In this episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, hosts Ed Smith and Eric Fitz, co-founders of Amply Energy, sit down with Mike Gundersen, owner of Compass Heating and Air Conditioning and HVAC dual fuel expert from the Chicago area. Mike shares his journey from the military to leading a successful HVAC business, focusing on doing things the right way.
With extensive experience in the field, including a significant focus on heat pump technology and dual fuel systems, Mike shares his expertise on why heat pumps win on comfort. He discusses the technical aspects of heat pump installations, the benefits of dual-fuel systems, and how he has built his business gradually, focusing on doing the basics right consistently.
Mike’s expertise is not only in the installation but also in the practical application of heat pump systems in various environments, emphasizing how proper system design can lead to significant improvements in comfort and customer satisfaction – in addition to efficiency savings.
[00:32] - Introduction to Mike Gundersen and the Heat Pump Podcast
[01:12] - Mike Gundersen's journey from military service to HVAC expertise
[05:16] - The business model and driving principles of Mike's HVAC company
[15:45] - Exploring dual fuel system advantages
[26:01] - Technological advancements in heat pump systems
[39:30] - Mike discusses resources for continuous learning and improvement in the HVAC field
[42:47] -Closing thoughts
Connect with our guest Mike Gundersen:
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Mike Gundersen: The heat pumps are phenomenal. It is mostly a comfort thing, more than a cost savings. Now, if you put in a heat pump system, it's going to be more efficient than your standard air conditioner. So you are saving in the summer as well. The variable speed is just there's no reason to have a two stage anymore. Definitely no single stage systems, but if you're putting in a heat pump or a gas furnace, whatever it is you're doing, it should always be a heat pump. Right. And you should never put in an air conditioner. Never replace an air conditioner with another one. There's no benefit to it.
[00:00:44] Ed Smith: Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump podcast. I'm Ed Smith.
[00:00:47] Eric Fitz: And I am Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amplify Energy.
[00:00:50] Ed Smith: So we are telling the stories of folks who have built successful heat pump focused businesses. So we're very lucky today to have Mike Gunderson from the Chicago area. Join us. Mike, welcome to the pod.
[00:01:02] Mike Gundersen: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:01:03] Ed Smith: Pleasure. All right, Mike, we're going to get deep into your business and ask a bunch of technical questions. But to start, we just want to get to know you. Tell us the Mike Gunderson story and how you got to where you are running a successful HVAC business.
[00:01:19] Mike Gundersen: I guess I'll start just with entering the military. I went into the military right out of high school. I was a crew chief on E-3s. Most people would be more familiar, maybe with Awacs. If you watch movies, it's not the real Awacs that you see on there. But yeah, E-3, I did that for, a total of 15 years in the Air Force as a mechanic. I did go to heating and Air conditioning school when I was stationed down in Oklahoma, and thought I was going to get out and do heating and air conditioning for a company full time. I decided to stay in with military, and so I would change my shift and work the swing or night shift and do heating and air conditioning during the day.
[00:02:00] Ed Smith: Wait, you'd be a mechanic for the Air Force at night and then.
[00:02:05] Mike Gundersen: Yes. Yeah.
[00:02:06] Ed Smith: And then also do HVAC during the day.
[00:02:08] Mike Gundersen: Correct.
[00:02:09] Ed Smith: For the Air Force two, where that was like.
[00:02:11] Mike Gundersen: No, it was that was a civilian job.
[00:02:13] Ed Smith: Okay. All right. Hustler. All right, I love it.
[00:02:15] Eric Fitz: You took the easy route. Sounds like. Yeah.
[00:02:18] Mike Gundersen: Right. Yeah, that.
[00:02:19] Ed Smith: Sounds super.
[00:02:20] Mike Gundersen: Easy. It's actually pretty funny because going to school in Oklahoma, you get to the section for boilers and hydronic heating. They're like, yeah, you're never going to see this. And you skip right past it. And then I decided to move up to the Chicago land area. Yeah. Boilers everywhere. So.
[00:02:35] Ed Smith: How funny.
[00:02:36] Mike Gundersen: Yeah. Now that's one of the specialties that, uh. It's fun. It's fun to get into things that are different. And boilers were definitely that. I remember moving up here not being from Chicago. It's like, please do not send me into the city and don't put me on boilers. The company that I went to work for, that's what they did for a month straight, I was I was in Chicago working on boilers every day. It was definitely an interesting time. So back then we didn't have GPS, right? That was 2005. So you had the map books. So it's really thick and you're flipping from one page to another. It's like you're learning what street goes north and south, east and west. When GPS came out, I was like, wow, I have a new best friend.
[00:03:16] Ed Smith: I remember those. It's like, I gotta go from A1 to now D7 because I just got to the edge of A1.
[00:03:22] Mike Gundersen: Yeah, yeah. You find out really quickly. The streets that go through every town, right? But some towns you'll go in and a street changes a name just for their town. Even the same street. And then restarts again. So, yeah, there was pretty funny. I'd get into the Chicago, Evanston, Skokie area, and I was very, very happy for what I called the streets that were the K streets. Right? Like Kidzville. And all of them were K's, but you knew they went east and west, so that was north and south. It was nice. Off of Irving Park goes all the way into the into the city from the suburbs. So we're finding those trees that helped out. Now it just doesn't matter. It's been a while.
[00:03:58] Mike Gundersen: Well, thank you for your service. And then when you got out, you moved to Chicago. You go work for someone else's HVAC company.
[00:04:06] Mike Gundersen: That's correct.
[00:04:07] Ed Smith: Tell us more.
[00:04:07] Mike Gundersen: I went to work for a company up in the Northbrook area, North Shore. So we worked along the lake a lot, you know, again, a lot of boilers. I was there for, uh, about five years. I went to work for a company in the city. And, uh, after being there for a couple of years, I decided that it was probably better to to do our own thing. So my wife and I decided that that's what we were going to do. And we started from nothing, really. We had went out and bought a truck, the van, and, uh, she basically supported everything until we could do it on our own. So with her, she did. She's, you know, business management degree and human resources is what she was working in. And, uh, prior to the company, you know, prior to us having the HVAC company. So it worked out really well. She's been fantastic. She runs he runs the day to day. So it's pretty nice. I would say the biggest reason for us, you know, starting the business was because there were things that we would like to have done and we were working for somebody else. You can't you just gotta do whatever it is their model is. And it wasn't what we were interested in doing.
[00:05:16] Ed Smith: And so tell us about the model of compass, like having had that as your reason for starting it. Like what did you want to do. What type of company did you want to build and what type of company have you built?
[00:05:27] Mike Gundersen: Well, so we started out, you know, we'd like to do things differently. So it was a lot of pride in what things looked I was doing. I was primarily a service technician when we started. Obviously I did installations when we started the company. It was something that I had to do, but it was about making it look as well as it performed. One of those things that was just you wanted to be able to show people why your work was different necessarily because of a brand or anything, but this is what we do to make sure that you're not going to have air sucking in around a filter or noise, just different things that you would, you thought were important to the operation of the system. And a lot of places it has more to do with how many furnaces can you sell. And that wasn't really what we were interested in. It was more the performance of the system and selecting a system to solve problems that customers were having. And so we started out, like I say, it was me in a van. We grew over the years, had some great people with us. We still have, like I say, Scott has been with us. He was the first guy that came on with Beth and I once we started bringing folks in, and he's with us still to this day. So we have a great team in our install department. We have great service technicians and it's just been a really nice time. We're starting with myself now. We're up to what we have six vehicles on the road, ten total employees at this point, and it is definitely going to be growing beyond that here very quickly.
[00:06:57] Ed Smith: Congrats. What year did you go out on your own?
[00:07:00] Mike Gundersen: It was the end of 2011, so we started, I believe January 1st, 2012 is when we did the incorporating.
[00:07:09] Ed Smith: That's great.
[00:07:11] Eric Fitz: And I'm curious, just given your background. Yeah. How did you get those first set of customers and kind of get things going initially? What was your approach?
[00:07:19] Mike Gundersen: That's funny you ask actually. So I will say my mother in law was a very, very big proponent of the company. She worked at a local hospital. So all of the nurses and people that she would talk to, she would always be referring, and she did a great job with that. I had a great neighbor, Fred, who, uh, he knew everybody in town that we worked in, and he was leaving my cards with people, talking to people, and it was just a lot of word of mouth we would do our town we were in in Streamwood. They had a summer celebration during the summertime in the mid-summer. And, uh, we would go out there, they would have a tent set up for businesses, and you would talk to people as they walked through, mostly getting in front of people and just introducing yourself to folks and making sure they knew that you were doing heating and air conditioning on your own as a business. And that's how we got started. We didn't buy any customer lists. I didn't take over another company. It was all from scratch.
[00:08:14] Eric Fitz: 100% amazing.
[00:08:16] Mike Gundersen: It was a lot of work, I won't lie, but I do think it was worth it for sure.
[00:08:20] Eric Fitz: Awesome. I can't resist asking this question. I noticed on your company marketing site there's a special section for Mike's Pepper garden. Can you just say a little bit more about what? That's what that's all about? I love it, by the way, but our.
[00:08:36] Mike Gundersen: Our marketing company we work with, he likes to put things out there so people see more than just, hey, the HVAC guy or anything like that. So, I did start sort of growing hot peppers in 2020 more than a normal, right. So I was growing them well before. I grow them in pots and move them around. And it was an interesting story. So my oldest son graduated high school that year. Very interesting for sure. Right. He was able to watch his graduation on TV. It ended up being the wrong graduation from a town, I think, in Iowa.
[00:09:09] Eric Fitz: Oh my gosh.
[00:09:10] Mike Gundersen: And everybody had been stuck in their house not really doing anything. And we got all finished. And I had these potted pepper plants sitting in the back corner of the yard and like, you know, I'm not really ready for summer to be over with. And I brought him in the house, put them under a little light that I had actually gotten for seeds and never used. But everyone was trying to find things. When you're bored out of your mind, not being able to go and do anything, go anywhere. But I started come to realize that you could grow hot peppers throughout the entire winter. I had 3 or 4 rounds of peppers. I kept those plants actually, for about four years. But long story short, now I grow a lot of peppers. I think last year I had just over 200 plants that I took out of the basement. I give them to neighbors. I everybody wants some sort of peppers.
[00:09:56] Eric Fitz: So wow.
[00:09:58] Mike Gundersen: This year I do still do a lot of the pepper, but I have a lot of other things as well. Growing my own vegetables in the basement and everything. So it's all or nothing either way. My mom always told me and my wife, she's kind of on that boat as well.
[00:10:12] Ed Smith: So you're one of the rare houses where you actually use the plant aspect of the manual J because there's so many, it throws off humidity and everything else.
[00:10:22] Mike Gundersen: It does. Yeah, yeah. It's fine. The whole plant thing is just I don't want to say it's gotten out of hand, but now I have everything in a tent. And of course if you have a grow tent, then you get all of the marketing for other types of plants. It actually helped a little bit with some of the problems I had. When you have an indoor plant, you get like mud looks look like little grainy crystals almost underneath the leaves, and it all has to do with perforation of the plant. All the water absorbed absorbs has to come out somewhere. It's like breathing, right? So one of the things I was like, well, you know, I mean, a plant's a plant. So let me read some of these books that they keep sending me in the mail with all these pamphlets and everything, and learned all about vapor pressure deficit and keeping humidity and temperature in line so that the plant can breathe properly. And, man, it made a world of difference. So I'm very thankful to those folks that. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's awesome. Take a lot of pride in their plants as well.
[00:11:15] Eric Fitz: Nice. And you got the, uh, the building science plant science synergy going on there to, you know, to you're worried about airflow, humidity, temperature, pressure.
[00:11:24] Mike Gundersen: 100%. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. And to your point, I do have, uh, humidity that we take care of down there as well because it's constantly circulating air and I'm adding moisture to that area. So yeah, there's a lot to that.
[00:11:37] Ed Smith: That's great.
[00:11:37] Eric Fitz: Awesome.
[00:11:38] Ed Smith: So Mike in what you've built today. So you're mainly focused on residential, right?
[00:11:44] Mike Gundersen: Not that is correct. Yes.
[00:11:46] Ed Smith: And so there's no average job. Every home is unique. But if I pushed you what is a typical compass job look like? Like what equipment are you guys using? What's the setup?
[00:12:00] Mike Gundersen: So our primary brand that we use is Daikin. You know, we've been a Mitsubishi dealer for a very long time, basically since the day one, since we started, some of the other places that I worked at, I was the heat pump guy or Ductless guy. And I really thought they were a great product. Fortunately, Mitsubishi doesn't make gas furnaces, so that was a problem. They did come out with a coil about a year and a half or so ago, finally. But it does make gas furnaces as well. They have fantastic systems for dual fuel, which is a big part of what we do up here. The all electric is great. I will say when I can get into it a it a little bit later as well. But when it comes to heat pump systems, a lot of people are like, oh, they work. They're rated at 13 below zero. I can tell you firsthand the Mitsubishi system I had in my last office at 25 below zero, it had no problems keeping up. It was the great systems. Daikin. Same thing. It's all about selecting the equipment for what it is that the customer expects out of the system. So when we are putting in systems, I do feel sorry for anybody who puts in a straight air conditioner anymore. There's not really a great price difference, especially with rebates if they qualify. I'm probably getting a little ahead of things, but when it comes to designing a system, that's a question it has to be asked.
[00:13:17] Mike Gundersen: What do you expect the heat pump to do? When we're putting one in, most common people would say, hey, I just want to put in the heat pump and let it run as much as it can. And then if the furnace has to take over, that's fine, right? So a great dual fuel aspect of that when it comes to dual fuel, I have a dual fuel at my house. I put it in. It's a Daikin VRV life system. And the reason for that is I didn't have a heat pump in my house prior. We moved into this house about six years ago. It was hot. My bedroom was over the garage. So in the summertime, if it's 70 degrees, it's too hot for Mike. So we would look at the house and I was like, yeah, I know we're either going to be putting Ductless in here or there's going to be something that takes care of this. Otherwise I'm going to be in the basement all the time. The VRV life just worked out for us for many reasons, right? And it comes to designing and the knowing what comes in to play. So for in this case there was a the existing system had a three and a half ton air conditioner. But back in the late 80s, a three and a half ton, even four ton air conditioners had a three quarter inch suction line. Anything now that size, most of the time you're going to look at least 7/8, possibly an inch and an eighth.
[00:14:29] Mike Gundersen: It sounds like some of the newer refrigerants. It depends on which one you're using. You may wind up using smaller ones again, But aside from that, when I'm looking at that, I said, wow, I got to tear out 40ft of my basement ceiling to replace a line set. Or if I go with a vrrv life, I can leave that line set, clean it really well, and then just let my system know, like, hey, it's bigger, right? So the RV life only needed a 5/8 suction line, so I had to let it know that it's a larger suction line than was necessary. And also the liquid line is not insulated, so it would only run at a capacity that would keep the refrigerant lines from sweating. Right. Because normally on a V type system you would insulate both lines. This system allowed me to do that and add a ductless wall unit up in my bedroom off of the same outdoor unit. So we've done many of those systems as well. The very nice. It's, uh, it's the only system that I can put a gas furnace on a VR or most companies, it's called Vref. That's the only one that has a gas furnace available to run everyone else there. Vrf systems are all electric and that's it. So we went with the vhb life in our house for that reason. For the little items, smaller lines that I think being the biggest one.
[00:15:45] Eric Fitz: So so you start off by saying that you installed Mitsubishi and they perform really well at cold temperatures. It's about selecting that equipment. Why did you still end up with a dual fuel system? Why not just go all electric? Yeah. What was the.
[00:15:57] Mike Gundersen: Yeah. Well, so, you know, it's one of those things when I put my system in. I love the heat pump side of things, especially Ductless. But you just don't know. You know, you're going from a big gas furnace in the house and you're like, wow, I, I'm going to put in. I ended up putting in a four ton Vav systems are full size. You don't have half sizes, right? There is no three and a half or a two and a half. So I went with the four ton and then put my coil proper size coil on the furnace. And then of course it also takes care of the ductless in the room. I'll be honest with you, I didn't think that the heat pump would work as well as it does. So I think I was like, well, I'll, I'll have the gas when I need it. The reason we moved into this house was our previous house. We were told by a solar company that they wouldn't put solar on because it was shaded too much at the time, couldn't remove trees, or wasn't anything that I could do to eliminate that. So my neighbor's trees would have too much cast, too much shadow on the home as well. So at that point, I knew I wasn't going to do anything else to the house because I wanted to have solar and be able to use the heat pump for as much as I wanted to, essentially. Right. So the system was designed, you can go minus five before it switches over to gas and guess it does it. So if I want to set it to minus five or 15 or 20, I can do that.
[00:17:14] Mike Gundersen: But it'll warm down that low and in my duct system off of the same unit will still run. I've had it running at below zero with no issue either, but the gas does switch over at five as long as I can go on that particular system, but that's why I didn't go all electric. I think I might have been staying a little bit earlier. Back up heat. A lot of people, because of the ratings, you can get out of heat pumps now. You see, as low as 22 below. The new refrigerants coming out are going to allow us to go colder than they are currently rated at as well. But back up heat is necessary. It's a heat pump is a mechanical item. Choosing whether you have electric resistive backup heat or a gas. That's a personal preference, really. Heat pumps are extremely comfortable, and I think that's the biggest point of them, quite frankly. But when it comes to being a mechanical item, if it breaks in the middle of winter, especially a refrigerant circuit, you can't pull good vacuums when it's cold, right? You can definitely service refrigerant if necessary, but you can't pull a good vacuum, which is extremely important on any refrigeration, whether it's just straight AC or a heat pump, or as I've been talking lately, two way AC's, maybe? Adams. I think I would have to credit for that because I like how you talk about a heat pump and not confuse people. But he's been talking about two way AC, and so I've been kind of using that a little on my on my own here lately, because it's less confusing for people when they can say, oh, so an air conditioner does heating and cooling two way AC definitely describes that.
[00:18:41] Speaker1: Whereas if you say heat pump, some people don't even know that it does. Air conditioning. I think it's only for heating. So. So pretty good on his part. But you have to have the back up heat because you're gonna have to wait until the temperature comes up. So and we've been running into a little bit of when you look at people who do go all electric, it is a little bit of, uh, you run out of power sometimes. And what I mean by that is if you have a 200 amp panel, great. But if you have two systems and you go all electric now, you're going to have 40 to 60 amps for the backup heat, plus 4050 amps for your heat pump. That will gobble up a lot of what you're allowed to have on a panel like that. So sometimes it's it does come into can I do this in my house? Whether you want to have gas or not, you might have to keep it. So dual fuel is good for that as well. Most of the houses we've dealt with going all electric, no issues whatsoever, but you can run into it, especially when you start having two EV chargers and everything else has been converted to electric. It does. You do have to bring in more power to the house and it's happy to do it. It's just a matter of being on their schedule when they can run. More power to your home.
[00:19:49] Eric Fitz: So and so for your system. I mean, you're you've got a balance point set to minus five or the crossover point to to minus five degrees. How many hours a year are you actually even running the furnace?
[00:20:00] Mike Gundersen: Not very many. I actually use a monitor and energy monitor, so I called it an Emporia view.
[00:20:07] Ed Smith: You know it. You know it.
[00:20:08] Mike Gundersen: Well it is. Yeah. It's great. Yes, I am a little nerdy. I would say when it comes to these things.
[00:20:14] Ed Smith: You're in good company.
[00:20:15] Mike Gundersen: It takes exactly two pennies to cook a box of mac and cheese on the induction stove. So. And there's no mess to clean up, right? So the kids are not catching hand towels on fire or anything like that. So it's nice to have that induction stove. But with the Emporia view back that it's easy to see what kind of energy you're using. And especially it's very nice when I am talking to a customer who is concerned about the cost of electricity versus running gas. In my experience, I've done it. I've done the numbers and I've also ran it physically. So for the second year that we were in this house, I set my heat pump to 50 degrees for a switchover. So I ran my furnace the entire winter just to see like, what is it going to cost me? This was before I put the emporia in. What is it going to cost me to run the gas furnace versus what it costs me to run a heat pump? It's almost identical. There's not really savings. When people talk about savings with heat pumps and they're more efficient, they definitely are more efficient. You have a copy of three four. I've seen as much as five. I want to say so for every watt that you're spending to run that heat pump, you're getting five. As far as output is concerned. So they're very efficient as far as that is concerned. You know, electricity resistive is nearly 100%. And it's just expensive to make it. So in that aspect for us in northern Illinois, one thing we can say that we have cheap is gas and electricity.
[00:21:39] Mike Gundersen: It's very cheap. When I say cheap, it's like average about $0.13 per kilowatt hour. Dead of winter. Typically, if you look at historically 68 $0.69 a therm for gas in the winter when it's an actual winter across the country right now. Last month, in December, it was $0.25 a therm for gas. It's $0.28 in January. So if it's severe weather, it might cost a little less to run the gas furnace. Right? Especially with those kind of prices. What you won't get out of a gas furnace is the amount of comfort that you get out of a heat pump. So if you think about a furnace, I have the furnace I put in and it sounds like overkill, probably for some. But the main furnace we put in is a modulating furnace. There's not a lot of difference in cost between a two stage and a in a modulating furnace. Now you got rebates and tax credits. So that gobbles up everything. All the difference between those. But we've done the modulating furnace primarily. You can go down to 35% of its capacity all the way to 100. So you're like, wow, that's a comfort a very comfortable furnace. And it is. But my heat pump, the VRI system, goes down to 14% of its capacity. It's barely running. So if it's maintaining I've seen it down in the 600 watt range, maintaining the temperature in my house. So very, very comfortable. You're getting the longer run times at a lower heat rate.
[00:22:56] Mike Gundersen: So it's very quiet and it's even right. You have one problem we have around here is the two story house with a basement and one air conditioning and heating system. It's like, wow, upstairs is always uncomfortable. Not with a heat pump. It does a tremendous job of evening that out. So that's the heat. Pumps are phenomenal. It is mostly a comfort thing, more than a cost savings. Now, if you put in a heat pump system, it's going to be more efficient than your standard air conditioner. So you are saving in the summer as well. And that's what when you look at especially with inverters, which is virtually all we put in. Very seldom do we put something in. I don't know if last year, if we put in a system it did not have an inverter compressor. The variable speed was just there was no reason to have a two stage anymore. Definitely no single stage systems. But if you're putting in a heat pump or a gas furnace, whatever it is you're doing, it should always be a heat pump, right? You should never put in an air conditioner. Never replace an air conditioner with another one. There's no benefit to it. Everything is expensive anymore. Any system you put in is going to cost you a lot of money. Even a basic system is not cheap, so why waste time when you could spend another couple thousand dollars and you can put in a nice a nice system?
[00:24:08] Ed Smith: Mi ke, you are hitting so many of our favorite points. Heat pumps work at super cold temperatures. Heat pumps are Comfortable heat maps for cost of insulation can be quite competitive. Heat pumps shouldn't be sold on cost savings over the course of the year. That's like really dangerous territory. It's all about understanding the homeowners. These are anyway, you've just like check, check, check.
[00:24:33] Mike Gundersen: So our number one system that we put in is the Daikin Fit system. That is not something you go all electric with. They are designed I believe uh five they'll operate down to. But this is where I'm talking about using the heat pump that is designed for what you want out of a system, right? I wanted my system to be able to work all year. If I want to use it, then I want to be able to do that. The fit system, even though it's got a design of minus five, the it loses capacity well before then, right? So you're not at 100% capacity like mine. At zero degrees outside temperature, my system is giving the full capacity that it's capable of. Even at zero. The Daikin fit is not that way. And we have actually found through the cloud services. And you can see when people systems switch over between 24 and 28 degrees is when the average single family home will switch over. We do have the systems in condominiums and townhouses. They do get down into the single digits and low teens before they'll switch over. So they have the benefit of having people around them. So it does kind of help a little bit. But that's our most popular system. It's a small side discharge unit, very quiet. So it's not very obtrusive if you're out in your back patio barbecuing like we like to do at our house. If you have a swimming pool, you just want to enjoy your company. You don't want to listen to the air conditioner turn on. That's something that is is very appealing for people.
[00:25:59] Ed Smith: So that's.
[00:26:00] Eric Fitz: Great. Remind me that the Daikin fit I mean you talk about something important here of controls are so important for these systems. You've got it. You know, you can set up that I can fit either to choose your crossover point or you can let the system based on like dwell time. So like if Thermostat's calling and it's been two hours, let's say I can't remember the exact setting, then the system is gonna say, hey, you know what? We need to we need to switch over to the auxiliary heat, which is the furnace in this case. Is that right? What's the setup you typically do.
[00:26:31] Mike Gundersen: So that is yes, that is the case. The cool thing with the thermostat too. So when it first came out, just like any heat pump you would set, don't operate below this temperature. Don't operate above this temperature. Yep. You set everything where you want it to switch in minimums and maximums that you wanted the heat pump to run at. And then Daikin came out and they do over-the-air updates through the Daikin one and the OneTouch thermostat. Now I can set it and say, yeah, you want it to run as much as you can. Let's set it to 20 degrees. I know 24 to 28 is average, but maybe your home is going to be different, right? One home. It looks exactly the same as the next door neighbor is not going to operate the same, as silly as it might sound, but I'll set it at 20 degrees and it will do exactly like you said. You know what? It's not keeping up. I'm gonna turn the gas furnace on with a standard heat pump where you have to set those. It is not going to switch over to the gas furnace just because it got it can't keep up.
[00:27:24] Mike Gundersen: It's just gonna keep going. And you're going to say this thing isn't working and have to make adjustments to make your, your set point a little bit higher to switch over to the furnace. But communicating systems like the Daikin Fit allow it to make those decisions on its own and say, hey, it's 20 degrees is what you want. You're going to get 24, because that's when I keep turning on your new set. Point is now 24. You don't have to do anything. It'll do that for you. Now if you want it to be higher because you want your gas furnace to turn on at 40 degrees for whatever reason, then you could do that as well. But as far as the low set point, it'll change it to say, this is what you're you're going to be good for. You can also tell this, hey, I want to be based on comfort or energy savings. It's going to make decisions to help you do that as well, if that's what you choose to do.
[00:28:07] Eric Fitz: It's so great. These systems, particularly that I can fit to be able to. Yeah, set a set a goal, something you're trying to achieve and not have to take all these guesses about what exactly I need to configure the system to achieve those specific goals so that you don't like with a traditional system where you're picking that that balance point, that crossover temperature, you're just like, I think it's going to be this. But like you said, every home is different. The behavior in the home, the occupants, the orientation of the building. There's so many things that one house built by the same builder next to another could behave differently. And now with these systems you get you get the best of both worlds. You get the ability to to dial things in if you need to, but also you can kind of maximize cost savings. You can maximize comfort and let it kind of figure itself out. It's awesome.
[00:28:54] Mike Gundersen: Yeah, yeah it is. They are amazing. There are some inverter systems that are non-communicating, which are good because if somebody had to replace a furnace two, three, four years ago, whatever, they may not want to buy another new furnace just to get that communicating piece of equipment. But the communication is makes the world of difference. You know when you when you're looking at inverter systems, they don't dehumidify the same as a standard air conditioner that's running at 100% all the time. So but with the Daikin fit, it does a fantastic job with communication of slow the blower wheel down a little bit and be able to dehumidify based on the set point that you have in the thermostat or the humidity you want to be at. It makes a very, very big difference. But I would say very easily that the Daikin it is, from what I have seen so far, the best at deed modification of any of the inverter systems. They're out. So it's definitely a nice point. And because of the communication ability that they have to talk it all, talk through that thermostat, indoor furnace or air handler and your outdoor heat pump communicate. And they, you know, take all of their information and combine it and make it what you want, your whatever your comfort level is.
[00:29:59] Ed Smith: How long have you guys been mentioning?
[00:30:01] Mike Gundersen: You know, I mentioned that Emporia View is just an interesting tidbit we had not this past winter, but the one prior as an example of being able to show gas usage in that sort. I think I kind of got away from that when I started talking about the Emporia View, but our houses are all pretty similar, all built in the late 80s, early 90s in our neighborhood that February. So gas prices were very high, like we started at $1.24 for the entire summer. Like I said earlier, 68 $0.69 in the dead of winter is normal, right? And you're in the 30s most of the year. We made it down. By February, we had finally gotten down to 84, 80, $0.87 or a therm. So still high. Higher than usual, but not as drastic. But my neighbors in February were all between 350 and $400 to heat their home because I could single out my heat pump with that Emporia view, it cost $118 to heat my house with a heat pump. So it was. Those are types of things. When you're dealing with dual fuel, you can make choices if you want to use gas as a source because it's cheaper, you can do that. So some people retire retirees especially, they want to watch what is my budget? Well, if you have $1.24 a therm for gas, electricity is probably going to be a better choice if we, for whatever reason, electric prices go up. Maybe they want to switch over like right now, right? Not going to get into politics any. But it doesn't matter who's president or who wants to be president every four years. Gas prices are low here. You can look right on the night quarter's website and it shows you everything. So it's pretty comical. But right now it is very, very low.
[00:31:36] Ed Smith: So and just saying.
[00:31:37] Eric Fitz: Yeah that's great. So you get with the dual fuel system you can optimize for comfort. You can also optimize instead of like for the thermal balance point or this crossover temperature. You can also optimize for the economic balance point. And that can change from year to year. And like you said, the Di can fit gives you an option to kind of say, I really want to. Here's the information about my utility. Let's dial in the how this isn't going to going to operate to make sure I'm keeping.
[00:32:04] Mike Gundersen: So and that's on you, right. So it's not going to take any information from the utility company or you're not putting money in like a $0.13 a kilowatt hour or $0.68 for a therm. That's not stuff we can put in. My understanding is that is going to be coming, so that'd be fantastic when it does, because then that'll be a true switch over for economic reasons, if that's what people want to go with. I will say with January, my solar production is not great in January. January and February are the two worst months of the year. It picks up pretty drastically. I will say when February is over, but we still run our heat pump because it's more comfortable. Again, the comfort is the biggest thing with the heat pump. If it's not astronomically expensive, then there is no reason for us to switch over, and I think most people who have them in there would likely agree. I think just like myself when it comes to heat pumps, once a person has one in their house, they're never going to not have one again. And there probably will be people who are just like, I don't really need the gas for, especially in new construction. If you're in a build, it's not going to be a very significant amount of time that you're running that electric backup heat. So if that's what you want to do, you can cut a lot of costs out by not having run gas piping in your house or service to it, especially if you're out where people have, uh, for instance, oil or in our case, we have propane outside. Believe it or not, we have quite a few. Once you get 15 miles from our shop here in Dundee, and there's a lot of propane houses. Propane is definitely expensive, but you wouldn't want to have to have all of that extra build. If you were building a new house out there. You'd just go with your electric and be able to do it with wine as well.
[00:33:37] Ed Smith: Mike a lot of HVAC, contractors are little worried about dual fuel because it's complicated, right? It's different. What is your design and sales process look like in order to spec a home with a dual fuel system and then educate the homeowner, walk us through that process.
[00:33:58] Mike Gundersen: So a couple of things. But in this like this, even if you're doing this regular air conditioner. Right. But air conditioning in general has always been more finicky than a gas furnace. A gas furnace will run at higher temperatures than it should and things like that. And when I say finicky, it's just you have to do it right? Right. And you should be doing your furnaces the correct way and correctly sized and that sort of proper airflow. So you do look at the ductwork, make sure that you have the capacity to move the air. I think one of the big things and it's all systems right. So was it what, five, six years ago? As of July 4th, you had to put in furnaces, have to have a DCM style motor. Right. So whether it's constant torque or a variable speed, we love variable speed like we were talking earlier. It's a communicating unit. So we can change blower speeds for different reasons to manipulate your airflow. But what people don't take into account is if you put in even a constant talk, ECM motors are going to be louder because the old style that most people had the PSC or permanent split capacitor motors. They don't like static pressure at all. They slow down. So you could have a blower motor that's designed to be 1075 rpm, and it'll run at 8 to 900. If you're what you have a good duct system, right. It's just in there. And so you put the variable speed.
[00:35:15] Mike Gundersen: It's going to move the amount of air you want. If it needs to move, you know, a thousand cfm, it's going to move a thousand CFM, even if it has to speed up. So you're going to have more noise either because the blower motor is running at a higher rate, or the volume of air is going to cause more noise because of the friction of the ductwork. So that is that's something that you have to talk to the owner about as well. You can expect that. But most of the time, especially with variable speed equipment, it's not going to be any noisier because it's doing a better job at lower rates. So it's kind of an offset, right? But with that being said, a lot of the equipment we're looking at the federal tax credits that are currently available, you wind up going to bigger blower motors, right? There's that one problem that's been had with that tax credit is the EHR. Right. So that's an efficiency that's geared more towards air conditioning. And although we get hot and humid it's a very short period of time. So I wouldn't say it was a drastic thing like when I lived in Oklahoma, you fall asleep to the nice hum of that outside unit because if it's humming, you know you're going to get some good rest. But sometimes it's better when you're looking at a system, especially ductwork that is on the smaller side, we're always replacing return drops, right? The minimum I want to see is ten inches, but we will go 20in wide and lower the static pressure as much as possible.
[00:36:37] Mike Gundersen: But what people need to consider too, when you're looking at these systems, it's not about getting rebates. We designed the system for the house. And what I mean by that in order to get the EHR, a lot of times, almost all the time, you have to up the size of the blower. So instead of an 80,000 BTU furnace with a three ton blower. You're going to put an 80,000 with a four ton blower with a larger coil in order to get the efficiency because of that one number right. The ease, the CO2, the hspf could be exactly the same, but you need that number to get that rebate, or you're going to get that $2,000 rebate, and then you're going to spend it on a dehumidifier for your whole house, because it's going to be noisier for one, a four ton blower, especially on small ductwork. Right. So it's going to be noisier. It's not going to be as comfortable. And the dehumidification is going to be less. You're going to run at a lower rate of refrigerant. You're going to have a larger coil. It just doesn't match. So if it's not a good fit, we don't want to say, hey, I'm going to design you a system and get you a rebate. I'm going to let you know that it's available, but I would also let you know what I would do in my house.
[00:37:41] Mike Gundersen: And in that case, I would drive and not get my rebate. So that's the big thing I think, is knowing what it is you're putting in, what's expected and what is the house capable of? You can change some ductwork. Some things you can't if you have a two story house in your new construction back in the 80s had five inch ductwork. You're not going to change all of that to six inch to go upstairs. So there's some limitations, but there are little things you can do, like the return drops and adding air underneath from underneath the furnace, getting as much return as you possibly can. It is definitely going to be a big consideration, but you can test, right? And that's the biggest thing, is testing for the static pressure. What are you running at? What is your actual airflow in CFM going through the ductwork? Can you handle a heat pump? That's the kinds of things that when you're looking at the system that you're talking to the customer, you know, we don't really offer any air conditioning options anymore. I think some people when I talk to them about it, they look at me like I'm crazy. I'm not there to make just the sale. I'm there to to talk to you about what's going to be better. And there is no scenario that an air conditioner is better than a heat. Well, even anymore, it just doesn't make any sense.
[00:38:47] Ed Smith: Totally. Mike, I can see why you went out on your own. Like your level of meticulousness and delivering what's right for a homeowner. I mean, I would have been glad for you to work on military aircraft. I would be even more glad to have you work on the mechanical system of my home. Like I can tell you, just take it seriously.
[00:39:08] Mike Gundersen: Thank you. Yeah. And it's fun. It's. I do feel like I'm a little nerdy sometimes, and. But, uh, it is. It does help in being, uh, just like with the peppers. Right? Once I'm in, I'm all in. So.
[00:39:21] Ed Smith: So to that end.
[00:39:22] Mike Gundersen: You can always get better, no matter how well you might be thinking you're doing now, it can be better tomorrow and next year.
[00:39:27] Ed Smith: So actually, that tees up perfectly. The question we like to end with is what resources have you used to get smarter or get better over time? Because a lot of our audience are folks who are like, just started a heat pump business or are about to, or techs who left, like where you were in 2011. You just bought a truck and now it's time to kind of go. So anything associations, books, podcasts like where would you point people to get better?
[00:39:54] Mike Gundersen: I mean, there are so many different resources, right? So you have ACA that you can get classes through, gosh, anywhere you can get classes, right? I'm not a big fan of the classes are necessarily offered at vendors because they're basically there to say, hey, look at this product and sell it. I'm not a fan of those so much, but if you can have it, actual learning opportunities. I've visited and gone to classes with Mike Cappuccio several times, not just once. Every time you go, you learn something new. There are some classes offered through different vendors that are geared towards doing things better. Whether you're learning how to do a manual J, you have the National Comfort Institute that has a lot of information in there, and that's just the types of things that I would recommend. I think the biggest thing you have to be all in on whatever it is you're doing, right? So if you believe in selling heat pumps, it shouldn't be Before selling. It should be for helping the customer with what they need. Right. I don't want to sell them more than they want or need. I just want them to know what the options are. If I'm not going to be the lowest cost guy out there for sure, and sometimes you'll lose the call, lose a sale, as they would put it, it's not that it's the customer selected to go with something else for the cost, but there there's going to be more costs that they are going to pay by going with the cheaper, lower cost system because there's definite benefits. But I'm not going to say I would put in something else because of being afraid that the customer is going to go with another company.
[00:41:26] Mike Gundersen: If the company that they're going with believes that air conditioners are good, then that's fine. They can go that way. But I think once they realize that, um, the heat pump is not going to be that much more $1,000, that's what, $2 a week. If you're financing. It's not a drastic difference. So I think being all in on What is it that you want? What's your model? Right. And I was told early on, like, you can't just keep doing high efficiency. You can't keep doing inverter systems. Well, I can tell you that right now that I can fit system by itself is 94% of our installations, not just an occasional one. That's 94%. The other stuff we're doing is going to be ductless, whether it's Mitsubishi or we do some of their duct and stuff. I'd love Mitsubishi's air handler. So nobody make the electric air handler like Mitsubishi does, I think is it's awesome. So we'll see what the new ones look like. But that one, you know. Yeah. Machine screws instead of sheet metal screws. It's just very, very well built and designed. So but I think it's because you're sticking with what it is that you know, is right. And that is going to be the biggest thing just changing what I'll do because of having some work or something. I don't think it's worth it. And I think that is it's easy to take that way, but I just don't see it as being beneficial. Official. So you can't believe one thing and do something else.
[00:42:46] Ed Smith: Totally.
[00:42:47] Eric Fitz: Mike, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for all your insights. Really so much fun. Really appreciate you having on the show.
[00:42:54] Mike Gundersen: I appreciate you guys having me. Thank you very much.
[00:42:56] Ed Smith: Yeah. Thank you Mike. Awesome to have you. Thank you.
[00:43:02] Eric Fitz: Thanks for listening to the Hip Hop podcast. It is a production of Ampli Energy. And just a reminder that the opinions voiced were those of our guests or us, depending on who was talking. If you like what you've heard and haven't subscribed, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to reach out! You can reach us once again at hello@amply.energy Thanks a lot.