 Hi, I'm Nate Adams, often times known as Nate the House Whisperer. And if you're here watching this, somebody told you about something called the comprehensive planning process and you are wondering what the heck that is. So I wanted to make a video walking through what this is. So this is the planning that needs to be done to be able to solve really complex problems in your house. So we have to slow down and think our way through it and figure out how we're going to do things. And there is unfortunately no cookie cutter way to do that. It's individual to you and your house and your budget. So let's go through what this looks like. So for starters, you should have already been through the comfort consult. The goal of the comfort consult is to figure out these three circles of the Venn diagram. So what are your goals and then you should have ranked those. What does your house need? So how leaky it is, ballpark idea, our values, and then what HVAC that you have now. So trying to understand what the house has, what it needs, but it's only the first glance that we really do at the comfort consult. And then the third piece of the puzzle is your budget. The budget largely determines what a project looks like because these complicated projects there's literally millions of permutations. So the comfort consult helps narrow it down some, but there's still a pretty broad array of ways that any project go. So we need to narrow it down some more and then start putting some real numbers on it so that we can figure out what it's actually going to look like. And in doing all of that, here's what we're trying to do. We're trying to find the sweet spot for your house. So how do we find that viable project where your goals, needs of your house, and the budget overlap? So where do those circles cross? And this is how we like to think about things. You may have seen this. There's another version of this chart that talks about the Gulf of Disappointment and the Sea of Success. Gulf of Disappointment is what happens when you do a low-hanging fruit program, quote, a job where, well, we'll just do this and that'll be just as good, or it's the cheaper but just as good kind of argument. If your house needs a comprehensive planning process, the cheaper but just as good path is very unlikely to work and perhaps you have tried it already. A lot of our clients have. That is a very frustrating way to waste the five, 10, 15, 20,000 dollars. So we developed this process to help reduce the risk and increase the odds of success. So what we want to do is for the bottom here, this is work that we do or money that you spend and these are the odds. We want to get upwards of 80% odds of success if at all possible within your budget. So the problem with this is that is different for every house, every set of goals, and every budget. So as a friend of mine says, he's a researcher down at Florida Solar Energy Center, he says that one size fits one. There really is only, there's no cookie cutter way to do any of these projects. We have to figure out what you want, what your house needs and what the budget is and try and match that. But when we get into the more complicated projects, this takes some time and effort and thought and we don't want to rush it because you don't want to go spend a bunch of money and then find out that you wasted it. So here's what the steps are. So the comprehensive planning process is also known as the CPP and there are five basic steps to it. So the first step is the energy audit where someone from your HVAC 2.0 contractor will come back to your house and they need to measure it, they need to take a bunch of pictures, they're looking for root causes to the problems that you want to solve and they want to see what's feasible because sometimes there may be one way that they'd like to do things but when they dig into it, it's just not easily possible or perhaps they give you an option for it but it's much more expensive. So we're trying to figure out what that might work. So that's usually a four to eight hour job. Then the next step that we do is you won't see this but someone from your HVAC 2.0 contractor is going to make a huge list. So typically we end up with 30 to 50 items for projects. So we go through the notes and the photos and we make notes of things that we think should be done to the house. So we are doing everything that's reasonable so this may go well beyond your budget but we want to start by thinking of everything that it might take to make your house an awesome place to live and then pare it down to what we think is really likely to work and then pare it down again if needed to what your budget is and see if we can fix most or all of your concerns within that budget and sometimes we can, sometimes we can't, they will be very upfront with you. What we do is we educate you and we offer you options. That is what HVAC 2.0 is all about. So third step is the energy model. So in the comfort consults there was a very simple load calculation done but that is usually pretty fast, pretty quick. It's meant to be quick and dirty and good enough for sizing HVAC but not necessarily good enough if you are looking to make major upgrades. Because you want to understand if you do various things to the house, what size heating and cooling equipment is the house going to need. So it's a very detailed model that gets built and then that model can be manipulated from there and you get much more precise load calculations so that you really know what piece of equipment you should get. Fourth step is to create packages. So all of those upgrades get organized into a few packages. So it can be two, it can be five, it's gonna depend on your house and what your practitioner thinks needs to happen. And each one of those packages, if there are insulation and air saving measures, it will get a load calculation that goes with it. And then each one of those items from the upgrades, so there's like 30 to 50 items, those will get budgets. And you'll actually get two budgets. You will get a budget that is basically what you're very likely to be able to get it done for. And then a lower cost if say there's two different pieces of HVAC equipment. So here's the high line, here's the medium line, something like that. Or if you are big on DIY, they will give you what the cost would be for DIY various things like say blowing plastic insulation or something like that. So that all takes some time. So this process takes anywhere between 15 and 30 hours. It depends on the house and how many people are involved and what needs to happen. So the cost that you were quoted is likely very heavily discounted from normal prices, normally hourly rates. Then the last piece of it is your practitioner will come back and go over all of these packages, line item by line item, and then also go through the load calculations as well. And speaking of load calculations, let's dig into that a little bit. Because this can be, it's on the geeky side, but this is really important. So if you wanna solve problems and you want a comfortable house, you do not want to oversize your HVAC. Right sized HVAC runs almost all the time. It's constantly washing the house with a little bit of cool or a little bit of warm. So if you oversize, houses tend to be uncomfortable. Now the trick here is you don't wanna size HVAC to where the house is today. You wanna size it to where it's going. And so to do that, you need to know where the house is going, what the load calculation is likely for that. And there are a number of software tools out there, so I'm gonna show you one that we have used. Your practitioner is likely to use a different one, but they all essentially do the same thing. And if you know how to work them, they can be very accurate. So and again, each package that has a different insulation and air sealing measure in it, so different things that you're gonna do to the house. Every one of those packages should have a different load calculation, so you understand where you might go. So I wanna just touch on this for a little bit. This is a load calculation from the program that we use. It's called TREAT. Not a lot of people are gonna use this, but there's a lot of numbers here. And so these take a little bit of skill to read, but they're not really that hard to figure out. But here's the important thing. So see these five numbers here. These are called block loads. So these do not have much in the way of fudge factor in them. Most load calculations have a fair amount of fudge factor. And you wanna size aggressively. Particularly if you are insulating an air seal in your house so that it is higher performance, you don't need the fudge factors. The fudge factors are in there for older leaky houses where what a contractor wants the least is for you to call when it's five degrees outside and say that your house has fallen to 60 degrees. Because it is likely their responsibility to come and change out your furnace to a larger one. That's what they don't want. So how they would typically read this, so here's the block load if you add all of these up. This is about 48,000 BTUs. That's like a four ton heat pump. The smallest commonly available furnace is 60,000 BTUs. This particular load calc is for a about 4,000 square foot three story house that was built in the teens. So this is after it's upgraded, it started at a much higher load. But this is what the house, once it's complete, is likely to need. This number is still typically a bit on the high side. We find this to still be 10 or 20% heavy. But this is what the industry standard load calc would be pointed at. This would be called a manual J. This is not exactly a manual J, but it's very close. So this load calculation will say that you need 69,000 BTUs. And how most HVAC contractors would read that. It would be like, well, we certainly don't want to do a 60. So we're gonna put an 80,000 BTU in. But if you actually know how to peel these things apart, you don't need 60,000, you don't need 80,000, you need less than 50. And when you oversize that piece of equipment, your house is likely to have temperature differences in it. If you have a room that's always been cold, it may stay that way even after upgrades. So you really have to find a way to get the insulation and the HVAC to work together. So like I said, most HVAC contractors would read this 69,000 BTU load calc and it would give you an 80,000 BTU furnace, which is the wrong piece of equipment. Because you have to know to pull out the fudge factors. So looking at the difference between these two here, it takes some skill to interpret these. And every program has its little strengths and weaknesses that you have to know about. We know where there's a lot of holes in this particular program. So we know when to trust it and when not to trust it. So load calculations are very important for providing comfort and you want to size as aggressively as possible, as small as possible to get really nice, good, even comfort in your house. So if your house is now tight and reasonably well insulated and it has the right size piece of equipment, the consistent feedback that we get from our practice, because this is all grown out of doing these projects, you can go look at case studies at energiesmartohio.com, that's our practice. You can go look at those case studies and read about what they do and what we did and the consistent feedback that we get from clients is, I can't believe this is the same house. So if you want to feel that way, the comprehensive planning process is the path to get there. Okay, so I also want to show just briefly, this is an actual package from an actual client for a project that we did last year. So we do multiple packages. The practitioner is going to do multiple packages. So this is package one. So they had a $200 per month budget. And so you can see what these columns are with these first two items. It shows what the package is, what it involves, which is the budget, where package two is sweet spot. This is what we think it's going to take to really hammer home the solutions to the problems that we called about. And then the next thing we put in is the goals. So these are what we think we have a high likelihood of serving. Then there are five columns for each one of these line items. So you can see this is the package and then here's the first few line items. And the line items are meant to be quite specific. So they will be tailored to your house and your needs and your goals. So the first item is air sealing. Air sealing is a tricky task that you do your best to dig into it, but oftentimes you end up needing more budget for that sort of thing. So we like to build in some extra budget for achieving that goal. This particular house was a very challenging house and I wasn't sure that we really could get there, so I don't normally put this high of a budget in, but I did for this one. So I've got $4,000 in for that. You've got the recommendation to try an induction hot plate. This particular client doesn't absolutely love their stove, but it's an electric house, so I'd suggest doing that. You can see there's a lighting recommendation because recess lights can commonly be very leaky. We have to remove the attic insulation in this house so it's gone now. We needed to figure out ventilation for one specific part of the attic, which we actually ended up not doing. We ended up finding a way to tackle that without needing ventilation. And then there's spray foam here. So this gives you kind of an idea. So you've got the work scope. So this is something that you can take to bid. The reasoning why that item is there and what it affects. A link for something to buy or something to read if you need that. And then the two costs, like I mentioned. So this is what we think we have high odds of being able to get this work done for. If you're working with your HVAC contractor, they're going to give you a bid for their own work. So you'll know that. And you may want to take that out to get bids because now you have a specification to get a bid against. So you won't get an apple and orange or banana. You'll get apples to apples comparisons. But most HVAC contractors are not going to do insulation work. So they are likely going to work with a sub. And so these costs in this column here are what you're likely to be able to get that job done for. But we also really like to show you what the low side might be. So maybe you are game for DIYing something. We will give you a price for DIY. Maybe you're looking at two different types of HVAC. And so maybe one piece of HVAC is $12,000 and the other is $10,000. You get an idea of what the spread is. An important note as you get this information, it is a great deal of information to take in. So the important thing is when you are reading about these packages and you're going over this, don't try to decide what you're going to do. Pretend this is monopoly money. Ignore what the numbers say. And just try and understand what it's likely to take to make your house a really nice place to live. So if you focus on that, you won't hit your mental reset. And when you wait a couple of days or a week, the whole project will begin to coalesce in your mind. So it will become clear what you want to do and what needs to be done. And then you can move forward with that project. You get the delivery for this. Don't try and decide what you're going to do. Take it from me. I've worked with a number of people. Whenever somebody does that, it tends to freak them out. So just try and understand what it is. So those are the pieces of the puzzle. So again, we talked about the energy audit. We talked about listing upgrades, creating the energy model, which is what we can create the load calculations from, the more detailed ones, creating the packages like I just showed you with all the work scopes and all of those headings, and then returning to deliver what those plans are. And when you come out the other side of this process, you should have a very high degree of clarity of what it's going to take to make your house better and solve the problems that you want to solve. And if it's possible within the budget that you gave, or if you may need to stretch, or sometimes it doesn't, we don't need to use the entire budget. So those are the things that we're trying to do. And again, the CPP, the comprehensive planning process, it is all about finding that sweet spot where spending more money isn't necessarily helpful. So that's it. That's the comprehensive planning process. I am Nate the house whisperer. I hope this has been illuminating and feel free to ask some questions below. Have a great day.