Most HVAC contractors try to scale by running more trucks and hiring more techs. Tim De Stasio built his business around a different question: what if you could make a boutique HVAC business focused on extraordinary quality?
It sounds counterintuitive. Every HVAC business owner knows the math: more trucks, more calls per day, more revenue. Push your comfort advisors to hit three or four homes daily. Keep the pipeline full. Scale fast.
But Tim De Stasio, the 2025 HVAC Tactical Awards Mentor of the Year, has built his consultancy around a radically different model. He spends entire days doing comprehensive home performance evaluations — blower door tests, thermal imaging, duct analysis, Manual J load calculations, and a 60-point HVAC system assessment. He charges what he's worth. And he guarantees his work for 90 days with zero callbacks.
"There's Walmarts out here, then there's boutique shops," Tim explains. "When I'm looking for a good pair of men's dress shoes, I don't go to Walmart. I go to the boutique shop where I know I'm gonna pay more, but it's gonna last longer. That's the kind of consumer that I am, and that's the consumers for home services that we're looking for."
Tim's path through HVAC spans three distinct careers: 12 years as an industrial and commercial technician, 11 years running his own company, and now his third act as a consultant, trainer, and home performance specialist in coastal North Carolina. His experience gives him a unique perspective on what actually works — and what's scalable.
Tim's HVAC evaluation alone includes 60 distinct checkpoints. It's not just "your compressor is bad" or "you need a new filter." It's a systematic walkthrough that catches predictive repairs before they become emergency calls.
"The very first thing we're gonna do is check the air filters and the thermostat," Tim explains. "We're gonna make sure they have a carbon monoxide detector in their house. It has nothing to do with air conditioning, but guess what? That customer may turn on their gas heat later on in the year. We want to take good care of that customer."
He walks through homes with his hands in his pockets initially — just looking, documenting, taking photos. No panels off yet. No measurements. "It allows me to slow down and not get hyper-focused and miss the forest for the trees."
Then he deploys smart probes using Measure Quick software, which aggregates readings from multiple probe brands into a single diagnostic report. The system quantifies airflow, static pressure, refrigerant charge, and even calculates the coefficient of performance in real time.
"How valuable is that for you to be able to tell the customer: you've got a 12 SEER unit, it's got a few years on it, but it's actually performing like an eight SEER," Tim says. "Maybe we wanna think about that replacement. Or this system scored a D on this report — this is what we can do to get you up to a B-plus."
The comprehensive process consistently finds issues beyond the original service call. Float switches that need to be installed. Non-code-compliant wiring. Dirty coils that will cause problems in six months. And because Tim documents everything systematically, he can offer customers an ethical repair options list — ranked by importance and return on investment.
"I can give that system a clean bill of health," he says. "And if they let me do those things, I can offer them a 90-day no breakdown guarantee. I have not yet once had to come back within anywhere close to a 90-day period and give that service call away for free."
For customers with chronic comfort or indoor air quality problems, Tim offers an even more comprehensive service: a full home performance consultation that includes the 60-point HVAC assessment plus building science diagnostics.
This is where things get interesting — and where most HVAC contractors miss hidden problems entirely.
Tim sets up a blower door to quantify infiltration rates. But he doesn't stop at the standard test. He simulates real-world conditions by asking homeowners which doors stay closed at night, then measures the pressure imbalances that result.
"In a lot of markets you have one central return in the middle of the house, and there are no other returns in any of the bedrooms," Tim explains. "What happens when those bedroom doors close at night? The bedrooms pressurize with conditioned air, but the main body of the house goes into a pretty big negative pressure."
The result? The house sucks in humid outdoor air all night long — exactly when the AC isn't running enough to handle it. In the HVAC world, this is called MAD Air (mechanically-assisted depressurization), and it's the hidden gremlin behind most humidity problems in hot, humid climates.
"We have this double whammy where we're pulling all this moist air in, but our AC isn't running to handle it," Tim says. "And even if it could run, it doesn't perform in the right ratio to be able to handle all that moisture."
His diagnostic process also includes:
At the end, customers get two reports: a comprehensive field report with thermal images and observations, followed two weeks later by a summary report with prioritized recommendations.
"I don't draw any conclusions on that first report," Tim says. "It's just data and observations. That keeps them busy for two weeks while I'm chewing on it too, because I need time to process all this."
Here's where Tim gets brutally honest: this approach probably isn't scalable.
"The market isn't ready for it yet," he admits. "The market has been trained to have a technician there for 45 minutes, fix your problem, leave. For a comfort advisor to go in there and he already knows before he even gets outta the truck what he's gonna try to sell you."
Traditional HVAC economics assume high call volume. Three to four visits per comfort advisor per day, each closing high-ticket jobs. That's how you build a $2M, $5M, or $10+ million business. Tim's model doesn't work that way.
"If you want to get into this, just know right now that you're probably not gonna scale the way that you want to," Tim says. "If you have aspirations of having a $10 million business, this isn't the path for it. But not everybody has those aspirations."
There are exceptions — contractors like Hal Smith at Halco in New York, Brynn Cooksey in Detroit, Chad Simpson in Toledo — who've found ways to do this level of work at scale. But they're unicorns.
"Those are the people that we need to learn from," Tim says. "I don't want to say that it can't be done, but it takes a unicorn."
For most contractors, Tim recommends starting small: train your nerdiest technician, get them a blower door and proper training, and deploy them on chronic comfort problems where traditional service calls aren't working. Front-load the diagnostic fee so it covers costs even if the customer doesn't proceed. And schedule non-emergency work during shoulder seasons when your crews need something to do.
"In the middle of summertime, go out there and make that money," Tim advises. "Fix those units, replace those units. But if you find something that can be put off for a later time, collect a 10% deposit and schedule it for November when your guys aren't sweating in an attic."
Tim's moved through multiple HVAC careers in the Southeast — a heat pump-mature market where contractors should know better. Yet he still sees the same mistakes repeated constantly.
Mistake #1: Sizing Based on Square Footage
"We're not using Manual J as an industry," Tim says flatly. "Contractors are sizing systems based off of square footage, based off of past experience. The houses have changed in the last few years. 2012 energy code in North Carolina made R-value changes, window U-value changes. The houses are not requiring the amount of heating and cooling that they used to."
When Tim runs proper load calculations, he consistently finds homes that need far less capacity than installed. A house with a 120,000 BTU furnace and four-ton AC might only need 45,000 BTUs of heat and two tons of cooling.
"Nobody wants to get that call when it's 90 degrees and the unit can't keep up," Tim acknowledges. "But there is enough fluff built into Manual J that if you're vacillating between a two-and-a-half and a three-ton unit, if you go with a two-and-a-half ton unit, you're gonna be just fine."
His advice? Be aggressive with sizing. The houses have thermal mass. And if your AC is running all afternoon on a really hot day, that's not a problem — that's good design.
Mistake #2: Improper Zoning
North Carolina code requires multi-level homes to have separate HVAC units or automatically controlled zone systems. The intent was good, but implementation is terrible.
"Here we have a lot of 2,500-square-foot houses with an 800-square-foot bonus room over the garage," Tim explains. "Instead of putting a mini-split up there, they put zone dampers in. First, they oversize the unit — I see three-and-a-half ton units when a two to two-and-a-half is all you need. Then that giant heat pump is blowing through two supplies like a hurricane."
The finished room over the garage calls for cooling constantly. The main house doesn't. Result: terrible comfort and massive noise when that zone runs.
"There is nothing I can do other than put in a mini-split," Tim says. "I don't need to run numbers to tell you what we already know. This is never gonna work."
Mistake #3: Locking Out Heat Pumps Below 35°F
This might be the most consequential misconception in heat pumps.
"Contractors think that a heat pump should switch over to auxiliary heat below 35 degrees," Tim explains. "Even now, the Ecobee thermostat is set up from the factory to tell you that."
The reality: even a basic 14 SEER single-stage heat pump can produce heat more efficiently than electric resistance or gas furnaces all the way down to the temperatures listed on its performance chart.
"Your most inefficient heat pump that's rattling around out there right now can heat your home with no strip heat," Tim emphasizes. "We wanna lock that strip heat out above 35 degrees, but we don't wanna lock the heat pump out below 35 degrees."
During the Texas freeze, contractors emailed customers telling them to shut off their heat pumps below 35°F. Inefficient electric strip heat took over. The grid overloaded. The grid shut down. People died.
"Some of it stemmed from really poor advice that contractors were emailing out to their customers," Tim says. "We have to be so careful in the setup of a heat pump."
Mistake #4: Zero Commissioning
Installation crews work from 7 AM until whenever. If a salesman sold accessories or duct modifications, it's still getting done in one day. By the end of that long day, asking exhausted installers to spend two to three hours properly commissioning the system just doesn't happen.
"Most installers don't have a technical aptitude," Tim says. "They're hardy people who can withstand the heat and drive a screw in uncomfortable positions. But expecting them at the end of the day when they're hot and tired to spend hours commissioning? That is never going to happen."
The result: blower speeds not set correctly, systems that work in cooling but never tested in heating, strip heat that doesn't work at all.
Tim's solution: build commissioning into the job as a separate visit. "Every installation I do takes two days. We get the unit running, get the house cooling down, walk away. Then we send somebody back the next day with a commissioning checklist. That takes two to three hours and you have to build that into the job."
The payoff: zero callbacks. Deeper customer relationships. And you can explain the difference in your quote so customers understand why your price is higher.
Mistake #5: No Nitrogen Purging
"We're not even properly piping the systems in," Tim says. "We have to use nitrogen when we're brazing. I can't tell you how many system failures I see because there's debris in the lines."
It's basic best practice, but crews skip it constantly. The nitrogen bottle needs to come out anyway for leak testing — just bring it out two steps earlier and purge while brazing.
"Those crews that mess up installs are not the ones that have to come back and fix it," Tim notes. "They're on another job. They never know. It's not their problem. Not having that feedback loop is something we need to change in this industry."
Tim has worked on heat pumps his entire career in the Southeast. But even in a heat pump-mature market, he sees contractors resisting the technology or implementing it poorly.
His position is unequivocal: stop installing central air conditioners. Just stop.
"If you're going to replace someone's air conditioner, just go with the heat pump," Tim says. "Even if you don't replace the furnace, fine. Go with the heat pump. It's a great stepping stone."
The cost difference between a 14 SEER air conditioner and 14 SEER heat pump is a few hundred dollars. The outdoor unit has a few more parts. The indoor coil is identical.
"We should not be installing anything but heat pumps in cooling-dominant climates from here on out," Tim says.
For cold climates, he's more nuanced. Single-stage heat pumps sized for heating will be oversized for cooling. Two-stage units struggle to balance both needs. The answer: cold climate heat pumps with inverter technology and built-in turndown.
"But we can't overlook humidity control even in northern climates," Tim adds. "I'm gonna be speaking about that at the Heat Pump Summit — taking lessons in humidity control from the south and applying them to northern homes. Because our climate's coming up there."
Throughout the conversation, Tim keeps returning to a core belief: this work is about stewardship, not politics.
"We're given an amazing earth and amazing bodies, and we honor our creator when we take care of them," he says. "This doesn't have to be political. This is gratitude."
Heat pumps eliminate fire risk from furnaces. They eliminate carbon monoxide risk. They reduce carbon emissions. They deliver better comfort when designed properly. The technology works everywhere in the continental U.S.
"Whether or not you wanna agree with how much carbon affects climate change — okay, fine," Tim says. "But we know it's contributing somewhat. Doesn't it make sense to do what we can to minimize that?"
His advice for contractors getting started: stop listening to people driven by politics on either side. Test heat pumps yourself. Learn the technology. Start by replacing every AC with a heat pump instead. See for yourself what works.
For contractors who want to move in this direction, Tim recommends starting with building science fundamentals:
"Understand the building envelope first," Tim advises. "Understand Manual J, Manual S, and Manual D. Trust people that have done it and succeeded before on sizing heat pumps correctly. Size them aggressively."
And perhaps most importantly: understand that heat pumps don't need to be political.
"We just want people to have comfort," Tim says. "We want their homes to be efficient and safer. If we can eliminate fire risk and carbon monoxide risk from improperly operating furnaces, doesn't it make sense to do that?"
Tim's approach won't work for every contractor. It requires patience, technical expertise, and accepting that you won't build a $50 million company this way — at least not yet.
But for contractors willing to charge Rolls-Royce prices and do Rolls-Royce work, there's a profitable path forward.
"Let the Walmart customers shop at Walmart," Tim says. "You make sure that you find the boutique customers. But you better do Rolls-Royce work. Don't charge exorbitantly high prices and then send people that aren't well-trained, that aren't looking at building science. You're just ripping people off at that point."
The customers are out there. The single parent with a 1,000-square-foot house having humidity problems needs help just as much as the McMansion owner. And both deserve someone who will spend the time to understand their home as a system, diagnose the real problems, and fix them right.
"There's enough of them out there in every market that you can run a decent-sized business," Tim says. "You're not going to get the scalable $10 million a year business out of home performance. It's not there yet. But not everybody needs that."
For contractors who can embrace this model — systematic diagnosis, building science integration, aggressive but proper heat pump sizing, and thorough commissioning — Tim proves there's a viable business waiting.
Just don't expect to run four calls a day.
[00:00:00] – Introduction to the Episode
[00:03:12] – Tim’s Journey into HVAC
[00:12:57] – Technician to Business Owner to Educator
[00:18:47] – Why Heat Pumps Are the Future
[00:21:55] – The 60-Point Evaluation Process
[00:29:32] – Home as a System: Comfort Consultation Workflow
[00:46:05] – Scaling Ethical Home Performance Services
[00:51:10] – Common Heat Pump Installation & Design Mistakes
[01:05:55] – Final Thoughts and Resources
Eric Fitz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ehfitz/
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[00:00:00] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Some people are fine being a boutique shop. There's Walmarts out here, then there's boutique shops. When I am looking for a good pair of men's dress shoes, I don't go to Walmart. I go to the boutique shop, the men's clothing store that I know I'm going to buy quality and I know I'm going to pay more, but it's going to last longer. That's the kind of consumer that I am, and that's the consumers for Home Services that we're looking for the masses. What I tell people is let the Walmart customer shop at Walmart. You make sure that you find the boutique customers and you charge Rolls-Royce prices and do Rolls-Royce work, but you better do Rolls-Royce work. So don't charge those exorbitantly high prices that a lot of these home service companies do. And then you aren't sending people that are well-trained. You're not looking at building signs, you're just ripping people off at that point. And that is the basis of a lot of my funny videos, is I pick on those guys. But...
[00:00:48] Host: Ed Smith: Hey everyone, we've got an awesome episode for you today. It's with Tim De Stasio. If you don't follow Tim on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, wherever. I highly recommend it. He is that rare human who is both tremendously educational and insightful and hilarious at the same time. You'll see that during this episode. Second, we put a lot of thought into what we've been learning over the last 40 or so episodes of this podcast, and we just put that out in a new article we're calling: "Stop competing on price, Start winning on trust; The heat pump business model matrix." Check it out. We'd love to hear what you think of it, and it fits right in with what Tim is recommending here. How to charge Rolls-Royce prices for doing Rolls-Royce work and differentiate from the competition. Third, November 18th and 19th in Worcester, Massachusetts is the US Heat Pump Summit. This was our favorite event of the year last year when we went in Colorado. It's awesome. The lineup looks great and we are super biased because a bunch of our friends and guests from this podcast are going to be there, but they've got great stuff lined up.
So if you're building a forward thinking heat pump business, you're going to find your people there. You're going to love who you meet and you're going to love the content. So if you head to US Heat Pump Summit, link is in the show notes. Use discount code AMPLY, A-M-P-L-Y and get a discount. We hope to see you in November and enjoy this episode. Hi and welcome to the Heat Pump podcast. I'm Ed Smith and.
[00:02:00] Host: Eric Fitz: I'm Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amply Energy.
[00:02:03] Host: Ed Smith: So today we are very lucky to have Tim De Stasio, who just won the 2025 HVAC Tactical Awards Mentor of the year. Tim's got over 25 years in the industry. He's done it all. Technician, installer, contractor who ran his own business and now consultant trainer through his own company, Comfort Science Solutions. He's become known for his systematic approach to home evaluation, his hilariously entertaining or entertainingly hilarious I don't know which one social media work, but super insightful, I always find. And his belief that true comfort comes from understanding both the HVAC system and building science. Tim. Sorry for that long intro, but welcome.
[00:02:43] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
[00:02:46] Host: Ed Smith: Awesome. Tim, you've told it before, but we like to have a pod that hangs together, so if you're willing, we'd love your story. Yeah. How did you get to where you are today? How did you get into HVAC? To start. Like, we'd love to just hear that.
[00:02:58] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, it started in high school. My parents had brought me up with the understanding that I was going to learn a trade or a skill, and that we weren't going to take the four year college route, even though that was the traditional path that guidance counselors and academia was pushing people, they had enough foresight to see that the trades was really a better path for most people. So in high school, there was a vocational school that opened up that served all the other high schools in the county, and they started offering things like auto mechanics and electronics and HVAC electrical, because the high schools weren't doing that. And I'll just pause and just say that. I think that's a shame. That shop class and all those other blue collar trades classes have gone away for whatever reason. But they had one school in that county, and so you would start in the morning there and do those vocational classes and then you. They would bus you to your respective high school and you'd finish out the rest there. So my junior and senior year I was doing that and I was taking electronics. And then I really liked it. I was thinking about getting into that background. But then my senior year they actually opened up the HVAC course. And so I started that, and we were setting up the equipment in the lab in that class through throughout the entire year. So I was installing equipment and setting it up, and I just really loved it.
[00:04:24] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And so when the other reason why I did that is because my parents also, not only did they not want me to go to a four year college, but they didn't want to pay the tuition to a two year community college. So I got a back up. This just popped in my head. I haven't thought about this for a long time, so I actually have two high school diplomas. All right, so I did homeschool. My parents pulled me out of public school after seventh grade because I was getting picked on, and one day I just snapped in. The next week. I got into three fights and I was just like, nobody was going to mess with me anymore. And so they're like, all right, we gotta pull him out. Not for his sake, for their sake. He's beating up everybody. So they actually pulled me and I did homeschool eighth and eighth grade and then ninth and 10th. What normally would have been just two years of high school because of the homeschool curriculum, I was actually able to complete my whole four years of high school, and I got a diploma, high school diploma after what would have been like my 10th grade. I didn't learn anything because it was a correspondence thing, and so my parents would leave for the day and I would just watch TV, and they look up the answers in the back of the book.
[00:05:34] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And then my parents would come home and I learned this is way back when TVs were they got hot if you ran them for a while. So I knew exactly what time I needed to switch off the TV. So by the time mom and dad got home, the TV was cool and it looked like I'd been to my schoolwork the whole time. But I actually graduated when I was like 16 years old with zero education. But then my dad was like, I don't really want to pay for the community college, so how about we just send you back to high school for your junior senior year and not tell anyone that you've already got a diploma, but you can get a scholarship and earn college credits through this vocational course. So we did. Wow. And I graduated again. I just went right back into step with my old classmates and lo behold, they didn't mess with me when I came back. Yeah, I got that high school. The reason why I told you that is because that senior year, that program allowed me to get some college credits for that community college, which I think is really important to have a program like that. And I know that there's a lot to exist now. So I took HVAC at the community college, got my associate's degree instead of two years, one year, and I got a job doing industrial and commercial HVAC as a technician.
[00:06:46] Guest: Tim De Stasio: I started out as a helper, worked my way up. I was there for 12 years and I was working on all kinds of cool stuff big hospitals, chillers, data centers. I was doing low temp refrigeration. I was doing all this cool stuff. But I started to get a little bit bored, and I started to get the feeling that maybe I'm better suited to be self-employed. So I started taking prep classes to get my state license, and those prep classes introduce me to the ACA manual's manual J manual, not so much manual s, a little bit of manual s with the manual D, and this was eye opening for me because all of a sudden I went from just thinking about what I did as an at the equipment level to zooming out and say, oh man, this equipment has to interact with the enclosure. And because when you're doing a load calculation, you have to understand all that. And that was fascinating to me. And so I found that, man, this is a path that I want to do. So I got my license and eventually quit my job there. And that ended what I call is my first HVAC career. And then I started my business, and I did everything from residential to industrial, because some of my industrial commercial customers followed me when I left because I was taking good care of their facilities, and they weren't getting that level of care with whoever my company was sending in to replace me.
[00:08:07] Guest: Tim De Stasio: So I got a call one day and say, hey, we want you to take care of our entire manufacturing facility. And that propelled my business. I started hiring people. We did everything from residential to industrial, and I did that for 11 years. We did new construction, Energy Star, and during that time I really got interested in home performance. This is during probably this is when I started my business in the middle of the recession, 2012. And but we were getting a lot of government programs that were weatherization homes and making them more efficient. This is under the Obama administration. There was a lot of that funding there. And so I got linked up with a couple of green builders that were doing that work, and I started doing Energy Star work and learning about home performance. I eventually got BPI certified through my utility provider, and I did that for again, 11 years. But now we're in the pandemic and I'm trying to run a business through the pandemic. I'm having trouble keeping or even finding employees that would do the quality work that I wanted to do. I was getting burned out. I think 2020, most of my time was spent running warranty calls from people that I had working for me that just weren't doing a good job, and they weren't up to my standards. And I was just going back behind them.
[00:09:21] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And I was just, man, I was swirling around the bowl and I was I needed to make a change. After praying about it and talking about with my wife, I decided, look, I'm going to take either two paths with this business. I'm going to whittle it back down to just me and a truck the way it was for the first six months of my business, when I was actually happy. Or I'm going to try to sell it because again, during the pandemic, the big thing was to sell your HVAC business. There was a lot of interest generated in that, and I worked with a business broker who was legit. She was local, wasn't a scammer, and she found a buyer. And a year later, I had sold my business and I worked for a year for the company that bought me out. Then I concluded that contract, and that concluded my second career in HVAC as a contractor. And because I had to sign a non-compete, understandably, I needed to move if I was going to continue to practice HVAC. And so I moved to Southport, North Carolina. I was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I moved to Southport, Oak Islands by the beach. We were vacationing here. We loved it. This is our dream to live here. Selling the business gave me that opportunity. And so I opened up more of an HVAC and home performance consultancy.
[00:10:31] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And so my business now has three main arms. I do local home performance assessments, a lot of beach houses here, a lot of moisture problems, a lot of room to room comfort problems, a lot of track home builders that are putting in the bare minimum. Not a lot of design, fixing a lot of inherent problems with building science. The second arm of my business is HVAC design, and that's actually nationwide. I can do designs for someone's dream home, their energy efficient home, their passive house. Just doing simple load calculations for contractors are too busy to do them. That's a section of my business. And then the third arm of my business is contractor education, and I do that remotely. I even trained a few local contractors that are forward thinking enough to want to have good people. And that keeps me busy for as as much as I want to work. I'm also, I do a lot of volunteer work with my HVAC skills. I'm also a Bible teacher, and so that's really my main focus in life. But obviously you still have to work and earn a living. So I try to keep my business part time, and then I volunteer with the other part of my time. And of course, I do a lot of social media stuff, which drives attention to my business and my brand. And so now I'm in my third HVAC careers, I call it as a consultant.
[00:11:43] Host: Eric Fitz: Two. Is there anything you don't do? I feel like you have.
[00:11:46] Guest: Tim De Stasio: So that's the thing. I don't do anything else but HVAC. You can ask my wife. I don't have hobbies. Like when I'm relaxing, I'm going up into my attic. It's a spray foam attic, so it's pretty comfortable. And I'm tinkering around with little HVAC projects. I love electronics again, that started in high school, but I don't. This is all I do and I'm happy. That's fine. I don't have I don't golf, I don't. I'm trying to pick up fishing here, but I'm just way too. I'm like too anxious and I can't sit still. So fishing is hard. So yeah, I don't outside of HVAC, I can't swing a hammer, I can't do any of that other stuff, but I can do it if it's got a little motor with something that spins and refrigerant in it, man, I'll work on it.
[00:12:28] Host: Eric Fitz: So amazing. Wow, I have so many questions. I want to go a little bit deeper. How did you go making this leap from being a sort of a technician to saying, hey, I want to start my own business. Yeah, that's a huge jump alone. And then how do you go from all this to being like, hey, I want to get into teaching and consulting, which is like a whole other challenge. Can you connect those dots somehow? Like, how did you where are the threads connecting those pieces?
[00:12:53] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, from technician to business owner. A lot of times that stems from if you have somebody with a creative mind, that's, hey, we would be a lot more efficient if we could do this or things would run smoother if we did that. And what it took me a long time after essentially burning the bridge with the company that I had worked for many years is, if you don't love it, leave it. And I was trying to somehow find a way to implement my ideas in a company that wasn't paying me to do that. They were paying me to be a technician. And when I finally came to the realization that the company was never going to change, they weren't going to adopt my ideas to be. And nor was it their obligation to. Then I decided, okay, I've got to try this for myself. And so I did. And it worked. And so in fact, again, customers followed me. But you go back. Shoulda woulda, coulda probably could have handled a little bit differently. I was in my 20s. So that's how that worked. I still owe a lot of gratitude to the company that I worked for, still maintained a good relationship with a lot of the people. But obviously, you can't start your own business and then take a few customers from that business without burning a bridge and that.
[00:14:01] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And I learned something from that. I always made my employees sign non-compete, which is what they should have done, but they didn't when they hired me, so I'll leave that in the past. So as far as to teach her. I always enjoy teaching. And so even when I was working as a technician, I would moonlight part time in the evenings at the local community college where I had gone as an HVAC instructor to earn a little bit of extra money. And it was just a scratch, that itch. And man, I really loved it. When you see people's eyes light up. And it was cool because for years going forward, I would see these guys who and women that were now in the industry. I'd see him at the supply house at different training events, and these were people that I trained, and they always looked up to me because I started off as their teacher. In fact, I got a couple of my early employees for my business from students. But I always just love to teach. And it just it shows up in my volunteer work, but also in my career. It's just there's something about it. I like doing.
[00:15:05] Host: Eric Fitz: It. That's neat. So that makes more sense. That was always through from the beginning to now. Teaching was this side passion, but now it's become actually part of your work as well. That makes a ton of sense.
[00:15:16] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And I'll add this. I think that the way that we teach HVAC historically, I don't know how they're teaching it now in community colleges, but the way that we taught it was backwards and it did not work. We would teach all the scientific theory we were teaching Pascal's law and Bernoulli's principle, unlike the first week. Let's show them what an air conditioner looks like. Let's take the panels off. Let's get our hands in there. All these scientific principles need to come way later, and they're important. If you're going to be a designer or a consultant or a contractor, maybe. But to start off as a helper, everyone's going to start off at HVAC company. As a helper, you don't need to know those things. And so it was really backwards. And I felt again, it should be done differently. Let me try it my way. And at the community college, they pretty much were like, Tito, wherever you want. And they gave me a lot of freedom. And I had students that were like, man, your class is the only class I got anything out of. And I taught a bunch of classes over the years and got a lot of lessons learned that way.
[00:16:17] Host: Ed Smith: That's great. Now, where did you pick up? Maybe it was at community college too, but like, where did you pick up the funny end educational skill? Because it's palpable on your social media and it's honestly rare, like we do a lot of HVAC videos too. They are not nearly as entertaining as yours. So like where did that come from?
[00:16:40] Guest: Tim De Stasio: I think I pick up a lot of stuff from who I'm around, so there are some great educators out there with a great sense of humor. The first person that comes to mind is Alex Meaney. He was at the summer camp building summer camp last week. He's got a very you can really remember what he says because he puts it in a humorous way, in a just down to brass tacks way. And, I don't know, my sense of humor comes from what is going to make my wife laugh. We've been married for 20 years and we watch the same shows. We consumed the same media, and so we merged our senses of humor together. And so there's stuff that I know would make her laugh. And I make those videos pretty much to make her laugh. And then other people happen to laugh along with it. So this is just my snarky sense of humor that just comes from the comedians that I listen to, most of the stuff that I do, the bits are stolen from other things. Like I'm not coming up with a lot of the stuff myself, but they're funny to other people and I will just use that same similar joke, but apply it towards HVAC or something like that. But yeah, I don't consider myself like a naturally funny person. I did some really good at copying other people's funny stuff.
[00:17:51] Host: Ed Smith: If you were in the doghouse with your wife before, when she listens to the first eight minutes of this episode, you're going to be in the clear, like crediting her with the success of your social media Hummer. That was very good. Very well done.
[00:18:05] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, I'll make sure I always give her credit not to get all sappy and everything, but there's a reason why we're given a compliment as an A mate is because they're the ones that support us, and they fill in where we're weak. And yeah, so she's great. She's been a great support.
[00:18:19] Host: Ed Smith: Congrats on that. Yeah. Eric and I wouldn't be here without our wives.
[00:18:23] Host: Eric Fitz: Yeah. Tim, I know that when Ed was going back and forth with you to figure out if we could get you on the pod he was talking about heat pumps, and you responded with a very strong agreement that he pumps are the future, that you just you feel like he pumps or something we should be focusing on. Why is that?
[00:18:42] Guest: Tim De Stasio: I've been around heat pumps my entire career. Growing up in the South. So I know in other colder climates, heat pumps are something relatively new. Down here, that's how half the homes were heated and cooled. Even working on commercial heat pumps and even when heat pumps weren't that great. Years ago. I've worked on plenty of those too. But when you start looking at the amount of efficiency and what they can do and how versatile they are now with inverter technology, with cold climate heat pumps using liquid injection, that is technology that I really appreciate. Liquid injection on the cold climate heat pump is turns the refrigeration circuit, and they have a little miniature refrigeration circuit that recirculate in there. And they allow the heat pump compressor to operate at a really low outdoor temperature without flooding back, and allows it to operate rather efficiently. That is technology that was stolen from low temp refrigeration, which is what I did as a technician when I saw liquid injection and being advertised in heat pumps, I'm like, oh, technology finally made its way down to us. Inverter technology was something I was working on PhDs years ago. That's decades old technology. That's not anything new in industrial. And eventually that technology trickles down to residential. That's why I'm really excited. When you get a coefficient of performance of above three down to really low temperatures, and you compare that to the most efficient gas furnace, which is going to be 96, 97, 98%, 300% versus 90 something percent is always going to win.
[00:20:18] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Now there still is a place for fuel fired. Right now. There's heat pump technology is getting there. But yeah, we can do so much for a heat pump with a heat pump. I don't think there is any climate that is really any climate south of Canada that really needs a gas furnace anymore, except for maybe some instances where you may have a power outage and you don't have a generator, but maybe a small one. You can power a gas furnace off a little generator and have heat. Other than that, like these heat pumps can perform any climate that you and I are going to be in. Heat pump can do it now and they can do so efficiently. So I think that's where it's going. The inverter technology, being able to maximize your runtime and minimize your off cycles is just better comfort. And all the things that you learn when you study HVAC design, you realize the heat pumps, checking all those boxes, whereas a traditional air conditioner doesn't. Whereas a gas fuel fired equipment, they don't check all that. Those boxes, the heat pump actually does.
[00:21:20] Host: Eric Fitz: So you can deliver on that. The comfort efficiency. It's a single piece of equipment that's doing both heating and cooling. So in many ways, you're simplifying the overall system. Yeah, totally.
[00:21:29] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, definitely.
[00:21:31] Host: Ed Smith: All right. We're going to come back to talk more about like technical excellence and heat pump installs. But before we go there, I have really enjoyed a bunch of your videos on your systematic approach to evaluating a home. It's 60 points, right?
[00:21:47] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, and that's my HVAC evaluation alone. And then I have a home performance evaluation when the need is to zoom out. That's even more.
[00:21:57] Host: Ed Smith: It's awesome. You don't need to take us through all of it. But actually, I would love to touch on both the HVAC side and the sort of the whole home performance side. It would be great to hear if you just describe for folks like, what is it? What are the big buckets of stuff? You're looking at how long it takes. And then if I can ask a third question on top of that, like the software you use, like I know you, you built yourself an app that lets you like answer all the questions so you don't forget them and take the photos. Like, it's a really remarkable thing you've done, Tim, I love it if you've just described it to the audience.
[00:22:27] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, I am very. What I found is I'm very process driven, and I'm really focused on trying to figure out a repeatable way of doing things. That's how I ran my last business, almost to a fault. But I just like that. So when I think about, let's just take a traditional service call, whether it be my air conditioning was working yesterday in a broke today, or my house is never comfortable. Those are two possible service calls that we get as HVAC professionals. And even when a person they may have a home performance problem. But who do they call to diagnose that problem? Who's on the front line? It's the HVAC company, so we could get any range of calls, from indoor air quality to comfort to weird noise to condensation to just, hey, it was working yesterday and now it's not. And so how do we develop a process that can handle all those things so that we can duplicate that with technicians, especially in a workforce that is really lacking technicians. How do we get people up to speed? Put butts and trucks quicker and it's teach them a process. So the way my approach to it is, we're always going to do a full system assessment. I don't care whether as soon as you walk up to the unit and they show you the AC unit outside and it's going, oh, okay, that's a wrong capacitor, I don't care. We're not going to start there. We are going to go through the process every time we're going to deploy our smart probes.
[00:23:53] Guest: Tim De Stasio: If the unit's not running that's fine. We can't get any readings. We skip that part, we come back to it after we get it running. But we're going to do a full system assessment. We're going to look at ductwork. The very first thing we're going to do is the air filters. We're going to check the thermostat. We're going to make sure they have a carbon monoxide detector in their house. It has nothing to do with air conditioning. But guess what? That customer may turn on their gas heat later on the air. They may leave their car idling in the garage in the wintertime. We want to take good care of that customer. So it is a full it's a walk through. I'm walking around with my hands in my pockets for the first little bit, and I'm photo documenting. I'm doing visual inspections. I'm not taking any measurements. I'm not pulling any panels off. It allows me to slow down and not get hyper focus and miss the force for the trees. And then at that point, then we start opening up panels. Now I like to start an indoor unit, even though if I know the problems outside my indoor units running like everything looks normal, I'm still going to document things because what I look for is predictive repairs. So yes, this fan is running today, but will it run tomorrow? Is the fan wheel dirty? How the heck am I ever going to read airflow with the fan wheels dirty? If the coils dirty, I need to know those things before I deploy my pros, because they're going to change how the system performs.
[00:25:08] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Even the static pressure on an air handler. That static pressure cannot be trusted if your coil is dirty, or if your blower is dirty, or if your filters are dirty. So you got to know what you're dealing with. So I'm going to do a full system assessment ductwork, air handler, photo document, everything. And in the course of doing so I'm going to find predictive repairs. Do they have a float switch that's going to cut their AC off. If the drain pan fills up I find all kinds of non code compliant things. Has nothing to do with why their AC isn't working, but it allows me to give that customer an ethical repair option list at the end of that call. That allows me to continue as a business to have work, and it also minimizes the chances that there's going to be a call back. And I'll go back to that call back here in just a little bit. Then I'm going to go outside. I'm going to check everything out there, photo document everything. And then I'm going to deploy my probes. And I like to use the measure Quick software. Measure quick is an excellent. It's developed by Jim Bergman who's legend in our industry. And again, he saw something that just wasn't there. And he decided to build it with in bootstrap with his own resources.
[00:26:16] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And it was It's an amazing piece of software. If you use it correctly, you deploy smart probes. He's figured out a way to take the Bluetooth readings from other brands of smart probes. Feel piece. Testo JB whatever they are and they all talk to one app, you can mix and match them and you deploy all your probes and it tells you how that system is performing, even to the point where if you have a meter that can read true wattage, you can determine what the coefficient of performance is at that moment. Now, how valuable is that for you to be able to tell the customer you've got a 12 seer unit? It's got a few years on it, but it's actually performing like an eight seer. Maybe we want to think about that replacement or this is your system scored a D on this report that measure quick generates. This is what we can do to get you up to a B+. It's super important. So you get all that process. It steps me through the same steps photo documentation at the very end, And anything that I have flagged, I've got a list and now I can build my options and repair list based on that list. And what it has allowed me to do is offer something that is very unique. And that's what I call a 90 day no breakdown guarantee. So because I look at the entire system, if the customer allows me to make the repairs and the other recommendations, I can give that system a clean bill of health.
[00:27:45] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And if they let me do those things, I can offer them a 90 day no breakdown guarantee. And I have not yet once had to come back within anywhere close to a 90 day period and have to give that service call away that re diagnosis away for free. Because when I walk away from that system, not only do I know what broke today, I also have a pretty good idea about what may break tomorrow and cause that call back. And it just works. And here's what makes it better for the HVAC contractor? You get more revenue per call. If we're going to talk business, you're going to run less calls, less chance of problems, less mileage on your vehicles, less customers that you have to service because you're getting a bigger bang for the buck out of them. You don't get burned out. Running ten, 12, 13 calls a day during the summer, like most HVAC companies run, the max I would run would be three or maybe four service calls in a day if I were running a traditional HVAC business. And I guarantee you I'm walking away with more ethical revenue and sales and repairs and recommendations that are actually moving the needle with the customer's safety, health, comfort and efficiency than a traditional HVAC company would trying to push various products, trying to get that revenue for call up with snake oil products.
[00:29:00] Guest: Tim De Stasio: I'm actually finding stuff that's going to work at the end of the call. They can't offer a 90 day no breakdown guarantee, and I can, and I'm not losing money on that. Now. I take that same process and then I have another one for my home performance side. And that's a whole different ball game there. The home performance assessment. These are sometimes when you get a service call when someone's not comfortable, they're having indoor air quality problems. They're not expecting you to start talking about blower doors and thermal cameras and load calculations. So you sort of book that 60 point assessment that I started off with. But during the course of that, because I've quantified the performance, the delivered capacity and BTU sensible and latent, I've done all that I can say, okay, it is not your HVAC system that's causing this problem. We need to zoom out and here's what that process looks like. And so a lot of times that home assessment, home performance, comfort consultation, what I call it is a product of just the HVAC service call. Other times after talking with them on the phone, I asked the right questions. I find out, look, this is where it's going to go. And so I convince them that we really need to take that full comfort consultation step that includes the 60 point HVAC assessment. But now we're also including the other side of things, which is the enclosure of the envelope and all that other building science stuff. And I actually book more of those calls nowadays than I do the traditional HVAC service call that I do, and that's a similar process.
[00:30:29] Guest: Tim De Stasio: I'm going to walk around the house with my hands and my pockets. I'm going to take a bunch of pictures inside and out before I do anything, and then we're going to start looking at various aspects of the house. Is there more bulk moisture that's coming in? Do we have water that's coming into the foundation, the crawl space? We do have crawl spaces here. A lot of houses in my market are on slabs. We do have basements a little bit farther west, not on the coast, because if you dug a basement, you'd be in the water table. But when you go a little bit farther west, you do start having basements. Do we have bulk water problems? Do we have gutters that are not designed correctly? Gutters aren't working. I'm in HVAC contractor and I'm having to diagnose gutters. That's what it takes to become a comfort, true comfort advisor. You've got to zoom out and look at the house as a system. And then we're looking at things like infiltration. Do I have signs that I have condensation? Do I have rusty supply registers? Do I see condensation? Do I see black biological growth. And so we've got to diagnose that. So I'm going to set up a blower door. And I'm going to quantify what that infiltration rate is. But then I'm going to take it a step further because in a lot of markets you have one central return in the middle of the house.
[00:31:38] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And then there are no other returns in any of the other bedrooms. And so what happens when those bedroom doors close at night and everybody's asleep? The bedrooms actually pressurize with conditioned air. That sounds good. We're definitely going to be pushing conditioned air out. We're not going to be pulling in anything. But what happens in the middle of the house is that the main body of the house that has that return goes into a pretty big negative. So I'm testing the house for those pressure imbalances, and I'm asking the owner how what are your habits? Do you close your doors at night? They say oh, yes. This door. Say it's closed. This one stays open because the dogs go in and out. Okay, I'm going to simulate that. And we're going to take some high precision manometer. And we're going to measure and quantify how much pressure that house is depressurized by. But then you can also do something cool if the house will actually hold enough pressure. And it's not so loose that you can't tell anything by it. You can flip your blower door around, and when your house is depressurized, you can rebalance it, get it back up to a neutral pressure, and you can quantify how many CFM of air that it took to do that. And that is the true infiltration at night that you put in your manual j load calculation.
[00:32:53] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And it's amazing. In the humid climate, that amount of infiltration is really loaded on latent load, moisture load and just a little bit of sensible load, a little bit of heat. Because what happens at night? What's the temperature at night. It's in the mid 70s. It's the same temperature that it is inside, but it's a lot more humid outside. And so when is your AC going to run less? It's going to run less at night. So we have this double whammy where we're pulling all this moist air in, but our AC isn't running to handle it. And even if it could run, it doesn't perform in the right ratio to be able to handle all that moisture. And what we find is these scenarios house depressurization in the building science world is called Mad Air, and that's an acronym. And I can't remember off the top of my head what Mad Air stands for. But it's essentially mechanical depressurization of the space. And that is the hidden gremlin that most HVAC companies are not even going to be aware of to diagnose why they have humidity problems in my market. But it can also cause other comfort problems in northern markets during the wintertime. It can cause really dry air, because now you're sucking in all that dry air from the outside. It's the hidden gremlin that a lot of people aren't as aware of. So I'm testing for all those things, I perform a heat load calculation using an app that uses lidar technology similar to what you guys offer.
[00:34:10] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Let's pause there. The value of doing a manual J when you're doing these evaluations is you have three pieces of information that are critical. What is the nominal tonnage of your air conditioning? If we're dealing with cooling I'm in a cooling dominant climate. So most of what I'm going to talk about is cooling. What's the nominal tonnage? You go out there and you read the model number I got a three ton unit. Okay. What does the heat load tell us that we need okay. Do we have too much? Do we have too little. And then how is the system performing. And that comes back to that measure quick analysis. So we have three pieces of information. What the house needs, what the house has got and how the house is actually performing. And you do that with total sensible latent and heating. And all of a sudden you have a very clear picture of what size equipment needs to go in there and whether or not the existing equipment is meeting the needs. So that's part of my approach. I do an indoor air quality assessment where I stick a portable temporary indoor air quality meter on the kitchen table right next to my keys so I don't accidentally leave it, and I just go about my business. I'm doing all my testing at the very end. It talks to my phone and I get a screenshot of it, and I can see right there and then the particulate matter, the VOC is the temperature of the humidity.
[00:35:21] Guest: Tim De Stasio: But then my comfort consultations also include a haven IQ central duct monitor, and it gives me some really good information that I'm going to look at over the course of two weeks or so. It's going to give me temperature, humidity, total VOCs, particulate matter, which is probably one of the most important things when it comes to indoor air quality. That and humidity. But the other thing that does, because it is a duct monitor, it has a little built in hot wire anemometer, which tells me when the system is running. So now I can look at run times over that two week period. Is the system short cycling? When it does run, does it actually get the humidity down or does it fall short? What happens at night? All kinds of things. Does the humidity go up when the system comes on? Okay. We may have a return air leak that we're just pulling in all moisture, and we're actually going the wrong direction when the AC runs. Its all this really good information and it gives you a graph. And at the end of that call, after doing all these things, and this is not an exhaustive list, like there are things that I'm not missing. I give them a field report and that has all my pictures, including thermal pictures. So one thing that I do need to talk about is when we're running the blower door, we get our infiltration number.
[00:36:32] Guest: Tim De Stasio: The other thing that I do is I depressurize that house just barely, maybe 20 pascals or so. Not the full 50 pascals that we normally depressurize a house for the blower door number. I'm just going to run it a little bit, and I'm going to walk around with a thermal camera, and I'm going to watch to see where that hot air or if I'm doing it in the wintertime, where the cold air, where those plumes of air are coming in at. And that's where I document where the air sealing needs to come through. And a lot of times this duct penetrations in the ceiling Can lights really bad? Electrical top plates are never sealed. And then obviously you have floor penetrations also. And you can actually see the stack effect that happens on a multi-story building. So I take a bunch of thermal image pictures of each room. All that goes into a report. It is information overload to the customer. I don't draw any conclusions on that report. It's just read and report and observations. And I send it to them, and I let them chew on it for two weeks. That keeps them busy. And then for two weeks I am chewing on it too, because I need time to process all this. And at the very end I send them a final report, which is a nice summary. I take the worst case pictures and say, okay, this is this one picture is typical of your whole house, and this one picture is typical of your whole house in this area.
[00:37:46] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And I send them really easy to read report with my recommendations with a list of what to do in order of importance and biggest bang for the buck and all the way down from Typically, air ceiling is one of the highest things on the list because it's good bang for the buck. We never want to insulate without air sealing. There's a lot of contractors here in my area that are doing that, and it's really causing a lot of problems, and then it goes down to, okay, at some point when it's time to replace your HVAC system, we need to go back with this size instead. And guess what? I'm getting those replacements because I've won their confidence and I am not leading with an equipment replacement. Your four year old heat pump. Yes, it's oversize, but it's four years old. So when you're ready to do something about it, talk to me about it. But no, I'm not going to put that at the top of your list. Let's get your house weatherwise first. And then any of the work that I don't do myself, I refer out to like minded contractors. We got a good weatherization contractor here. I've got several larger HVAC contractors that can handle, like full duct replacements where I can't, and then I end up doing the fun stuff, the dehumidifier, the indoor air quality stuff. And that's the how we're solving these problems here in the North Carolina coast.
[00:38:57] Host: Eric Fitz: Tim, there's so much to love about this. Like, you are absolutely treating the home as a system, and I understand how you can offer this 90 day guarantee that you're talking about, because not only are you delivering all this incredible information to the homeowner because you're looking at all these different points from the outdoor unit to the indoor equipment to the building enclosure. It's giving you confidence in all these different elements and how they're connected together or how they might not be, as you're seeing different issues. So you really have that full picture. And holy cow, you're doing blower door test infrared thermography. You've got you're doing static pressure. You're taking measurements. Measure quick outside and inside. It's incredible.
[00:39:43] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah I'm not charging nearly enough for it either. But I am getting there right now. I'm trying to gather data and perfect my process. And I also want to make these services available for people who need it the most. Someone has a giant 10,000 square foot McMansion. They're going to have problems. And yeah, I can help them out and they'll pay whatever I ask them to. But what about that single mom who's got little 1000 square foot, two bedroom house and she's having problems? I can't price myself so much out of the realm for her that she needs to help more than the other guy does. So I try to adjust my prices accordingly so that everybody can take advantage of it. But it is a huge. I'm there all day and I tell people, put your dog in a kennel, put your dog outside, put your kid in the kennel, whatever it takes. But I like this is you don't want to get it mixed up. You're not like, tie your kid to a tree and put your dog in it. Find a babysitter for your dog. You don't want to get those mixed up. But yeah, it's very invasive, very intrusive. I make sure that people know that I'm going to be in every room, every closet in your house. If you got anything weird, put it away, because I'm probably going to find it and I'm probably going to take a thermal image of it.
[00:40:56] Host: Eric Fitz: It's amazing.
[00:40:57] Guest: Tim De Stasio: It's very intense.
[00:40:58] Host: Eric Fitz: It's not even one day you're leaving a piece of equipment behind to monitor their system for two weeks. So it's incredible. You're getting not only a snapshot view. You're getting this over time, over multiple days. It's incredible. And yeah, to see the runtimes over compared to outdoor temperatures and have that in context with all the other information. That's incredible.
[00:41:20] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah. The cool thing about The Haven is that I can leave it in there permanently. It's affordable enough where it can. It's actually a fixed mounted, but it also has the ability to control the HVAC equipment. So if they do go with any of my recommendations of improving indoor air quality, a dehumidifier, a Merv 13 media filter, some kind of other ventilation, that same haven can just be left in there. And now we turn it to a controller and we put some automation into it and turn that stuff on and off on demand so we can ventilate on demand, filtrate on demand, dehumidifier and demand with that same Haven device. It's a really cool thing to leave in the house.
[00:41:54] Host: Eric Fitz: That is a great piece of technology here, folks, especially in areas where there's more wildfire challenges. You can program a haven to shut off your ventilation completely if you've got really bad outdoor air quality.
[00:42:05] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Absolutely.
[00:42:05] Host: Ed Smith: Yeah. I agree with Eric's fawning over this process. I'm like, I'm thinking of like a bunch of our listeners who like the idea of sending a comfort consultant or comfort advisor to a house, and they do one house in a day. Like it breaks their mental model for the economics of a comfort advisor, right? They need to be hitting 2 to 4 houses a day, four days a week. They get a Friday in the office to catch up on quotes. If this much converts, then this guy does 3 to 4 million a year and I can put two crews on the road. They've got this mental model and I heard you preempted my question before. I look like I can make more recommendations, I get all the follow on I built. So I heard that answer. But can you, like, get to the nitty gritty of the economics? What would you say to a contractor who I just I can't deploy a comfort advisor that way. Like, it just it breaks all the numbers. I understand for running my business day to day.
[00:43:03] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, and it's understandable. And I don't think that this process is scalable yet because the market isn't ready for it yet. The market has been trained to have a technician there for 45 minutes. Fix your problem, leave for a comfort advisor to go in there, and he already knows before he even gets out of the truck what he's going to try to sell you. The people, the consumers are not educated to demand that, so the contractors aren't going to offer it. It is to do this as scale. I don't know of many companies that are able to do it at scale. Even some of the companies that I really look up to, and there's a very well known one in Florida that they do really good work. But in order for them to be the size they are, they have to run like a traditional HVAC company. So what I tell contractors is if you want to get into this, just know right now that you're probably not going to scale the way that you want to. Okay. The way that you if you have aspirations of having a $10 million business, this isn't the path for it. Okay. But not everybody has those aspirations. Some people are fine being a boutique shop. There's Walmarts out here, then there's boutique shops. When I am looking for a good pair of men's dress shoes, I don't go to Walmart. I go to the boutique shop, the men's clothing store that I know I'm going to buy quality and I know I'm going to pay more, but it's going to last longer.
[00:44:22] Guest: Tim De Stasio: That's the kind of consumer that I am, and that's the consumers for Home Services that we're looking for the masses. What I tell people is let the Walmart customer shop at Walmart. You make sure that you find the boutique customers and you charge Rolls-Royce prices and do Rolls-Royce work, but you better do Rolls-Royce work. So don't charge those exorbitantly high prices that allow these home service companies do, and then you aren't sending people that are well-trained. You're not looking at building signs, you just ripping people off at that point. And that is the basis of a lot of my funny videos, is that I pick on those guys. But you're absolutely right. The way that the Western consumer, they don't want to be educated and they are being educated by marketing. And who has the deepest pockets for marketing. It's the very egregious companies that are funneling them in like this. They're in charge of the marketing. Those are the ads that you see. And so what we're doing is we're trying to find the people that can actually appreciate what we do, and they're out there. There's enough of them out there in every market that you can run a decent sized business, and you can also offer other services as well to keep your people busy. But you can. But you're not going to get the scalable $10 million a year business out of home performance. It's not there yet.
[00:45:36] Host: Eric Fitz: What do you recommend with that in mind? And maybe you're about to jump into the same question. If someone wants to start to move in this direction, what would you tell them to do to not completely break their model, but dip their toe in some building science or some of this workflow and process that you're doing that just will help illuminate some of these opportunities and these challenges that their customers are experiencing.
[00:45:58] Guest: Tim De Stasio: I would say if you're going to do that, you need to make sure that your diagnosis are not as are not the loss leaders that they traditionally are. So traditionally you send out a comfort advisor. You may send them out there for a free estimate. You may send a service technician out there for a $79 service call. And that's just to get people. It's just to get your get to the door. Nobody's making money on a $79 service call. You're going to have to front load it. And that's what I do. And that immediately weeds out to people that are kicking the tires. But you're going to want to train somebody and it's usually your nerdiest technician. Sometimes your nerdiest technician is not your best seller as far as selling stuff, because he's so nerdy that he sees right through all the sales gimmicks and he doesn't use it. That's who I was, I couldn't there are certain things that certain companies would want me to say, and I just couldn't say it. I couldn't bring myself to it. But if you have somebody like that's your person and you develop a model where if they go in there and they test and let's say no, the person sits on it for a while, they don't do anything about it. You still made a decent amount of money to cover yourself, but if that person is able to get a little bit of communication training and be able to sell the work, or you bring in somebody else to close the deal, then based on those recommendations and they're doing it ethically.
[00:47:17] Guest: Tim De Stasio: They're not making up stuff, they're not embellishing stuff. They're not turning a mountain into a mole or a molehill into a mountain. Then, yeah, you can do it. But you start with one person, get them a blower door, get them training, and they have to want to do this. They have to have the passion for the science. And if you don't have anybody like that, then you may have to go find somebody. And there are certain HVAC companies that have bought out, maybe like a her's raider, and now they have a Herz Raider on staff and that becomes their home performance diagnosis expert. And then your service technicians need to know when to turn that lead over to them. So those chronic comfort problems, those chronic indoor air quality problems. Don't send your service technician out there. Send him on a call that looks like it's got a bad compressor. You got those chronic problems. You send your home performance person out there. And then the other thing is, when you find these problems, you're going to find a lot of duct systems that are bad. You're going to find problems that are not emergencies, but they can be put off for slower times.
[00:48:19] Guest: Tim De Stasio: So in the middle of summertime, that's when most HVAC companies are making their money. Go out there and make that back, get those service calls, fix those units, replace those units, all that stuff. But if you find something that can be put off for a later time, then collect a small deposit, a 10% deposit and then say, okay, we're coming out here November 9th. We are not moving that date. I've collected your money. I take that very seriously. We've got you set up for November 9th and 10th to replace your duct system in that attic. And now your guys are happy because they're not sweating in an attic. And now, when you're struggling to keep them busy in November, they've got something to do. So there is a way to make this work based on your climate. Some cold climates. November. You already run a heating calls. Maybe it's September when you schedule it whenever your slow time is. There's typically two slow times during the shoulder seasons, and that's going to depend on climate. But you're going to schedule that work during the shoulder seasons collect deposit. That way they have skin in the game. Customers should always have skin in the game, and they're not going to cancel on you and then you can go to work.
[00:49:20] Host: Ed Smith: Those are incredible answers, and I appreciate your honesty on what segment of the market this is relevant for. But then those are awesome, tangible recommendations for folks who want to move in this direction. Do you know Hal Smith who runs Hal Co in New York?
[00:49:35] Guest: Tim De Stasio: I don't think.
[00:49:35] Host: Ed Smith: So. All right. We're going to introduce you to him. Okay. He's the only he. It's what, 40 million? Eric. But like, it's your process at $40 million scale and like, it's become a little bit of. It's a passion project for Eric and I like how do we make it? Not a niche thing. How do we make it mass market and workable in HVAC unit economics to be able to do that sort of work all the time?
[00:50:01] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah. Another good example is Brynn Cooksey in the Detroit market.
[00:50:04] Host: Ed Smith: Oh yeah.
[00:50:05] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah I know Carlo services in the Orlando markets getting into it. They're a big company.
[00:50:10] Host: Ed Smith: Oh yeah. Brian. Yep.
[00:50:11] Guest: Tim De Stasio: There is a way it takes people that are really. You gotta have that unicorn owner Chad Simpson in the.
[00:50:18] Host: Ed Smith: Yes.
[00:50:18] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Toledo market or. Yeah, another one that's that that has found a way to do both. Yeah. And do it ethically. Yeah. I don't want to say that it can't be done, but it takes a unicorn. Those are the people that we need to learn from.
[00:50:30] Host: Ed Smith: Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:31] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Those are the stories that need to be.
[00:50:32] Host: Ed Smith: Told. Yeah, I'm hoping it's those unicorn exceptions. Sometimes the exception proves the rule. I'm hoping in this case the exception does not prove the rule. And this actually could be something that everyone does.
[00:50:42] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Well, it proves the rule that it can be done.
[00:50:43] Host: Ed Smith: Yes. Yes, exactly. Awesome.
[00:50:46] Host: Eric Fitz: Tim, I want to go a bit more into heat pumps from all of this experience you have with heat pumps with a whole range of homes in your market. What do you see are the biggest mistakes that contractors are typically making, whether that's on the design side or the install side? Why don't we start on the design side and see where that takes us?
[00:51:05] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Mostly it is sizing. We're not using manual J as an industry or any other approved sizing method. Contractors or sizing systems based off of square footage based off of past experience. And houses have changed in the last few years 2012. Energy code in North Carolina made our value changes made window. You value changes. The houses are not requiring the amount of heating and cooling that we need them needed to. Now, what they are requiring is moisture control, because we've done all this work to get our sensible loads down, which is insulation. You value solar heat gain values and we've tightened houses up a little bit, but then we have to start ventilating them. So one way or the other that moisture is getting in the house. Yeah, I would say sizing their sizing systems based off what they were taught in the 80s and 90s. We've got more energy efficient houses, so we need it. And it's eye opening. When you do a heat load calculation, you're like, I don't know about this. Nobody wants to get that call when it's 90 degrees in the unit can't keep up. No one wants to get that call and I get it. But there is enough fluff built into manual J that if you're vacillating between a two and a half and a three tonne unit, if you go with a two and a half ton unit, you're going to be just fine. And houses have thermal mass in them so that it takes a little while for that 95 degree weather to actually start affecting the inside.
[00:52:30] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And by the time that happens, the sun has already gone down, and now you're going the other way. But we have to have faith that aggressively sizing systems work. And I do that. I track, I monitor systems, I know that my systems are getting that runtime and doing the job. I think the other thing that I see in my market, and I know it's not the only one here in North Carolina, we have this weird code. It's not weird. I understand why they did it, but it's not written in the mechanical code. It's written in the Administrative Code and Policies book, where any multi-level house needs to have a separate HVAC unit, or it needs to be an automatically controlled zone system. And I know why, because in the 80s we were building these houses, these two story houses put in one unit, one thermostat, whichever floor the thermostat was not on was not comfortable. And in the wintertime it was like the other way around. So I get it that the cheap building created that code. But then we didn't go far enough to give guidelines to how to properly zone it. So here we have a lot of pretty much single story houses with a finished room over the garage. They call it a frog here. I call it a bonus room, but it's over the garage. So you have a 2500 square foot house, and then you have 800 square foot bonus room.
[00:53:42] Guest: Tim De Stasio: This technically on the second level. And so what they do, because everyone's trying to save a buck here instead of putting like a mini split or something up there just for that one frog, they put a zone system. So first of all, they oversize the unit. I see three and a half ton units on these houses all the time. When a 2 to 2 and a half is all you need. So the oversize unit, they put zone dampers in there. And which of those two zones is going to call for air conditioning more. It's going to be the finished room over the garage that is surrounded by knee walls and has a hot garage under it. It is going to call for air conditioning by itself a lot. When the main house cools down, stays cool. The frog is still running well into the night because all that thermal mass is still coming into the frog. So you got this giant three and a half ton heat pump, and it is blowing through two supplies and it's just like a hurricane. And I've been up there. Buddy of mine lives in a house like that. We always do. May 4th, we do the May the 4th, but we always watch Star Wars movie. I made May the 4th, and we're up there. And every time his unit kicks on because it's May, that zone kicks on.
[00:54:47] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Let's get turn the volume up on his TV because it's so loud it does not work. The big zone, little zone does not work. There is a proper way to zone and there is an improper way to zone. And so we see a lot of that where I'm just like, look, there's nothing I can do other than put in a mini split. I don't need to run numbers, I don't need to do a load calques here to tell you what, you're already what we already know. This is never going to work. So improper zoning and just controls the other thing that I see. And this is huge, especially in warm climates where we don't where we're not used to cold winters, is that contractors think that a heat pump should switch over to auxiliary heat below 35 degrees. And even I'll tell you, the Ecobee thermostat is set up from the factory to tell you that. And I teach contractors. That's like the main thing when I do an ecobee class is no, you got to set that thing all the way down so a heat pump can even a 14 C sear single stage banger just is rattling around out there. That thing can produce heat at a higher copy than a gas furnace or electric strip heat for that much all the way down. Like when you take the panel off and you're looking at the heating charging chart. If there is a number on that charging chart like negative five degrees, it has been tested at that charging chart and you are still producing some heat may not be enough heat to heat the home, but yes, you can run your strips at the same time, but do not cut heat pumps off at 30 to 35 degrees.
[00:56:25] Guest: Tim De Stasio: What you want to do instead is to disable this strip heat above 30 or 35 degrees, because any 14 C or heat pumps like 14 Sears were considered high efficiency not that long ago. And they can heat most homes just fine, all the way down to 30 or 35 degrees without any kind of strip heat. Even a 14 series, you get something that's inverter technologies. Your HSP or jets are getting a lot higher. Cops get higher. You may not even need strip heat for climate like mine, but down to 30 to 35 degrees. Your most inefficient heat pump that's rattling around out there right now can heat your home with no strip heat. And so we want to lock that strip heat out above 35 degrees. But we don't want to lock the heat pump out below 35 degrees. And that is a huge misconception. When we had that freezing weather in Texas a few years ago, 2021 contractors have given people that advice and I get it. They were trying to help people, but they just were not knowledgeable and would end up happening. Is none of the heat pumps are running and contributing to heating the homes.
[00:57:28] Guest: Tim De Stasio: We overloaded the grid, the grid shut down and some old people died. And that was really unfortunate. And some of it stemmed from really poor advice that contractors were emailing out to their customers in anticipation for that big freeze. So we have to be so careful in this setup of a heat pump and then just improper commissioning. Here's what's wrong with our industry. Comfort advisors go and they sell the job. And the expectation is that the install crew is going to put that system in one day. And that day is either going to be a short day or it's a long day. Typically, an installer schedule is 7 a.m. to whenever and now if that salesman sold and other accessories to go along with it, maybe he had to re duct it. You're still getting that job done in one day. And so at the end of that long day, do you really think that an installation crew that isn't already they don't most installers don't have a technical aptitude. They're hard workers. They've got grit. They can withstand the heat. They can drive a screw in an uncomfortable position and not give out. These are hardy people, but their skill set typically is not electrical troubleshooting. It's not the technical, the nerdy stuff. All right. Some people could do both. But you're expecting that person at the end of the day when they're hot and they're tired and they want to go home to now spend 2 to 3 hours commissioning the system, that is never going to happen.
[00:58:53] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And so we find where blower speeds have not been set up, we pretty much find where they turned it on. And they came on and they walked away. They didn't even check to make sure it would work. And heat. They didn't check the strip heat. It's July. Why would you check strip eat? That unit's been off all day. The house is 95 degrees. We're going to turn their heat on like I get it. So what we need to do is we need to build into our jobs that return trip by a technical person to go back and commission it. And so every installation that I do takes two days. Now I'm doing it all. I'm doing the work and the commissioning. But even when I was running my company, we would come back the next day. We would get the unit running, get the house cooling down, fired up, walk away, make sure it's not going to kill anybody. Overnight. We would send somebody back. It was built into my schedule and in my process, I was sending myself or one of my service technicians back to go through our commissioning checklist. And that takes 2 to 3 hours, and you have to build that into the job. But guess what? We didn't get callbacks. We didn't get the kind of calls. And now I'm running back behind some of these companies here.
[00:59:53] Host: Eric Fitz: Totally. And not only did you not get callbacks, you built a deeper relationship with that homeowner you're more likely to have a customer for, hopefully for life out of that that relationship.
[01:00:02] Guest: Tim De Stasio: They saw the difference.
[01:00:03] Host: Eric Fitz: Yeah.
[01:00:03] Guest: Tim De Stasio: And I made sure that I explained the difference in my quote. When I give them an estimate, I'm going to go into detail about the steps of commissioning. And that other estimate is going to be is just going to say install heat pump. I'm going to be a lot more descriptive on that, because yes, it is going to cost me more to do it, and I am going to be higher than the other person. I need to make sure I build that value in there because so the customer knows what they're getting. But it's so important to commission a system. No heat. And the problem is we were doing that with gas furnaces too. And that was let's install a bomb in somebody's house and then turn it on and walk away. That was even worse. And so that's where the industry is coming from. And no one's doing proper commissioning. So we have to get better as an industry.
[01:00:44] Host: Ed Smith: Tim, it is super clear. It was clear to me before why you got mentor of the year. But like it's incredibly obvious now. Well, you got mentor of the year. Thank you for all the advice on your process. Installing heat pumps, candid feedback on what's going to work for a traditional HVAC company, and like where the constraints are. Like, I just thought it was fantastic.
[01:01:05] Host: Eric Fitz: I just wanted to say that I just love that you're you covered some of the most important things or probably the most important things. And it's hard to believe that in this day and age with folks are not doing manual J. The most basic thing to get a design these issues with zoning. The basic elements of commissioning a system we can, with a little bit more time and care, we can have so much better outcomes. And yeah, just be better for us as contractors and have better outcomes for homeowners as well.
[01:01:33] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, I was giggling a little bit during some of the presentations that the building summer came because he was talking about embodied carbon and a lot of this pie in the sky, thinking about how we're going to build better buildings. And that's great, but we can't even get people to put in a heat pump correctly right now. And I'm not talking about up north, where heat pumps are relatively new. I'm talking about down here. That's all we did for the last 30 years, and we're still messing that up. So we got to be really careful about setting higher standards and more codes and more programs. We need to fix what we got right now, and I think that starts with educating the next generation of installers, because we need to speak louder than the old heads that are telling them to do this and don't worry about doing that. And that doesn't work. We've been doing it this way for 30 years. We need to talk louder than them. One other thing that really bugs me is that we're not even properly piping the systems in, so we have to use nitrogen when we're brazing. And I can't tell you how many system failures I see because there's debris in the lines. And that's just something basic. That's we're not asking the installer to do anything different. We're just asking to bring out the bottle of nitrogen out from their truck two steps before they still got to bring it out, hopefully to leak. Check the system. Let's just bring it out while we're brazing and purge while brazing. But again, it's this old time mentality where we didn't have to do that in the past, so why are we having to do it now? They're just giving us more stuff to do, and a lot of times those crews that mess up those installs are not the ones that have to come back and fix it. They're on another job. They never know it's not their problem. And so not having that feedback loop to come back is something else that we need to change in this industry.
[01:03:14] Host: Eric Fitz: Totally crucial. Got to keep those contaminants out of the system. Yeah, definitely use nitrogen. I'll add one more thing just to emphasize in manual J itself in the protocol in the book. It says be aggressive. So you heard it from Tim. You're from manual J itself. Be aggressive with your load calques. There's factors of safety built in. Actually take into account those window treatments and things like that. And then you're going to have great outcomes.
[01:03:40] Guest: Tim De Stasio: If your AC is running all afternoon long on a really hot day, that is not a cause for complaint. That is a good thing. If it's running all, if your heat pump is running all night long but it's maintaining good temperature, then you probably woke up to a very comfortable house where the walls, the furniture, the floors were all the same uniform temperature. That is not a flex that my heat that my system can come on and cool my house down to five minutes and blast and shut off. That's not a flex. We need to think it's a more comfortable house and we get longer runtimes. That's why I like two stage units. I like variable speed inverter units when used appropriately, because they maintain that long run time, they're keeping the indoor coil, hopefully under dew point for longer. One thing I will caution in a northern climate coal climate. Single stage heat pumps are not a great idea because if you size them for heating, they're going to suck during air conditioning or they're way oversize if you size them for air conditioning. All right. You got that aggressive size things running all day long pulling the humidity out. It's really good. You're going to hate your electric bill in the wintertime. So it's really hard to make even a two stage. I've run the numbers really hard for a two stage to work in a super cold climate, we need to be thinking about cold climate heat pumps that have that variability built into them to have the turndown built into them. But then we can't overlook humidity control also, even a northern climate. I'm gonna be speaking about that, the heat pump summit. I'm going to be taking some lessons and humidity control from the south, applying them to northern homes. And because our climate's coming up there. And so we're going to have to start preparing for that. Start thinking about supplemental humidification for those two months out of the year where it's just muggy outside because it ain't going away. It ain't getting any better. Sorry. Tangent again. I'm passionate about this stuff.
[01:05:25] Host: Ed Smith: That was the perfect tangent. Yeah. Tim, this was remarkable. Thank you for taking the time. And with one question, which is for folks who want to build business focused on heat pumps and building science. What resources would you recommend? I'll put the plug in for you in all your contents on Instagram. On LinkedIn, when you're giving trainings like it's awesome and you can plug more of your stuff if you want, but what resources would you recommend other contractors if they want that sort of insight?
[01:05:55] Guest: Tim De Stasio: The people that I learned from was Allison Bales. He's got the house needs to breathe or does it book? It's right behind me. It's just out of the screen, out of the shot right now. Drew Tozer just came out with a book about feel good homes. More of a northern based Advice. Allison Bales is in Atlanta, so he knows about southern humidity. Understand the building envelope. First understand the manual J manual s manual D. First, trust people that have done it and succeeded before on sizing heat pumps correctly, sizing them aggressively. And I guess just understand that the direction whether or not you agree with it or not, because unfortunately everything gets politicized nowadays. So we, even people's comfort has become politicized. And all of a sudden heat pumps become just this argument of one side or gets perceived as his argument of one side. Just understand that this isn't this doesn't need to be political. Like we just want people to have comfort. We want their homes to be efficient. We want them to be safer. And we need to start backing away from things that have been proven to add carbon to the atmosphere. Whether or not you want to agree with how much it's affected climate change or not based on that. Okay, fine. But we know that it's contributing somewhat to it. So doesn't it make sense to do what we can to minimize that and just understand that we're not with a heat pump? Yes, it comes with other risks.
[01:07:23] Guest: Tim De Stasio: We're talking about more amps in the wire and a little bit more electricity. That's flowing wattage. And we need to be careful there. But we are not lighting something on fire anymore under someone's house. And there are certain hazards in the hierarchy of controls. When we say elimination is the top of the hierarchy of controls, if we can eliminate the fire risk that comes from an improperly operating furnace or the carbon monoxide risk from that piece of equipment. Doesn't it make sense to do that? And now we've got technology that's making it a little bit easier and more economical to retrofit to a heat pump? And then I would say to someone. Stop installing central air conditioners if you're going to replace someone's air conditioner. Just go with the heat pump. Even if you don't replace the furnace, fine. Go with the heat pump. It's a great stepping stone. And you can. It does the cooling and you can set it for heating. And then you can find out where that balance point is, where the heat pump no longer can keep up with the house. And you can make some adjustments. Okay. This house, it was 26 degrees. This house is 31 degrees. But you can start getting more confident in heat pumps and the difference in cost between a 14 seer air conditioner and a 14 seer heat pump that gets connected to their existing furnace. That's where we want to start.
[01:08:45] Guest: Tim De Stasio: The cost difference is a few hundred bucks. That is not going to drive you out of the market. If you build the value and everything else that you're doing, you're going to be able to hide that $300 in your estimate and now you're setting yourself apart. We should not be installing anything but heat pumps and cooling dominant climates from here on out. In systems with gas heat. Just put in a heat pump. It's the same outdoor unit. It's got a few more parts. The indoor coil is exactly the same coil as what would go in an air conditioning. You're not going to have to change your coil at all. The model number is the same. It comes ready to go for a heat pump. You're just putting in a different outdoor unit with a few more parts. It costs about $300 more, and maybe you got to do some wiring changes. If you don't have enough conductors in your thermostat wire, they make wireless connectors. They make there's all kinds of kits that are available to make that work. And like with the equipment like Bosch, you actually when you go from a air conditioner to a heat pump, you can still reuse your two wire that goes out to the outdoor unit. So they've made it super easy. Just start there and don't listen to people that are being driven by politics, because no matter which side it's on, you're being lied to make. See for yourself.
[01:09:58] Host: Ed Smith: Tim. I can see why Bible study and education is your hobby because you can preach. That was awesome.
[01:10:05] Host: Eric Fitz: Yeah. Thanks so much, Tim. This has been so much fun.
[01:10:08] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Yeah, we were given an amazing earth, an amazing bodies, and we honor our creator when we take care of them. Doesn't have to be political. It's just gratitude.
[01:10:18] Host: Eric Fitz: Love it. What a great way to wrap up.
[01:10:21] Host: Ed Smith: Yeah, I can't say anything better than that. Tim DiCicco, thank you so much for joining us on the Heat Pump podcast.
[01:10:25] Guest: Tim De Stasio: Thanks for having me.
[01:10:26] Host: Ed Smith: Yeah.
[01:10:27] Host: Eric Fitz: Thanks, Tim. 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 to your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to reach out! You can reach us once again at hello@amply.energy. Thanks a lot.