50 goes a long way in, like, how in the hell are we going to hum this building? And how? Are we going to keep it from not growing mold like we have some margin for error on those things here? That said, we also have two feet of snow sometimes. So, um, there's different challenges and different market places, but it just seems like the more experience that you can get, the better you're going to be at guessing. But nobody's ever going to be perfect. And how much of that risk do you really want to take on? My. I borrowed this from Nate Adams and his book, The Comfort Book. A lot of my sales approach comes from that. And then I've augmented with, you know, the last 15 years of my experience and my personality. The popular saying was like, you could be plus or -70% based on the blower door. That's not true here. Very, very rarely. And when I walk up to a house that's plus or -70% of the blower door, I can eyeball it. It's an 1860s, you know, three and a half story crazy thing. And it's 12,000 CFM. 50 if I pull up to the 1940s built story and a half house, you know it's going to be 4500 cfm. 50 and I know where to go. Knock out a thousand and make the thing work. Not everybody has that experience.
[01:03:40] Silas Hoeppner: And the folks that do are going to rely on it too often. They're going to lead themselves astray 1 or 2 times. And that's when you get into the big, big problem where there's litigation and you're writing checks to fix stuff. And why take that responsibility on your own shoulders? If you can walk the client down the path of like, listen, I can guess with the best of them. I have a lot of experience here. It could be true that your house is this or that. How comfortable are you with me? Guessing that. And just ask them. That's how you can have integrity in this situation. I feel like contracting 1.0 was really about going in and in and saying, I'm the best. I'm an expert, I know everything. Put all your eggs in my basket so that they'll pick you instead of the other guy. And that's a flawed process because the other guy's saying the same stuff. And then basically it boils down to like, which guy matches your personality better? That's a terrible, terrible interview process. Google reviews are bogus. Who has less technical ability to properly evaluate a good HVAC install than somebody who just had a system put in yesterday? Oh, that was great. The guy showed up on time. They didn't swear in my house. You know, they didn't burn the carpet. You know, they shut up when they said they would. They left when they said they charged me the amount. They said the heat worked. When they left, it blew hot air. Five stars. Like what happens in 14 days or 14 months or, you know, whatever. Yeah.
[01:05:15] Silas Hoeppner: And you can feel.
[01:05:17] Silas Hoeppner: Pretty darn good on the day that they replace your equipment, or even six months after they replace your equipment. They don't know what it could have been. How good could this house have been had they gone through some of this process? So there's a lot of satisfied customers giving five star reviews that got a lot less than they paid for it.
[01:05:37] Silas Hoeppner: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:05:38] Ed Smith: That is a great point. It's also nice because you wove in there, you know, the advice on asking the customer a question that lets them decide which is kind of where this conversation started. After you Introed you talk a lot about your Socratic method to sales and asking questions, as opposed to just bombarding people with expertise, which feels like a nice kind of place to wrap, kind of hitting on a topic that we that we started with. We've talked a bunch. I guess my final question would just be, you know, for knowing who our target audience is, people who are trying to build heat pump businesses or trying to do heat pumps the right way. Any parting words of wisdom. You already shared a bunch, but any, uh, anything else?
[01:06:24] Silas Hoeppner: I think that there's a popular belief that the conversation around heat pumps is financial. Now, I will temper that with there's a lot of folks that are environmentally motivated with heat pumps. I have the unique perspective that it doesn't matter why my customer may or may not want a heat pump, but I can probably do the best job and I can probably solve more of their problems. And I can probably build a better system if I have a heat pump. It's better at all the stuff. It's better at load matching, essentially. Like if you want to talk to a gas furnace guy and you're like, is a two stage furnace or a one stage furnace, better is a modulating furnace or a two stage furnace better? They're always going to tell you, well, the two stage is better than the one stage that modulating is better than the two stage, but they cost more money. Well, the heat pumps another stage of heat. So whether you're doing an all electric system or whether you're doing a dual fuel, that heat pump is just allowing you to do all the things that a gas furnace would do if it could, if it was small enough. You know, there's a lot of 30,000 BTU furnaces out there that most people don't even know exist, and some of those are two stage and will go down to like 22,000 BTUs of input.
[01:07:46] Silas Hoeppner: But you're also blowing like nine cfm through that thing. Otherwise you're going to have, you know, like a ten degree heat rise and it the math gets wonky all of a sudden. So you have this low load building that's got a bunch of square footage, and then you got this tiny little gas furnace that you're trying to split up, you know, 400 cfm across 4000ft². Like it just the math doesn't math. God, wouldn't it be nice if there was a piece of equipment that needed more air and could deliver fewer BTUs at a time, or even, you know, modulate or stage based on how many BTUs the house is actually gaining or losing. Like the heat pump can do all that stuff better than the gas furnace. Don't be scared of it. I just got a call on Saturday. My dad was at an estimate on Saturday for insulation for a little old lady. Social security. She was affected by the terrible floods that they had up there this last summer. Unprecedented. Like historic floods up there. It was devastating. But she had baseboard, electric heat and an all electric house built in the 70s. Peak oil embargo construction up there. And a contractor came in and said, well, you have ductwork in your attic for your air conditioner. Let's just put an air handler with a ten kilowatt electric heat.
[01:08:56] Silas Hoeppner: And, you know, we'll go from electric resistance at the baseboard to electric resistance forced air in the attic. And she's lived there for 100 years, and her utility bill peaked out at 300 bucks ever. And last month, she had an $800 utility bill, and she made it very clear $800 does not fit in my fixed budget, even if it did. There's a lot of other things that I'd rather do with $800. And she was exasperated, like she was just like, what's going on? The contractor that she had paid to do the work lacked the proper credentialing, so that she couldn't even use the grant funding for the flood recovery to pay his bill. And so she had paid him half. He had installed the air handler in the heat kit, and he was going to install a split air conditioner. And I'm like, well, just with the limited information that I have in this 20 minute phone conversation, she should take that 13 seer air conditioner and swap it with a 14 seer matching heat pump. Like, it's not the best case scenario for Climate Zone six, but you're going to take that 800 to 500 right now. All other things remain equal. It's a no brainer. And so dad reached out to the HVAC contractor and said, hey, what about a heat pump? And they go, oh.
[01:10:14] Silas Hoeppner: We.
[01:10:14] Silas Hoeppner: Steer clear of those up here? Nothing but problems with heat pumps. And I'm thinking to myself. How can we be here in 2025? We're supposed to have flying cars, hoverboards.
[01:10:28] Eric Fitz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and.
[01:10:30] Silas Hoeppner: We've got folks in the marketplace that are telling people that $800 utility bill is going to be a better situation than they might have some trouble with the heat pump that they could.
[01:10:40] Ed Smith: Install. Yeah.
[01:10:42] Silas Hoeppner: I mean, in fairness, they'd have to run different low voltage wiring. So that was really frustrating. And I said, hey, if this guy wants any coaching, any help, any whatever, like tell him to give me a call, I'll do it for free. I'll drive 200 miles up there and help, because this is her one chance to get this right for at least the next 15 years. And frankly, it kind of sounds like this is the last HVAC decision she's going to make on this house. So it's an opportunity missed. And it's the low hanging fruit. It's the easiest bar to jump over and it's kind of like looks like a mountain. So anyway, that was the thing that, you know, you run into that stuff and you're just like, how can we be here?
[01:11:23] Eric Fitz: So I was this has just been fantastic. I feel like I know you so much better as a person. I think you're you're incredible. You have so much knowledge to share. And it's just been so much fun to hear your story, to hear various anecdotes, your advice. Really appreciate your time. And yeah, thank you so much for coming on.
[01:11:42] Silas Hoeppner: Yeah, thank you very much. I really appreciate what you guys are doing. The more of this information that can get out, I feel like the fewer opportunities that we're going to have with that bad situation that I just described, you know, and I guess the best thing that I can say is like, take it from me, I've made the mistakes, I've screwed up the stuff. You don't have to do those things. You don't have to screw up those things. Like learn from my mistakes that I've made in 15, 20 years and listen to all the really good information out there. You know, the stuff that you that you guys are doing. The energy conservatory. Nate Adams, the comfort book. Like all these really great resources where we can skip past the nonsense and just get down to like, hey, this is legitimate. These are things we can be doing today. And it's not easy. I don't want to say that it's easy, but it's attainable. And we have as an industry, we have the skills. It's almost just like we have to get comfortable with trusting ourselves that we have these skills and we have we have to learn a little bit more, and we have to do these things so that we don't kind of step in it. You know, we've we've talked kind of quite a bit about, you know, the great heat pump. I think Steve Rogers from energy conservative Tory said, the great heat pump revolt of of 2025 or whatever it is, because there's probably a lot of bad stuff going on. I don't think we're that far away. If we can just understand some of these things with the airflow, the static pressure in the house, that really in a way that other people put it to me, it's not rocket surgery. You just have to you have to try and you have to, you know, be open to it.
[01:13:18] Eric Fitz: So all that rocket surgery made easy? Yeah.
[01:13:22] Ed Smith: Rocket surgery.
[01:13:23] Ed Smith: Made.
[01:13:23] Silas Hoeppner: Rocket surgery for dummies.
[01:13:26] Ed Smith: That's our next blog post. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
[01:13:31] Silas Hoeppner: Thanks so much. I had a blast. You guys are awesome.
[01:13:33] Ed Smith: Thanks.
[01:13:37] Eric Fitz: 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 on your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to reach out! You can reach us once again at Hello Energy Now.com just dot energy.
[01:14:03] Thanks a lot.
