David Richardson didn't set out to teach. He started at twelve in his dad's HVAC company, handing up wrenches and crawling into the spots nobody else wanted. Decades later, as VP of Training at the National Comfort Institute, he's become one of the clearest voices in the industry on what separates a craftsman from a box-swapper.
The turning point came when he and his dad tested a system they'd installed by the book. Some readings were 200% over what they should have been; others were half. His dad looked at him and asked what they'd been doing all those years. That question — the gap between work that looks right and work that's been measured — runs through the whole conversation.
Richardson's core argument is a reframe most contractors have never heard out loud: we've been trained to call the equipment "the system," and it isn't. The equipment is one component. The system, in his words, is what each contractor custom-manufactures on site when they install that box into a particular home with particular ducts.
The business implication is sharp. If the box is the system, every contractor is selling the same thing, and the only lever left is price. If the system is what you custom manufacture on site at the customer’s home, then your workmanship is the product — and price becomes secondary to whether the homeowner actually gets the comfort they paid for. Poor work yields a low-performance system. Good work yields a high-performance one. Same equipment either way.
That's also where Richardson puts the 57% number. He says the average system delivers about 57% of its rated capacity into the conditioned space where people actually live — not at the equipment, but in the room. (His family's company contributed field data to some of NCI's early studies, and he notes the figure hasn't improved much in the years since.) The 88% that high-performance work can reach isn't better equipment; it's attention to the things that move the most BTUs — chiefly duct design, location, and leakage.
For contractors building heat-pump-focused businesses, Richardson flags a trap specific to furnace-to-heat-pump retrofits. The path of measurement — pressure, then airflow, then temperature — applies to any equipment type. But temperature is where heat pumps bite.
An old furnace might have run a 60-degree temperature rise across it. A heat pump replacing it may run half that or less. The ducts haven't changed, but now there's far less temperature to lose, so duct losses and gains you used to get away with start eating real capacity. A run through an unconditioned attic that was a minor inconvenience behind a furnace can become the reason a room never gets comfortable behind a heat pump. The pressures and airflow can both check out and the system still underperforms — which is why Richardson keeps pointing back to delivered temperature, not just the readings at the equipment.
The episode opens with Richardson describing a familiar failure: a contractor does excellent work, explains all of it, and still loses to the cheap bid. His metaphor is drowning — bury a homeowner in data they don't understand and they panic, then grab the one life preserver that makes sense to them. Price.
The fix isn't doing less testing. It's translation. Richardson's preferred move is to hand the homeowner the tool — a balancing hood, a thermal camera — and let them find the problem themselves. He says once a homeowner is holding the instrument and asking "what does this mean?", the job is effectively his, because now they're engaged rather than being told their house is broken.
One homeowner-ready script he credits to John Boylan of Lakeside Services in Michigan: frame delivered efficiency as a pizza. You're paying for the whole pie, but only about 60% of it is arriving — four slices out of ten get eaten before they reach your house. It's the same 57% idea, made impossible to misunderstand.
Richardson's through-line is that the hardest problems in HVAC usually come back to the most basic fundamentals — and that measurement is what lets a contractor prove the work rather than argue about it. For anyone positioning as a heat pump contractor, his warning lands hardest at the end: free furnaces and free air conditioners are already a race to the bottom, and "free heat pump" is coming. When it does, the only durable differentiation left is the system you build and your ability to show the homeowner why it's worth it.
Measure it. Explain it. Let them see it. That's the whole job.
[00:00] – Introduction to the Episode
[01:57] – David Richardson's HVAC Journey
[07:42] – Leaving the Family Business for NCI
[10:39] – What Does "High-Performance HVAC" Really Mean?
[16:07] – The 57% Problem
[20:05] – The PATH Framework
[26:27] – Why Contractors Skip the Fundamentals
[28:57] – Data Discernment vs. Data Drowning
[33:23] – Applying High-Performance Principles to Heat Pumps
[41:12] – Having Difficult Sizing Conversations
[46:43] – Solving the Mystery of the Dusty House
[52:23] – Ductless Heat Pumps and High-Performance Contracting
[58:05] – Where to Learn More
00:00:00.000 — 00:00:47.280 · Speaker 1
Anyone who has been trapped under water or had somebody dunk them under. They know the panic that sets in when there's the fear of drowning. You start flailing. You're trying to get away from whatever you can, and you've got so much just weight coming down on you as far as water. We're doing the same thing with data, and we don't even know it.
And we wonder why I'm doing all this great stuff. Why does nobody buy it? It's because they don't understand a word that's coming out of your mouth. You're drowning them with data, and they're trying to get away. They're flailing so they will get away. And they'll go to the one life preserver that they understand.
And that's dollars. They understand price. So you may be going out and doing a fantastic job, but because you can't communicate what you're doing and you're puking all this information on people, you're drowning them and they're trying to get away from you.
00:00:51.520 — 00:02:24.640 · Speaker 2
Hey everyone. Today we have the privilege of interviewing David Richardson from the National Comfort Institute. Eric and I have been fans of David since we first saw him on stage years ago. He may be the single best voice out there today for what it means to be a high performance HVAC contractor. I find all of his work inspiring, tangible, and tactical, and he tells a damn good story. If you want to be a high performance HVAC contractor, this is going to be an inspiring episode for you and I hope you enjoy it. If you do enjoy this episode and if you're enjoying our podcast, please take a second look into your podcast app and leave us five stars. It is shocking how much that helps us out. All right. With that ask, let's get on to the episode.
00:02:28.880 — 00:02:31.440 · Speaker 2
Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump podcast. I'm Ed Smith.
00:02:31.440 — 00:02:34.360 · Speaker 3
And I'm Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amply Energy.
00:02:34.400 — 00:02:38.280 · Speaker 2
Today our guest is David Richardson from the National Comfort Institute. Welcome, David.
00:02:38.320 — 00:02:39.600 · Speaker 1
Hey, thanks for having me. Guys.
00:02:39.600 — 00:02:59.340 · Speaker 2
Appreciate it. Thank you for joining. We've wanted you on the pod for a while, so this is super exciting. I've been looking forward to it. So we got a bunch of stuff we want to talk about. Good. But we'd love to start with people's backgrounds. Like your personal arc, starting with the family business. Yeah.
Tell us about starting there and how you got to where you are now.
00:02:59.380 — 00:08:46.780 · Speaker 1
Boy that's interesting. I never intended to do HVAC. I actually thought it was would be easy at the age of 12. My dad made me an interesting proposition. So consider this your 12 year old kid. All you want to do is run around all summer. My dad says you're either going to mow lawns, deliver papers, or you can come work for me.
I thought, easy, I'll go work for dad. So I did, and it's interesting. The boss's son. You get all kinds of monikers that are tied to you, but started out that way, just helping out the guys. So hand in wrenches, getting stuck in the places that no one else wanted to go and really from the ground up, learned this stuff and I actually started to enjoy it.
So my dad got me a place in trade school once I graduated from high school, went through there, came out, started running a crew, worked all the way up from installed through service. I saw a lot of the design side to running the company. And what was interesting, we were mainly focused on residential new construction.
We did replacements, but the majority of our work was residential new construction around, I'm going to say 97, 98. We were introduced to a blower door, and that was going to be the saving grace for our company because it separated everyone. You start looking at the building as a whole, start filling up your ducts.
But what we found was we were getting more complaints than ever before, and all of a sudden the equipment was dying. After we went in and did repairs, we didn't know why. So I'm thinking, all right, there's got to be more to this than there was. I just didn't know what it was at the time. In the meantime, I'm getting sick and tired of the residential industry at large because we have people selling us out for $50 on a job.
I know, at least I think I know at the time that we do better work. Our work looked better. I'll put it to you that way. There were some very uncomfortable truths. The measurements revealed, thought we did better work, did not have a way to prove it. And it was around that time that I came upon some articles from Rob Fulk, one of the late founders of National Comfort Institute.
He's talking about the static pressure and airflow, and I'm like, oh, wow, that may be what we're missing. So while I have one foot out the industry, my first son had just been born, I'm thinking, I'm young enough. I can go back, get a degree, do something, maybe an engineering degree, something along that line.
Get out of the business. Dag knows I'm down. He said, hey, this fault guy that you like is going to be at the energy management conference. We should go listen to him. We made the suggestion to the gentleman who was running this conference and was put on by bluegrass or the Touchstone Energy Cooperatives, East Kentucky Power, that group in Kentucky.
We had made the suggestion that they should bring Rob in, because the technical guy, my dad had been friends for a long time. They brought Rob in and I was like, this is it. So all of a sudden I went from having one foot out to bringing the other foot back in. We went to the class, we were sold. This was, I think, January of 2001.
So we were like, oh, this is it. This is how we prove everything. So then we start testing more questions. We're like, oh, that doesn't make sense. So we start talking to Rob. Why do these things don't make sense? He'd walk us through something, we'd go and we test. All right, that makes sense. So we're like, we're going to save our whole community from all the hack HVAC guys out there.
So my dad and I, to test this, we arrogantly think that we're going to go out and match our design numbers to what was installed. My dad and I make sure that we put this system in. We're like that way we know none of the other guys could have missed anything. So we had a chance to cross the T's and dot the eyes. And I'll never forget some numbers were 200% over what they should have been.
Others were half. And they keep in mind we're designing according to industry standards. The system should have just checked the boxes. I start questioning the hood ratings. So I call Rob fork and I'm like, Rob, I don't think this thing works. So he walks me through some tests and he says, try this. And he walks me through doing a duck traverse on an appropriate sized run.
And we do it and we're with five cfm. I'll never forget. My dad looked at me and he said, good Lord, what have we been doing all these years? At that point in time, that was a change. We were already on the path. We didn't know it. But at that point, what I realized was this is where most people quit. They find out that what they're doing isn't working.
And you've got a choice. You can either go back to what's uncomfortable, or you can move forward and try to get better. And I am grateful that we move forward. Now. There's a whole lot of other details that went into this. Our company was going bankrupt at the time. We were in trouble. We had to change. So that was one of the ways that we did it.
And I'm forever grateful that the events I believe in Providence, I think events fall into place for a reason. And I think those dominoes lined up for a reason. So we do this stuff for roughly ten years. NCI comes calling. I started teaching actually because of Jim Davis. I started doing part time classes on coal and combustion.
Jim called me up. And for those of you know who Jim Davis is, he's the daddy of modern day combustion testing. That market did not exist before Jim started going out and doing the testing and stuff in the field in Cincinnati, Ohio. So Jim says you guys are doing a lot of great stuff. He said, what if you could spread that message and just exponentially affect a whole lot more people?
I thought about that long and hard and I said, all right, I'll try it. So then I started teaching. I never set out to be a teacher or a writer. I started writing to kind of clarify the things that we were seeing, and then I would share it with the guys so they could learn. So that turned into writing for others and then the teaching side.
I've really started enjoying sharing what we were running into, and I just got bit by the bug, and they made me an offer that I couldn't refuse to make. One of the hardest decisions in my life, which was walk away from a family company. And I did that in December of 2010, and the rest is history.
00:08:46.820 — 00:08:56.700 · Speaker 2
And that history is you're now one of the most respected educators in the HVAC space. So congrats on the bold move and thanks for what you're doing for the industry.
00:08:56.780 — 00:09:56.320 · Speaker 1
I appreciate it. It was difficult walking away from a family company. There were some very uncomfortable Christmases. It took a while before my parents came around. There was a while that they were almost a hatred for NCI, because they felt like they took me from them when it was purely my decision, and then once they saw what I was starting to do, they were like, you're really making a difference.
And I said, that's what I'm trying to do. I said, I can't. All I can do is plant seeds and try to help fertilize them. Everybody's going to make their own personal choices. But I said, I think I've got a responsibility of everything that we've done to try to help make this place better, because I know that there's other people that are in the same spot that we were, that they know they do better work.
They didn't have a way to prove it. Now, granted, things have changed a lot since I came to NCI. Back then with the internet, social media and a lot of the things that was almost tribal knowledge back when I learned this stuff. It's now everywhere. So a lot of times people don't even know where this stuff came from, and it's been going back a long time.
00:09:56.360 — 00:10:23.040 · Speaker 3
It's a very cool story, and it's incredible to have a moment where you had these multiple key decision points. You had one foot, maybe multiple feet, almost out of the industry, and then all of a sudden you just got pulled way back in. And then, yeah, having a really hard decision about the family business, figuring out how you can have impact and realizing that this training education path was the way for you.
And those are hard moments, exciting moments. And man, that's their love. They'll hearing those stories.
00:10:23.040 — 00:11:27.700 · Speaker 1
It's amazing how many light bulb moments there were in class. We call them aha, no moments because you run into all these things that never made sight sense. But then once you can start to put measurements and numbers behind it, it's oh, that's why that's happening. My own home was a perfect example. We built it.
We had all kinds of dust problems within two weeks. No dust in the return grills. No dust in the filter, but dust covering everything. And we have all hardwood floors in our homes, so you can't hide it. If my wife was like, this is a dusty house I've ever been in. You're the HVAC guy, so fix it. I married up, so I said yes, ma'am and started trying to figure some of this out.
It was at that point where we started figuring out the home performance to HVAC performance time, because my issue was HVAC and building driven. So that was a dust problem. So all these things that presented themselves as problems that just wracked my brains ended up becoming opportunities. It's just a matter of reframing them and just keeping on looking for answers, just becoming a lifelong learner.
00:11:27.740 — 00:11:40.740 · Speaker 3
So, David, you started to kind of get at this whole movement and this concept of a high performance contractor. Yeah, it gets thrown around a lot. You say it. What does that mean? What does it not mean when you hear that term.
00:11:40.780 — 00:15:48.280 · Speaker 1
To really get a grasp of it, it's to kind of go back and look at where it came from. And I mentioned Rob Bork earlier, but the roots of high performance HVDC particular actually come from commercial air balancing. That's the industry that first brought measurement to the space. Taylor Kehoe was an engineer who found out that his systems weren't working back in the 60s, even though he designed them the right way.
So he had to put the protocols. It's actually what became the foundation for the associated Air Balance Council. But these principles, what were brought over into the residential market. And as far as I know, Rob Falk was the first one to bring a commercial capture hood into the residential space to solve a problem that he had.
So this actually expanded to looking at performance characteristics such as temperature, BTUs, and then it started getting into the building science aspects that apply to really a complete view of what high performance HVAC is and system performance. As you look at the principles that make it up, high performance HPC.
The term that it used to be called was performance based contract and because it was based on performance. But when you sum it up, it's really it's a culture. It's a philosophy of doing HVAC the right way, the way it ought to be done. A lot of times we think it's just about shipping boxes around, but it's not.
You look at the people that do this, they have a heart for the business, and it's a way of doing business in life that gets back to the principles of craftsmanship and then proving it through measurement. So those that participate in it, they care about their work, they care about their coworkers and their customers, and it shows up as they do the right thing.
It's all based on integrity, wanting to be the best and do the best. And then what's cool is you prove it through measurements. You're confirming that measurement. We call it a craftsmanship receipt. So it's crazy that the skills that are involved in this are the way HVAC always ought to be done, but they offer freedom to anybody who decides to do it.
It's not easy, but it offers freedom from being called a quote unquote dealer or from just swapping boxes. And that is unfortunately what our industry has devolved into. It's a race to the bottom and a run to fail mentality. So in a low price driven market, everybody looks the same. That's the problem that we had.
It provides differentiation. And through that any company that's willing to take this on, it empowers them and their staff to prove that they do have the best work and they can back it up. It's incredible. Some of the things that we found that were side effects of it, that our callbacks dropped. So we started finding this cause and effect relationship with a whole lot of things that happened.
The complaints that we used to get all of a sudden disappeared. We were able to solve those complaints, things that we used to make excuses for, say, when we would go in and use a system with a central return grill and the customer and say, this bedroom, it's way too uncomfortable. We designed it to operate with the doors all open.
They didn't live like that. And that was us making excuses that we didn't know how to deal with it. So instead of efficiency being in the hands of the manufacturers. What high performance HVAC does is it puts efficiency in the hands of the contractor. They are the ones that decide how well the box performs in the field.
It's all tied to what they do. They're in control of comfort. They're in control efficiency. They're in control of safety and health. So there's none of these exaggerated yellow labels plastered on a piece of equipment. It's what they do. The focus goes on their skills and what they're able to do. And that's the scary part about it.
That was the scary part for us is it's transparent. There's no smoke and mirrors that you can hide behind in high performance HVAC. You have to address what's there and offer real solutions or run. There's no silver bullets or placebos. It's a matter of making things work and you figure out what does and what doesn't really quick when you're profit's on the line.
So it does shed light, though, on some of the unintentional industry practices that we've done. And we challenge the status quo. That's what we do. And unfortunately, the status quo. As I said earlier, it's moving boxes. But when you challenge that status quo, it allows you to get paid for the results that you deliver instead of looking like everybody else.
00:15:48.320 — 00:16:28.000 · Speaker 3
Got it. So it's like it's a way to completely differentiate what you're describing. It's a way to sleep at night too. Right. You're verifying not necessarily just for the customer. You're verifying for yourself that you're confident in what the solution you've delivered is actually solving those problems in the house.
And man, you mentioned freedom. That's incredible. When you're running a business and you're confident in what you're doing, every day is delivering on the value. You're doing good work. It helps you sleep at night. And also it avoids those callbacks. Yeah, that's what we're all worried about, right?
Because if you think you're doing great work but you're just thinking about this scary, this demon that's out there just waiting to come and bite you, that's not a fun way to live.
00:16:28.040 — 00:16:53.180 · Speaker 1
All you got to do is turn on the television and look at traditional HVAC marketing. Everybody looks the same. They're all offering the same exact thing. And it unfortunately has turned what is a very specialized industry into a commodity driven industry. And it should have never been like that. There's too many specialized skills that come into play at once to turn HVAC into what it's become.
00:16:53.220 — 00:17:18.459 · Speaker 2
That's great. And you've put some numbers on this. So I've heard you talk about the 57% problem, which it seems like that commodity driven lower end is at 57%, like systems up to code. I've heard you say hit about 63%, and high performance work gets you to 88%. Unpack those numbers. What do they mean? And what separates the 88% from the 57?
00:17:18.500 — 00:20:14.520 · Speaker 1
That's a great one. So if you've got high performance there by contrast, has to be low performance. And that's what the typical results are. So that 57%, our family company was actually involved in some of the first studies that were done by National Comfort Institute. Rob knew we were doing a ton of testing.
We had the measurements. He said, hey, send us what you've got on testing what you've got on test out. Let's see what the changes are. And so our numbers were part of some of that first studies that were done from around the country. So there's contractors from the south and north, you name it, all across the country that were a part of that.
And it's real field measurements. It's not case studies. It's just here's what we had. What's interesting, though, is we have done case studies for utility companies and the work that we do out in California, and those numbers still haven't changed that much. As a matter of fact, they probably got a little bit worse.
So that's an interesting piece to note. But that 57%, that is the average delivered efficiency into the conditioned space where the customer lives. That's what they know. That's what they pay for. They don't pay for what's happening at the equipment they pay for what's making it into the space that they live.
And that, to me, is the difference between a low performance attitude and a high performance attitude. Low performance looks at the equipment and just does things like we've always done it. The code approved model, the 63%. This is where you're trying to do a little bit better, but you're still focused on the box.
The high performance approach is where you're now focusing on how many of the BTUs from that piece of equipment are making it into the space the customer lives. And that's the 88% that 88%, by the way, when you look at the factors that differentiate, all of those equipment's all the same. And this is why I say there is a gap of understanding in our industry.
We have been brainwashed to call the equipment the system. And it's not. The equipment is a component of the system. The system is what each contractor custom manufactures. When they put that piece of equipment together and the system you do poor workmanship, you get a poor system, you get a low performance system, you do great work, you get a high performance system.
The boxes are all the same. It's a matter of what you do with it. And that's where that 88% comes in. Because you have someone who's paying attention to the details. They know how to design properly. They know how to carry that out. They know how to sell it. Then they know how to test out and verify that the work was actually completed.
Now that 88% is an average, sometimes that number could go a little bit less. Sometimes it can go a little bit, a little bit higher. The main factor that contributes to that is duct location. So you're looking at thermal gains and losses that pay the biggest dividends. Duct leakage those sorts of things.
But duct location is a big difference. And it doesn't matter with the leakage aspect if it's inside the conditioned space or outside, if the air is not making it to the farthest room. Those are BTUs that are not being delivered. So that's another shift in our mentality. Our industry needs to have is duct leakage in the conditioned space doesn't make a difference because those who measure performance know it does.
00:20:14.560 — 00:21:11.340 · Speaker 3
Yeah. It's such a tricky there's this myth out there that oh, that ducts are in the basement. It's inside the house. We don't really have to worry too much about leakage. We don't need to bother with any mastic on the duct system, man. Sure. The heat or the BTUs that are being delivered by the unit. The box.
They're staying in the home. But they are definitely not getting delivered to the places in the home where people are actually living and hanging out and wanting to be comfortable. And that put that that sets aside all the other indoor air quality issues and other things that happen. If you're not sealing the ductwork, especially in a basement or crawlspace.
I feel like we started getting into some of the technical details. I kind of think I want to go there now. You have this acronym you refer to Path. Can you walk us through that? And then I'm actually hoping to use that as an opportunity. I want to come back to the story you started at the beginning of our conversation.
I want to know what was going on with the dust in your house, because there's some very cool lessons behind that as well.
00:21:11.340 — 00:27:14.500 · Speaker 1
And I'll give you a hint, it was tied to another side of the duct system that we called the building side of the duct system. And I firmly believe that this concept, I think I first wrote about it 2013 or 2014, It was the connecting piece that tied HVC to home performance for a whole lot of people, because a lot of guys are like, why should we care about this insulation and air sealing stuff?
Because it's an extension of the duct system. So that piece kind of brought it together. But back to the Path acronym. High performance HVAC is not easy. There are so many moving principles about it that unless you start to master one at a time, you'll freeze up and you'll do nothing. We were very fortunate at the time that we came in, because the only two principles that were really being taught by NCI at that time were pressures, mainly static pressures and then airflow at the equipment, and then which is of course fan airflow and then system airflow, which is what's coming out of the registers and going back to the return drills.
We didn't the only thing about BTUs at this point, we would do a couple of temperature diagnostics and stuff, but we didn't tie it to BTUs at that point. That didn't come until I think, about 2004, 2005. And what we started figuring out is, why is it so hard for so many people who come on to do this. The implementation rate goes down, and what we started figuring out, people are being drowned by having so many things to do.
And one of the examples I like using is that of a lion tamer. If you go back to any of the old school circuses, like Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, there was a lion tamer and he held a stool, typically with four legs in front of a lion's face, and he would crack the whip, and of course, the lion would roar, but it wouldn't move.
And as a kid, you're fascinated with that, even as an adult. And you're like, why doesn't that lion jump down, smack that guy and eating? What is preventing that lion from doing that big, massive animal? It's because it's trying to look at all four legs that's still at the same time. And when it does, it freezes.
It makes no decision and it just sits there and roars. Sometimes we call this paralysis by analysis. And that's what happens with high performance HVC. All the principles, all the things that tie into it, people try to do them all at once, or they'll do them out of sequence and they're like, this stuff sucks.
It doesn't work. And it's not a matter of the tactics. It's a matter of how they're being applied. The failure is in the process and the systems that's being used to apply it. So Path was an acronym that we came up with that actually describes the journey that you're going along. But oddly enough, each of the letters stands for something as processed for high performance HVAC should be implemented.
And if the first of that is pressure, if you don't start with pressure, it's the foundational measurement of any HVAC system. Looking at the pressure side of it and talking to airside pressure. So static pressure drops and understanding how they work. I am amazed at how many people talk about static pressure, but have no fundamental understanding of how it actually works in an HVAC system.
I've seen pressures get switched on components, saying the pressure is lower at the equipment versus farther away. And that, to me is a failure in understanding the fundamentals. But the pressures were. You want to master first. Understand that. And we tie this to medical analogies all the time. We start saying instead of being an HVAC contractor, be a thermal therapist.
That's what people need right now. They need thermal therapy. And that kind of, though, is the way you get to there. When you look at vital signs that a standard medical practitioner does. They take blood pressure. They take weight, temperature, pulse. Those same core principles apply to high performance HVAC, P being the pressure static pressures a being airflow.
And you can measure these in a couple of different places. Pressures are always going to be at the equipment until you expand into the building and we'll get there. Airflow is typically taken at the equipment, but then also it can be taken at the system level. And there's three different ways that you can measure that.
But what it is, it's a way to take these principles, master them and apply them into your companies. So many guys, the smaller the company, the easier it is to apply. The larger the company, the harder it is to turn that ship. And example I've used many times over the years. I don't remember where I heard it.
Most of the time we hear stuff from people and we forget to tribute where we learned it from. I don't remember where I learned this, but trying to implement any type of long term scaled project like this is like trying to change the eight tires on 18 wheelers. It's moving down the interstate. You have to keep the machine rolling.
You can't shut the business down. So what happens is everybody tries to do everything at once. Everything comes to a grinding halt. People get frustrated. You're not paying your bills. What the path does is it allows people to slowly and incrementally apply these things to their business. So pressures first in airflow, the tea's temperature.
You start looking at temperatures at the equipment temperatures from the system. So when I'm saying system I'm talking register and grill levels. What's happening in the conditioned space. And then you can also look at it on a building site. This is the perfect blend because the Path acronym doesn't just work for HVAC, it also works with the building side as well.
The same principles apply. It's just a different application. And then finally the H is heat or BTUs. And that is where the rubber meets the road. On any design, if you've got pressure and airflow but you have no temperature, you'll have a poorly performance system. That is why most HVAC companies get service calls during the summertime.
They've got airflow, but they don't have any temperature change. So all three of these when tied together BTUs. That is the metric that our industry should be driving itself on, because that's what it's going to determine comfort what's being added and removed, and then also what's being added and removed from the building site.
So there's a constant synergy that's going on there. But that acronym is how guys are taking those principles and able to slowly implement them into their company. It's a journey. It's not a race. And so many times when guys try to do it all at once, they run into the same thing that the lion did. They're staring at all four legs.
They don't know what to do, so they do nothing.
00:27:14.500 — 00:27:24.080 · Speaker 3
And beyond their reason why folks often want to skip past pressure, which you're describing as the most basic thing. Why do they want to jump to something else? Why do they want to go ahead?
00:27:24.120 — 00:28:46.100 · Speaker 1
Sometimes it's a human nature principle that also applies to airflow. The path of least resistance, and a lot of that is to is some of the voices that are vying for their attention. There's very strong voices that have a different solution for every single problem. And a lot of times those are more glamorous and shiny than getting down into the nuts and bolts of learning how to measure static pressure.
Yeah, but a lot of times it depends on where the solution is. And with this it's a measurement. But it has to be kept in context. And that's one of the dangers with static pressure. When I started measuring it and started talking about it, nobody did this stuff. Now I am so thankful that it's on the lips of almost everyone.
If you look on any social media channel, you listen to a lot of discussions, static pressures talked about everywhere. The danger in that, though, is that its original context is totally warped and it becomes the silver bullet and it is taken and turned into things that it doesn't mean. As soon as you take static pressure and you don't combine air flow with it, you've immediately taken it out of context.
You know, high static pressure is a bad thing. Maybe. What if it's a simple blower speed adjustment? Then it's just a symptom. So these all these measurements have to be kept in context. That's why I say you have to take them and really start with what's basic. But we like to try to skip ahead. We try to short circuit things if you will.
00:28:46.140 — 00:29:46.240 · Speaker 3
Static pressure in particular. I think it's such an interesting one. Your other story at the beginning you were talking about doing a duck traverse, and I feel like when you first learn about something like taking static pressure measurements, you're like, oh my gosh, I can measure something. Yeah, but you don't realize you got to be thoughtful about how you're taking that measurement.
Because if you're taking that measurement right in the middle of turbulent flow, you're not in the proper locations on the duct system. You're like, oh, I'm measuring something, but it's actually it's a improper measurement. And then there's that last piece of, okay, you figured out how to correctly place your test equipment so you can get a proper reading.
Then you need the context of what does this mean? Yeah. Is 0.7in of water column. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing in the context of everything else that's going on with the system or with the homeowner is saying, and yeah, there's a lot of little pieces there. If you don't know what you don't know, you can get confused, thrown in the wrong direction.
Yeah, there's a lot of challenges there.
00:29:46.280 — 00:29:53.680 · Speaker 1
There's a saying that we've been using for a while. It's just because you can measure something, it doesn't mean that you should.
00:29:53.840 — 00:29:54.720 · Speaker 4
Yeah, right.
00:29:54.960 — 00:31:20.910 · Speaker 1
And that is one of the dangers that happens with learning to measure is everybody gets excited and they start shaking. We can measure all this stuff. But a measurement has to have a purpose. It has to have a reason for being taken so that you can gather data and use it for a particular situation. And that comes with discernment.
So there's two contrasts that I'm seeing with a lot of this. Now that the data is so readily and easily available. And that's the one side you've got data drowning. And on the other side you have data discernment. Anyone who has been trapped under water or had somebody dunk them under, they know the panic that sets in.
When there's the fear of drowning, you start flailing. You're trying to get away from whatever you can, and you've got so much just weight coming down on you as far as water. We're doing the same thing with data, and we don't even know it. And we wonder why I'm doing all this great stuff. Why is nobody buy it?
It's because they don't understand a word that's coming out of your mouth. You're drowning them with data and they're trying to get away. They're flailing so they will get away, and they'll go to the one life preserver that they understand. And that's dollars. They understand price. So you may be going out and doing a fantastic job, but because you can't communicate what you're doing and you're puking all this information on people, you're drowning them and they're trying to get away from you.
This is where data discernment comes in. It's knowing when to use a particular piece of information in a particular way to solve that customer's problems, because in the end, they're the ones that sign the paycheck.
00:31:20.950 — 00:31:42.830 · Speaker 2
Now, since we're talking about it and David, you said pressure is one where you hear it used and abused quite a bit. If someone's I know you guys have very long trainings just on pressure, but if you were going to boil it down, what is pressure? When do you want to look at it and what is it. Not so folks can start exercising that discernment you're coaching them on.
00:31:42.870 — 00:33:14.030 · Speaker 1
Let's start with what it's not first what it's not as air flow. That is the first thing that people think is static pressure is air flow. It is not. It is a result of air movement. Now what it is, I think it's best if you can tie this to the blood pressure example. It is the pressure that the blower and HVAC system has to operate against.
It's what it's trying to push and pull air against. The higher the pressure, the greater the fan has to work to move air and to tie that back to the blood pressure. Example. The higher your blood pressure is, the harder your heart has to work the pump blood. So when you start making these relatable tie ins that I think is where it really starts to come in, is making it easy to understand and relatable.
Because one of the things we do is we tend to talk about these measurements, as we've said, in a vacuum, so you don't have any context around them. And to me, that's one of the easiest ways for looking at pressure is it's what the blower is trying to move air against. The higher it is, the harder it's going to be for that blower to move and then breaking it down even onto a diagnostic site.
That's where you can actually start to take that and actually identify restrictions. The greater the pressures, the greater the resistance to airflow. And it's one of the key strategies in tracking down restrictions and a duct system or restrictive components. Many technicians I know have pulled out a filter and gone.
It's clean and it may be, but it sizing may be too small or the media that's being used, maybe too restrictive. Pressure helps to give us an indicator of if it's too restrictive at that given airflow.
00:33:14.070 — 00:33:14.830 · Speaker 2
Well explained.
00:33:14.870 — 00:33:37.390 · Speaker 3
Glad you got the plug in there for the air filter, which is so often a simple fix for a system that's struggling, right? It's like low hanging fruit. You got this one inch Merv 13 filter that the homeowner got excited about and slammed in there. And now you've got 0.6in of pressure drop just on the filter. So yeah pay attention to those filters.
Measure your pressures.
00:33:37.430 — 00:34:08.730 · Speaker 1
It's one of the things with the measurements too, is that you tend to want to go look for all these crazy things, and a lot of times it's the basic stuff. It's just a matter of knowing that's where the discernment comes in. It's knowing where to look and where to start starting the equipment. A lot of people go, oh man, I gotta rip the whole duct system out.
No you don't. Sometimes you can just upgrade the filter, the return drop and change the fittings coming off the coil and put a lower pressure drop coil in. And you can fix a whole lot of systems, but that's a matter of discernment. Knowing where to apply which measurements and then how to create a scope of work from it.
00:34:08.770 — 00:34:45.889 · Speaker 2
That was great. David, thank you for the path overview. NCI has been rolling out some heat pump specific trainings, which have been really excited to see how does Path get applied to heat pumps and where do things change a little bit for more traditional systems? As the folks who listen to our podcasts, what we try to do is focus on contractors who are building heat pump oriented businesses.
And a lot of times are things that are same about traditional HVAC. There are things that are different. So as you take this path and the core of the teachings that you give at NCI, how do things change and what looks the same for a heat pump system?
00:34:45.889 — 00:36:44.570 · Speaker 1
It's really going to be the same. That's the cool thing about path as it applies to any equipment type. And if anything, it can really help you keep from inheriting a bad duct system. That's one of the things I loved about it used to be, I think every HVAC companies had this happen where they'll go in, change out a piece of equipment.
They don't test the existing duct system, and the measurements don't have to be elaborate. You can get a lot of information very quickly, but as soon as you go in and you put a brand new piece of equipment on a poorly installed duct system that was previously there, you now own it. So with heat pumps, this is really important, especially if you're pulling out a fuel fired piece of equipment.
And a lot of times it's not just the pressure and the airflow aspects that you've got to worry about with a heat pump. It's the temperature, because that old furnace may have had a 60 degree rise across it, where now that heat pump, the rise across, that may be half that or less. So your duct losses and gains really start to come into play now.
So you may have great airflow and pressures. But what about the temperature. So this is where you start to apply that path and you start to see what's going to happen. I think folks over at TSA, the digital flow grid, is probably one of the best innovations for performance testing I've seen in a long time, because it takes something that was one of those measurements.
It was like a black magic type of measurement. You had to really read the bones and all that stuff, and they made it very simple. Measuring airflow. The fan inlet is probably the most difficult and worst place in the world to do it. They've got it down to a science and made it super simple. So I think having that type of a tool, if you're going in and you're looking at retrofit and a heat pump out, they've got the tool built right into it that we used to have to do a ton of math to figure out, is this stuff going to work?
What if I'm changing duct sizes? What if I'm going down an equipment size? What needs to change? And these are things that we can all predict. Now we've always been able to, but it's a matter of packaging it where it's easier to look at. So I think probably the biggest one for heat pumps is looking at the duct losses and gains.
I know that's the one that bit us the quickest when we were doing replacement work.
00:36:44.610 — 00:36:45.170 · Speaker 3
Excellent.
00:36:45.210 — 00:36:56.290 · Speaker 2
All right. Very helpful answer, David. And it reminds me of an episode we did recently with Stephen Lake, who's the CEO of a new company called Jetson and Jetsons. Interesting. Are you familiar with those guys?
00:36:56.330 — 00:36:57.090 · Speaker 1
No, I'm not.
00:36:57.130 — 00:38:03.090 · Speaker 2
Super interesting small, but they just raised $60 million from a bunch of venture capitalists. They're designing their own heat pump. They're contract manufacturing it overseas. They're selling direct to homeowner. They have their own technicians. They install. So vertically integrated, okay.
There's no distributor, there's no dealer. There's nobody else. Just Jetson does the whole thing. Okay. End to end. They've done a thousand installs. And what he said, we asked him about duct modifications. Yeah. We hear a lot that you put it. And they just do ducted heat pumps. And so you put in heat pump system like the ducts were designed for the old system.
And he said in their experience, 99 out of 100 problems with a heat pump duct system mismatch is the heat pump is oversize. What they do is they aggressively size the heat pump so it's as close to the actual load of the home. And what the found is that there ends up not being an airflow or pressure issue because the size of the system.
I'm curious in your reactions to that? Basically, it was an interesting line. I figured no one better to ask than the ductwork master himself. David Richardson.
00:38:03.090 — 00:39:50.670 · Speaker 1
The answer I don't know if there's a black or white answer about that. Like so many things in our industry, I think it depends. And if there's measurements there, that ultimately is what's going to tell you what's happening. Now, the one caution that I would have is and without knowing the full details of the measurements, just because you've got pressure and airflow doesn't mean you've got BTUs.
So that would be the one thing I would be very interested in knowing is what other duct losses and gains. Now the aggressively downsizing. We've used that tactic a lot and it does work. It's actually a very easy way to do it, especially if you can reduce the load on the building and bring that equipment more in line, I think.
And a simple step that guys can go out and do is if the size of the outdoor unit magically works out the 500 square foot per ton, it's oversize. Come on, at that point in time. And it blew us away years ago when we did, it was a structural insulated panel house. It was 3500ft². Everyone else was coming in at five tons.
We came in at two tons and we were scared to death. We were oversize and I think we were. And they're like, why are you so much smaller? Because we understand your house and they're like, but you're twice what everybody else is. We know. But that's how you prove the measurements. But because of that, we were able to now was granted a completely different style of a home versus a retrofit.
One of the nice things that newer equipment does with inverter based heat pumps is the temperature swings are not anywhere near as extreme as they used to be. And as that inverter ramps up and down, it's a lot easier to match load conditions. So that may actually reduce the duct loss and gains. As I said, it depends on where it's at.
So basement you can get away with a little bit. If it's an unconditioned space like crawlspace or an attic, I'd be very interested in knowing about existing installations and things along that line, what the delivered BTU capacities were. I think it would be very interesting to know.
00:39:50.710 — 00:40:26.730 · Speaker 3
The other element. That is what they say they're doing is so they design the equipment. They're designing all the controls. The controls are they can actually they're remotely monitoring the system and they have command and control via their software. They have real time temperature, pressure, air quality measurements as part of their system.
And so they say that in the few times where they have had issues, they can actually turn some knobs and dials and actually adjust what that temperature rise is of the equipment remotely.
00:40:26.730 — 00:40:29.290 · Speaker 1
So they're changing it through the equipment settings.
00:40:29.330 — 00:41:07.710 · Speaker 3
Yeah. And so obviously there's a trade off. Right. If you're going to get a bigger temperature rise, you're going to have you lose some efficiency. If it's a with that heat pump or there's some other issues. But supposedly that's the other way that they're managing this in a way that honestly, I haven't really heard of any other manufacturer that exposes that many kind of options for you to really play with the equipment and To help protect you if you've got a bad design.
Basically, that's what I'm hearing. If they aren't carefully measuring the duct system and they're being super aggressive with how they're sizing the equipment, they're going to have to get in trouble sometimes and this is their way around it. That's what I understand.
00:41:07.750 — 00:41:23.630 · Speaker 1
That's out there. That's interesting. I would love to know more about it and how they're doing it, because it is one of those it depends things. If they've got all the measurements in their lining up, then I would love to know. I guess you could say what location their ducks are in and if that's a regional thing or if it's national.
That's fascinating.
00:41:23.630 — 00:42:11.730 · Speaker 2
He did say they're always measuring static pressure. Great step. It's one of the things they always do. Yeah it's a super interesting approach. Now there's so many more questions we want to ask you, but you just said something that piqued my interest because I was talking to a customer about it yesterday.
You were at a job. Everyone else came in at five tons. You came in at two tons. I was just talking to someone who's like, and I love amply. It's actually making my life a little bit harder because I keep coming in lower, and I have to have these conversations with homeowners. In the homeowners. I just want what I have.
What I have today keeps me comfortable. It's worked. It's been there for 15 years. I don't want smaller. You're making me nervous with this whole smaller thing. I see your measurements. You gotta. How do you coach people to have that conversation with a homeowner when you're like, I got the data. My answer is different than anyone else's.
When it's gonna make some homeowners nervous, it is.
00:42:11.770 — 00:44:19.530 · Speaker 1
And if you're not looking at the ducks assessment, I keep going back to thermal losses and gains. If you don't look at those and you are aggressively sizing a heat pump, then it is going to act like it's undersized, even though it may be correctly sized because you're a victim of the duck gains and duck losses in that 57% number could very easily come back to haunt you.
I can't take credit for this. A friend of mine, John Boylan with Lakeside Services out of Michigan, uses an analogy of a pizza and a skill that he uses as he will take four probes. He'll go farthest, return grill for the supply, and then he does, entering and exiting temperatures at the equipment, and he compares them.
And he'll do some quick math that we teach in our residential system performance course. And he'll say, basically, right now I'll round up the 57 to 60% and what John will share with the customers. Right now, you're paying for 100% of the pizza, but only 60% of it's getting delivered. So basically four slices out of ten are being eaten by the time they get to your house.
And this is happening nonstop. So what he focuses on is what's making it into the house. And I think that is where anyone who's having this conversation has got to change it. They have to move from equipment to system. And of course, the easiest thing to ask is, do you mind if I see the other contractors load calculations?
That's gonna cut it short right there. So a combination of asking for the information and they're like, this is what we've always had. They need to understand equipment's not like it. It always has been. You can cover some really simple analogies, whether it's automobiles that there's constant upgrades and.
Automobiles are a simple one because everyone understands the upgrades and. Automobiles used to be you could go get a car that had a 454 in it. Basic carburetor. You could work on it in your backyard. Cars today have got 26 miles of wiring on it, and they're all connected to APS. HVAC systems are the same way.
They're much more precise, and there's a much higher level skill, so we can actually get more out of a smaller unit, just like you can get more out of a six cylinder with a turbocharger, then you can out of a 454.
00:44:19.570 — 00:44:22.530 · Speaker 2
I love that answer because it's basically education, right?
00:44:22.570 — 00:44:23.890 · Speaker 1
It is. And it's relatable.
00:44:23.930 — 00:44:36.050 · Speaker 2
Yeah. Figure that out to have the conversation with the homeowner. Get them to see what you're seeing in a way that's approachable. Like the pizza. I don't want a pizza shown at my house that has four slices eaten by the guy delivering it. That sounds terrible.
00:44:36.090 — 00:44:37.130 · Speaker 1
Kind of dirty, isn't it?
00:44:37.170 — 00:44:38.250 · Speaker 2
Yeah, it's a great answer.
00:44:39.170 — 00:44:47.030 · Speaker 3
Yeah. And just this challenge that folks think bigger is better. That is definitely not the case when it comes to most things, especially HVAC.
00:44:47.070 — 00:45:12.270 · Speaker 1
Yeah, but I think that's the conversation that has to happen with that equipment versus system. That's why the focus has got to be taken off of the equipment. And I think for heat pumps, for those that are positioning themselves as heat pump contractors, that's the biggest danger is because right now you have companies that are giving away free furnaces, free air conditioners.
And what's coming up next is free heat pump. And your differentiation just died.
00:45:12.310 — 00:46:01.810 · Speaker 3
Yeah. And I love what you were talking about. Obviously there's a lot more training behind taking this for pro measurement. You can show the homeowner that this isn't some black magic or you're making up the numbers. You could be like, hey, this is where the air is coming out of your unit. We're going to measure the what the temperature is here.
We're going to measure at this supply over out in your bedroom where you're having a comfort problem. Look at what the temperature is at the beginning of the duct system. Look where the temperature is at the end of the duct system. Look, if it's the summertime and you're expecting 55 degree air, hopefully, maybe coming out of that supply.
And it's actually at 80 degrees by the time it gets out of that grill. Then the homeowners oh my gosh, I understand people can understand temperature rise like that across the duct system. And they understand oh my gosh, those are my four slices of pizza that are just going into my attic essentially. Or the attics coming in.
Yeah.
00:46:01.850 — 00:47:27.710 · Speaker 1
And what you just said, Eric, is the key to it. I don't know if it's as much educational as he can helping people become detectives in their own homes to help them understand what's going on, why this room has always been uncomfortable. My situation, why had dust elephants running across our floor, that kind of thing, but helping them find solutions to their problems.
Because if they don't have any pain points, there's nothing there for them to solve. But sometimes so many people have become so accustomed with the problems. They just gotten used to seeing those blind to something you're so used to the second floor being ten degrees hotter and turning the fans on. So that's why there's always little visual clues that you want to look through.
But all of us, we say we're in the heat pump, the high performance business. We're in the PayPal business. It's just HPC. Heat pumps are how we get there. We can't lose sight of that fact. And so many times we take the things that should be very personal and we make them very impersonal. But if you can take it, tie it to a customer and let them become a detective in their own home.
I knew if I got a balancing hood in someone's hands or a thermal image camera that the job was mine. I knew it because now they were engaged. And what's incredible is when a customer and there's even a tactic to this that you've got to be very careful with, because what most people do. Oh, man, everything's messed up.
We're going to go find all this messed up stuff and they're like, hey, I'm coming into your house. I'm going to give you a quote. Your house sucks. Here's everything that's wrong with it. And they're like, get out.
00:47:29.590 — 00:47:43.570 · Speaker 1
So we get excited, but we take the wrong approach. So with this approach, let's the customer say, look at what I'm finding. What does this mean. They're finding the problems and you explain it instead of telling them their house sucks, which more than likely it does.
00:47:45.130 — 00:48:03.690 · Speaker 1
And by the way, that's what was wrong with my house. It literally sucked. So that's where all the dust, which was cellulose insulation, was coming from. I was dumping 200 cfm into my basement, which is partially conditioned, but I didn't have any return. So it was pulling all the rest of the return out of the wherever it could get it on my upper level of a ranch.
00:48:04.130 — 00:48:06.370 · Speaker 3
Through your walls and into your house. Wow.
00:48:06.410 — 00:48:40.790 · Speaker 1
Yep. Because I thought I did a good job, but I didn't. So it's amazing. It's some of the most complicated problems that we run into our industry boil down to some of the most basic fundamentals. And what's cool is with that homeowner interaction, there's third party tools amply for the testing side, you've got measure quick tech with their True Flow app that take very complicated principles, and they make them visual so customer can go oh reds bad greens good.
Yeah. For yellow we need to be aware of that. What's going on? Totally It's making lives a lot easier. So thank you guys for what you do.
00:48:40.830 — 00:48:52.270 · Speaker 2
Our pleasure. Those are incredible answers across the board. And that you're opening story was like an itch in Eric's soul. So thank you for getting that answer there at the end. He was not going to let you off this podcast until he got that.
00:48:53.030 — 00:49:30.150 · Speaker 1
Yeah, that was an aha moment. Because at that point, until I had to solve it on my own. When you start making things personal, there's a real connection there. And I had almost a hatred for building science when I started doing the high performance HVAC side, because I felt like it had let me down. Blower doors were supposed to be the saving grace going in and sale and stuff.
That was supposed to be the saving grace. The principles were sound. It's just how I was using them. And I'm concerned that same thing happens with high performance HVAC principles. People don't have success. They blame the principles instead of the process that the principles are being applied. And I see it happening so much.
00:49:30.190 — 00:49:43.250 · Speaker 3
Folks should definitely check that out. Steve does just an excellent job digging into the duct leakage to the outside issue, whether that's in your attic or in a closed crawlspace or basement. Exactly. What you were talking about was going on in your house. And.
00:49:43.250 — 00:51:32.470 · Speaker 1
Yeah, and mine was intentional. Yes. What was so horrible? It was intentional. It can happen in the conditioned space. This is why measurements into individual rooms are so important. And that's where the path principle ties into the building side. There's so many people that want to do the right thing, and they try to get involved in home performance.
And they're like, customers are looking at me going, why are you talking about insulation? If there is no connecting point between what you're going to discuss with them in the HVAC system, you probably shouldn't bring it up. There needs to be a connecting point. And that's where that building side of the duct system concept came from, because they operate on identical principles.
When you look at a duct, it's got to be airtight. It has to be sealed, it has to be insulated. Right. You've got dampers to control airflow. A building is the same thing. It's just made out of different materials. It needs to be airtight. You need dampers that control their movement or call it interior doors, conditions based manual dampers.
So when you look at these things, it's the same principles. They need to be air tight. They need to be controlled because you can't control air unless you first contain it. And that's where so many problems come in. There's building issues that so many people get blamed for. We're getting ready to go in in summertime.
I guarantee you right now that they're going to be just across the country. I don't care what region you're from going into the summer two story homes. You've got a second floor system that is running ten degrees hotter, and you can hang meat on the first floor, and people are going to go in and say, we're going to put in bigger equipment.
You're not facing an equipment issue. Many times you could go in and measure the BTUs, and they'll be pretty close to what's needed. You're fighting a building problem. I don't care how good of an HVAC system you put in, you're never going to overcome a 130 degree attic air in training into the conditioned space.
You cannot overcome that. And the surface temperature changes that it causes you.
00:51:32.470 — 00:51:37.930 · Speaker 3
You can't just swap the box. The home is a system. You got to look at the duct work. Holy cow.
00:51:37.970 — 00:51:46.170 · Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. Look. The envelope. Yeah. This is Alex Mini's line. HVAC is the only trade that gets blamed for everyone else's mistakes.
00:51:46.210 — 00:51:56.090 · Speaker 1
Yes, that's why you have to make the connection. Because no homeowner ever is going to say I'm uncomfortable in this room. It's got to be the insulators fault. Or because the guy did a crappy framing job.
00:51:56.090 — 00:51:56.690 · Speaker 2
Never.
00:51:56.690 — 00:52:12.890 · Speaker 1
So it doesn't mean you gotta fix it, but you need to understand it. And it's just like a load calculation. I've heard so many guys that are like, oh, that doesn't apply to us. It doesn't. Low calculations have nothing to do with HVAC, but they have everything to do with it. It's 100% building science.
00:52:13.890 — 00:52:17.770 · Speaker 3
Yeah, okay. That's the connection. I was like, wait a minute. It is.
00:52:17.810 — 00:52:24.970 · Speaker 1
Yeah. It's 100% building science, but that is what drives the load. So it has everything to do with HVAC.
00:52:25.050 — 00:52:57.510 · Speaker 3
Yeah. This is the point of confusion about manual J. People think manual J is the end of sizing. Well, manual J is. That's about heat losses and heat gain in the home. It actually has nothing to do with the equipment. That's your point you're making. It's just it's filling science. It's about the envelope.
The only part that can be, I think, bridges into the equipment, or at least the other part of the system, is that we think about duct losses and gains from the duct system, but that's still that is not talking about the box. LJ does not consider the box at all.
00:52:57.670 — 00:53:00.670 · Speaker 1
No. That's why there's other alphabet manuals to refer to.
00:53:00.750 — 00:53:01.870 · Speaker 5
That's right.
00:53:03.070 — 00:53:04.630 · Speaker 1
And a process to apply them.
00:53:04.710 — 00:53:39.570 · Speaker 3
Yeah. All right David. So we've been talking a lot about pressure airflow. We've been talking a lot about duct systems. Let's talk a little bit about Ductless. A lot of this cold climate heat pump movement started on the ductless side. Obviously if you don't have any ductwork, you don't have any airflow to measure with the duct system.
But what else do we need to know when we're thinking about retrofitting a home with Ductless. What are some of these high performance contracting principles that we still absolutely need to be applying to Ductless systems?
00:53:39.610 — 00:54:52.710 · Speaker 1
The first part let's get to the equipment is installing it, commissioning it the right way. There's so many great tools that will increase the life of equipment if you just use them. I mentioned Measure Quick earlier such a fantastic tool for doing equipment startups. The other thing is, I think moving into the building side is understanding the building itself and knowing that if you're going to go ductless, that you may have some dead spots inside that building and knowing how the load profiles are going to work.
The one thing from a performance standpoint that we like to focus on with a traditional forest air system is filtration. And I'm here to tell you, if somebody figures out how to put a better filter on a ductless, they will rule the market, because I know you guys have seen them. You've seen the filters, you've seen the blower wheels which are wet, which are going to contribute to all that crud sticking to them anyway.
So if somebody comes up with that and they're able to develop that into a nice package that works, they'll own the market because people will flock to them. That I think is probably the biggest issue that I've seen from a performance standpoint is in order for a system to perform, it's got to be clean and it is tough to keep many splits clean.
00:54:52.750 — 00:55:30.130 · Speaker 3
Yeah, it requires a homeowner training to remind them that, especially if you've never had any filtration in your home at all, like you're in an old house running a boiler, you've never had any kind of ventilation or filtration those first few months running a ductless unit. You might need to be cleaning those filters every 2 or 3 months.
Right. Because you've got all this accumulated dust and that needs to be taken care of. And it's interesting. I live in a house with ductless mini splits. It's pretty obvious to me when that needs to be cleaned if I'm not paying attention to the regular cycle because holy cow, the airflow starts to drop pretty dramatically.
Temperatures start to drop. It's. Yeah. You got to keep that air filter clean.
00:55:30.170 — 00:57:22.150 · Speaker 1
Yeah. The one thing I would caution two people in going with Ductless is to really look at the situation. It's become so standard to start throw, especially in bonus room over garages, finish rooms over garages, people immediately. If there's a comfort problem, want to throw a mini split in it? That's like you've got a gaping wound and you put a Band-Aid over it.
You need other approaches for that. And on site that I did years ago down in Atlanta, Georgia, really opened up my eyes to this when I had a group of three contractors and one of their homes, we were like, okay, bonus rooms uncomfortable. It was this one gentleman's, his wife's office. It was so uncomfortable she couldn't work there.
And so we go in, we do some measurements. First off, I ask everybody, what are your solutions? What do you think? Everybody, let's go with a mini split. All right. Let's do some testing and see what we can find. We go out and we find that we have almost no air going into this finished room over the garage. We also turn around and we see some of the most common problems with bonus rooms.
All studs wide open on the back so all six sides of the insulation not enclosed. It's amazing what you can do with foil faced wrap on a knee wall. Now so many guys will say, oh, it has to be hard sheeting. You have to do it this way. No you don't. If you put FSK on there full of face wrap, it's amazing what you can do with a cleat at the top and the bottom.
It's easy to fold up. It provides the radiant barrier. It encloses all six sides. We did it for years. Go in there, did that, made sure that there were no openings underneath the floor so that he could short circuit and travel between those floors. We were lucky there because everything was on. Had plywood in the back.
So did the seal adjusted airflow. The temperature started coming down immediately, and these guys are all looking at one another and they're like, what did we just do? And I was like, you just did a duct renovation, and you charge the same price for it that you would charge for a mini split.
00:57:22.350 — 00:57:24.490 · Speaker 3
And you probably have less labor.
00:57:24.530 — 00:57:37.050 · Speaker 1
Yeah, I'm trying to cut anybody. I got a mini split sales or anything, but there's more than one way to address a problem. Sometimes it's on the duct system side. Sometimes you will need equipment. This one was a combination of both building and duct repairs.
00:57:37.090 — 00:58:19.930 · Speaker 3
Yeah. And that type of solution too is amazing. So you charge the same amount, but it's still a better solution for the homeowner. Right. You've got fewer systems to maintain. Right. Because you can use that one existing system, you're going to obviously have lower operational costs because okay, maybe you can put that ductless mini split in that frog that I like to refer to them as that frozen room over the garage, rather than the finished room over the garage.
So the mini split may be able to address that comfort issue, but now that mini split is just cranking to deal with this terrible envelope that around that space. And so at the end of the day, you can still have a very profitable job and the homeowner is actually going to end up with a better long term solution.
So everybody's winning.
00:58:19.970 — 00:58:43.110 · Speaker 1
Yeah. And then other times it is the solution because you don't have the necessary free area to get ducks there. We used to see this quite commonly. People would say, oh, it's just a room over the garage, just put a six inch up there to temper it. No, that's where people want to have either an office or a playroom for their kids.
And if they've only given you room for a six inch duck, then that ductless is a perfect solution for that, because you may not have any other choice.
00:58:43.110 — 00:58:51.230 · Speaker 3
So just to wrap on this question, what I'm basically hearing on the mini split side, all the same principles apply. You just don't have ductwork to think about.
00:58:51.270 — 00:58:51.870 · Speaker 5
Yeah.
00:58:51.910 — 00:58:53.990 · Speaker 1
And somebody please develop a good filter.
00:58:54.030 — 00:59:04.790 · Speaker 2
David this has been awesome. Thank you so much for joining. If folks listen to this and want more of David Richardson and what I heard here, where should they go? How can they learn more about you and NCI.
00:59:04.830 — 00:59:38.850 · Speaker 1
Come to National Comfort Institute. Com search around and you'll find my contact information on the site. And usually we're at the industry conferences a couple of our favorites the HPC school symposium. We're there every year. It's probably our favorite show because I think mimics are so much. I guess the next place that will be is our high performance HVAC summit down in Pigeon Forge coming up the first week of September, and we will actually be at Dollywood.
So we're at the Heart Song Hotel. They're working with the Dollywood Resort, so it should be a fun time, but that'll be the next place. So come hang out with me in Pigeon Forge.
00:59:38.890 — 00:59:42.810 · Speaker 2
And we will be there too. So looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks, guys. Thank you David.
00:59:42.810 — 00:59:43.690 · Speaker 5
Thanks, David.
00:59:46.890 — 01:00:09.250 · Speaker 3
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01:00:10.770 — 01:00:13.250 · Speaker 3
No .com. Just dot energy. Thanks a lot.