 All right, welcome back. You have made it to the end of the Electrify Everything course. So we are finally going to talk about how to find an HVAC contractor. And there's a fair amount of philosophical stuff in this one too so that you can get the best results and have it be a fun and profitable relationship for both of you. So let's dig in. Again, we are at the very end of the Electrify Everything course. So we're to finding a contractor. And what we're going to do, we are going to tie a whole bunch of concepts together that we've gone through in the earlier pieces. So we'll start with the church or the kitchen table. So this is where you're going to be. You are the homeowner. So you're the one that's going to be writing the checks. Contractors are the ones that sell and do the work. So those are the two parties that really matter. So we pay a great deal of attention to this. We have built the HVAC 2.0 system so that it takes care of both parties really well. We want it to be smooth. We want it to be lots of grease, not a lot of friction. And so it's a very carefully thought out process to do that. And what we're doing through all of this is conquering fear. So again, you're an early adopter. You're leaning forward into this. So if it doesn't happen to be your fear, it's definitely going to be your contractor's fear that you need to conquer. And remember, that's done mainly with math and understanding. So and this is all important because if we're going to scale electrification and have a catch fire, we need the experiences to be amazing for both sides. Contractors need to love it and the homeowners need to love it yourself. You need to be out there to where you want to tell your friends about it. Again, not in an early adopter way, but in a mainstream market way. And we want to avoid the risk of the very high winter bills, a really uncomfortable house or the HVAC being noisy because remember, it won't scale unhappy people on average tell about a dozen people about their bad experience. And now that we have online reviews, it's way more reach than that. So we need to be very careful to make sure that we are reducing risk of failure and we are increasing the odds of success in everything that we do. And doing that, again, tying back to something we've talked about before, we need to deal with the HVAC cone of uncertainty. So if you remember this, we've got the load calc variability risk. Like if you don't have any information about a house, the load calc is pretty much plus or minus an entire piece of equipment. That's plus or minus the three ton heat pump, which is the standard piece of equipment that we use here. If you have energy use, you're starting to reduce the risk in sizing. And if you have energy use, blower door and client information, namely like how many people live in your house and what your thermostat set points are, you can get to where your plus or minus 3000 BTU's on normal size houses. If you're talking a big house, it's a wider range, but you know, 2000 square foot under, which is a huge swath of American homes. That's going to get you to where it's obvious what size equipment you need. And you're going to drastically reduce those risks. So that you get a really nice project that you're proud to show people. And there aren't any weird little things that you have to cover up. Like, yeah, I don't look at that, you know, pay no attention about the man behind the curtain. You don't want that. You want this whole project to be put the whole thing up front. And there's there's nothing negative to say about it. It's just a good experience. Now remember, blower door heavily affects load calculations. Now, if you're in California or another warm market, it's not as big of a swing as what I'm showing here, but it can still be a pretty big swing. You can easily be off by a ton. And that's a lot. That's 12,000 BTU's so that you won't know which size equipment is right. So this is an 1800 square foot house in Rochester, New York. And you can see just by manipulating blower door, the windows are the same. The insulation values are the same. We can be anywhere from a two ton heat pump up to what it has a 70,000 BTU furnace. And we see leakage rates that high, like that happens. We've had several in the five to 6,000 range of tests that have happened this week. So that's not an out of line number on houses that are between sixteen hundred and twenty one hundred square feet. So this can happen. So you need to know what the blower door is or you're really guessing. And here's another quick way to look at that just as review. So it's leakage to square footage ratio. So say you have a 2000 square foot house with a 2000 blower door, or more correctly, the ratio would be a 2000 blower door to 2000 square feet. That's one to one. If you have a 4000 blower door to 2000 square feet, that's a two to one. So one to one is about when houses start to be controllable with HVAC alone. Is it guaranteed? No, it's not. Like you may have some rooms that are really screwed up. And that's why there's extra testing that's done as part of the blower door test because it's relatively easy to figure out if there are major problems in certain rooms that need to be dealt with. Because if you have one really leaky room, you can't HVAC the problem away. Like it's that's not the way you can get there. You usually can't get enough airflow there. All right. So to find an HVAC contractor, there are three things that they need to be up to speed with. So first, they need to have a blower door and that's going to shrink the pool a lot. Like this is going to be a couple percent of contractors. They need to be able to do load calculations, which again is going to shrink the pool a lot. Lots of contractors will say they do load calculations. You need to ask to see some and ask what program they use to do it, because hopefully they're not doing it on paper. And they also need to true that load calculation to both blower door and energy use. And only a few programs are really good at doing that. So these are important pieces of the puzzle. And the last one is air source heat pumps. So if you were in a market that has a lot of gas, the contractors that are used to installing gas furnaces tend to be kind of afraid of heat pumps because they're just used to air conditioners because that works fine. That's what they've known for years. That's fine. But if you happen to be close to the country somewhere, country HVAC, if you're rural, you don't have access to gas. So you can use propane, oil or heat pump. Those are the three options. So lots of country HVAC contractors are used to using heat pumps. The fellow that I work with here in Cleveland, I mean, I'm out in the boondocks myself and he lives not far from me and his shop is not far from here. So he doesn't even blink an eye anymore. He doesn't even ask me for the load calcs when I ask him for a piece of equipment anymore. So what size you want? OK, and he just goes and does it. So he's used to air source heat pumps and that's something you want to look for. And I'll show you how to do that in a little while. But first, let's talk about what the steps are in doing an HVAC project. So we'll get to electrify everything else, we'll electrify everything but HVAC in a second. So for HVAC, that's the hardest piece of residential electrification by far. This is three to 10x more difficult than all the other tasks. So first off, are there problems to solve? This goes back to start with Y. And also starting with Y is all the things that you want to solve. You know, hot and cold rooms, knocking down allergies, helping your kid with asthma, knocking down wildfire smoke. You want to think about what all of those are worth to solve. So not what is it going to cost, but what is it worth? And then if you're lucky, those line up. And then you also really need to know, is your house so leaky that you need to do insulation and air sealing upgrades for a heat pump to be a good fit? Because you don't want that $1,000 electric winter bill. That's real. I've seen them. I've seen $1,500 monthly bills. So you want to be sure. And a lower door test helps with that. You also need to decide, do you need a panel upgrade? So we talked about that earlier. More houses than you might think can get away with a 100 amp panel, but you're going to be pushing your luck. So everything has to be kind of carefully thought out or move to a 200 amp panel, and that's going to be safe on basically any house that has one HVAC system. Then you need to choose the right heat pump for you, your budget and your house. Get it installed and set up well. So I didn't really go into this earlier, but there's something called commissioning. So when a ship is commissioned, they build the ship, they take it out, they run it really hard, they turn it hard, and they basically try to break it. And then they bring it back in and they patch everything up and then they'll tell whoever's buying it. So she'll do 30 knots, but don't go more than 28 or she might rattle apart. So that's commissioning. And thermostat commissioning, there's all kinds of little tweaks and setups, and heat pumps are really sensitive to commissioning and the setup. So you want to make sure not only is it a good install, but it is commissioned and set up well. And that's not a big deal. It's like 10, 20, maybe 30 minutes of extra work. And that can literally save you $1,000 or $2,000 a year if it's set up well versus not set up well. Although higher end equipment is naturally set up pretty well, the stock settings, it's the lower end equipment that usually has really bad initial commissioning. Then the last piece is while you're doing the project, treat the contractors really well. And I want to talk about that. So we've talked about friction and grease in projects and just in general of working between people. So if you treat your contractors really well and their guys really well, and it's almost always guys, that is grease for the relationship. So this is showing love. This is important love and respect and creating an equal, equal relationship. This is really important because if you do a good job with this, like I'm suggesting stupid stuff. This is simple. This is cheap. Buy lunches. I mean, you can get a little Caesars. That's fine. You can buy them better if you buy them better pizza because they're going to know the little Caesars is five bucks. But buy lunches for the crew when they're there. Let them know that you're going to be buying them lunch. So maybe it's the second day because most of these installs are going to take more than a day. Have drinks. So pop, soda, whatever you call it in your part of the country. Water and then just snacks. Have some chips, pretzels, donuts maybe, things like that. Just have them handy and out on the counter and let them know, hey, these are for you. Let them know, go in the fridge, get whatever you want, especially if you have a garage fridge. That's a great thing to load up and just say, hey, help yourself to Gatorade or whatever. Let them know what bathroom they can use. You would be surprised by how many contractors pee in a bottle in their truck because they're uncomfortable with this. If you just let them know which room they can go use, which bathroom they can use, that adds a surprising amount of grease. I've always thought like a six pack of beer or a free t-shirt, they pretty much always buy you more than what they cost. So they have an immense amount of value. If you treat people well, you're going to get hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars in additional value from just being nice to people. So show them, you care about them. That's important. At this point here, this may or may not apply to your project, but if there happens to be a result that you're looking for, like say you want a low static pressure, or the key thing that we've found this useful for is when we're doing an air sealing project, getting really good air sealing numbers and blow it on numbers and the reduction you get in a house is really heavily related to how much the technician cares. Like almost 100% of results are in the hands of a technician, regardless of what kind of product they're using. So one of our early projects, it was a weird house. It had double ceilings, double walls, and we had hit it really hard with spray foam, which usually gets massive amounts of leakage out. And we'd gotten like 15%. And normally for the work that we did, we would have gotten closer to 50, not 15. And so I was nervous we were going to miss our target, and we did. I've only missed an air sealing target on a few houses, and that was one of them. So I asked the homeowner, hey, Paul, would you be game for giving these guys a $50 bonus each if they hit a certain blowtor number? And Paul's a blue-collar guy himself. He's like, oh yeah, let's do that. And those guys ran around with cock guns, and they found all kinds of stuff. And boy, he wouldn't have gotten the number he got had we not done that. So we had a chance packing walls, which is completely in the hands of the installing contractor. And if you want to read more about that, that's in the installation chapter of my book, The Home Comfort Book. But super important that we incentivize them to do something. And that's way better than giving them a tip after the fact. So tips are appreciated and they're great, but they don't actually get you what you want. So if you let them know, there's a bonus on the table if you guys can hit this. And even if they miss it, if they're trying, either give it to them or at least give them part of it. But that's important. You want to treat them well, and that tends to spur, if you give them an incentive or hit and result, that really spurs human competition and it makes them really want to do a better job. So very important, all of these things. But this is all really simple. We're talking grand total here, a few hundred dollars. And you're going to be buying an HVAC system that's at least 10 grand. That's the highly likely number here. So a couple hundred bucks may get you way more than that in value. And if nothing else, it'll make the whole experience more pleasant for both sides. Now, homeowner-contractor relationship. I want to spend a little bit of time here. Like I said, there's a bit of philosophy behind what we do. Everything has a fair amount of psychology and philosophy. And we're trying to, again, grease relationships and increase the odds of success in every possible way that we can think of. And I'm sure we'll find more still, but there's a lot of risk reduction and increasing odds built into everything that we do. So the first thing is, I mentioned this earlier, you need to have an equal-equal relationship. This is not master servants. I see this a lot in... There's a white-collar, blue-collar divide. Most of my friends now are blue-collar. They are contractors. I know a ton of them. I love them to pieces. Do not look down on them. If you want to be surprised by judging a book by its cover and then having it being something completely different, judge a blue-collar guy. Holy cow, they are really smart. They're awesome human beings. They will just surprise the heck out of you about all kinds of things. I love them. They're awesome. So you need to set up an equal-equal relationship. So you want to make sure that there's high trust both ways. So they need to trust you and you need to trust them. And again, this is where HVAC 2.0 is built to grease the skids and create that trust. So is it perfect? No, but it's going to drastically increase the odds of high trust happening both ways. And part of this is when they do a comfort consult for you and they give you bids, you need to feel more than open to go out and get other bids. Typically what's going to happen, though, is they will write a specification that's pretty tough. So generally you're going to find fear priced into other bids when you get them. So generally you're going to find that an HVAC 2.0 contractor is going to be your best bet because they will price things fair and they will also do good work that is trickier than what most contractors are used to doing. Another thing to expect is this is renovations. There's going to be bumps. Every project we've done, there's been bumps. Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're big. Be ready for that. And just if you expect them going in, we build in some fudge factor in our projects where we build in one to $3,000 of fudge because our projects are typically $30,000 to $50,000. So we build in a couple grand of fudge because you're going to tear into something and be like, oh boy, that wasn't supposed to be like that. That's a problem. And if you have built in some fudge factor in your mind and you use it, it's not painful. If you don't build it in and you need that same amount extra, it feels horrible. So again, we're just playing psychology. So keep that in mind. There's going to be bumps. When those happen and just in general, communicate and share responsibility. So stop with the finger pointing and the blame game that helps no one. It's like, all right, this happened. How do we deal with it? And go from there. And then most importantly, if you do this right, you're going to have fun. A blue-collar sense of humor is making fun of each other. If someone's making fun of you, it almost always means that they like you. There's a line where they're not being nice anymore, but that's play. That's just kind of how it works. So you want to have fun. You want to mess with each other, give each other a bit of a hard time, but just show that you care. And that makes these projects fun. I enjoy working with the crews that I work with because of this. Now back to how to electrify everything but HVAC. So you're going to have the water heater. A lot of contractors don't really want to do water heaters, the HVAC guys. It depends where you are. So where I am, it's not a big deal because we don't have a lot of permitting and other hoops to go through. But like in California, there's a lot of HVAC contractors like, nope, sorry, I just don't do water heaters. So that may be the case in your market. Now, if you have greased that relationship and you've created that love, guess who's going to help you get that stuff done? So either A, they might do it, or B, every contractor knows a guy. That's just how it works. It's a network. So they'll be able to refer you to a good electrician to help you get a new panel run, run a wire for your induction stove, run a sub-panel to your garage. All that stuff needs to get done. Get the water heater plumbed in. And the odds are, again, if you've created a trusting relationship, you're not going to overpay for any of that. So be nice, play nice, have a good time, be kind to people, and you'll be surprised by what happens. So back to those requirements. So we're out of the philosophy and back into the hard stuff again. So they need to have a blower door. They need to be capable and used to running load calculations, and they need to commonly install air source heat pumps. So there's not going to be a ton of these in a lot of markets, but there will be some. Again, look for the country boys. In fact, the country boys in general, and they're fun, and they know how to fix everything. So really key. Okay, let's tie this back into the HVAC 2.0 process. So again, it's predicated on two different questions. So are there any comfort problems to solve in your house? If no, it's a free quote. If yes, it's a comfort consult. Also, if you have a complicated project, you want to do this. Over here, you're going to own the results. It's purposely set up that way so that you're given choices, but there's no free consulting. Because lots of contractors end up owning stuff that they don't want. So if it's a simple change out, great. If you just want another furnace and air conditioner, great. But if you're trying to electrify, that's a complicated project. So that means that the comfort consult is the lowest risk path. And what that helps you decide is, is HVAC alone likely to solve the problems that you have? So even if it's just electrification that you're trying to accomplish, hopefully there's more. Because again, you want to open up a little bit more budget so that you buy the higher end inverter heat pumps, which give you much better experiences than the old-school one and two-stage stuff. But this is by far the lowest risk path. So you'll either find out, can you do... Oh, where did I get it? Can you simply do a tailored replacement or do you need to do more? We'll come back around to the details there in a second. But let's look at what is in the comfort consult and this should be really familiar to you at this point. So it's the Venn diagram. What are your goals? What does your house need? And what is your budget? What is it worth to fix those problems? So goals, we have a very long questionnaire. It's an hour to an hour and a half worth of questions. And we're trying to figure out what are little pecadillos in your house? What does it bother you? And then at the end, we sit back down and we prioritize those goals on a scale of one to ten. From one, I don't care, to ten, there's basically no budget to fix it. Just get it taken care of. For the house needs, you need to run a Blower Door test and then also do a load calculation that is true to the Blower Door number, the energy use, and your thermostat settings. So that's very important. And then the last piece, again, is what are your goals worth to solve? And if those three overlap, you have a viable project in the middle. And so it's going to depend, there's all kinds of different answers that come out of this. So there you are, the Venn diagram gets taken care of in the comfort console. So the good news is, and this is what I was going to dive into earlier and forgot the order of my slides, many or most houses can simply do a tailored replacement because HVAC alone is likely to fix stuff. So we're seeing somewhere in the half range, the 50% range, even in Cleveland, which is a cold climate. You can basically take a furnace, change it to a heat pump, and it'll work fine. But you need to do the math and understand a bunch of things. Now, for those of you that need more, if you have an older house that's leaky or you have a newer house that has some weird room on it, or whatever might be going on. If you have a complicated problem to solve, that is what we built the comprehensive planning process to do. So we started by doing these. We did these really exotic difficults to figure out projects and we created a scalable method for doing them, so scalable and repeatable. The problem that we found was this is like having an intensive care unit, an ICU at a hospital, but we didn't have a hospital or a clinic attached to it. So it was really hard, there was a lot of soft costs to find people that needed this, which is where we needed to begin. So HVAC contractors end up being perfect because this whole thing, over here, it sells a piece of equipment. If they go comfort consult, piece of equipment. If they just do a tailored replacement, comprehensive planning process almost always leads to a piece of equipment. So now we have, this is the hospital here, the comfort consults, and over here this is the clinic. So now we can handle anything from a very easy to a very difficult house. And our guys can lean into these houses knowing that whatever they walk into, they can solve the problem. Because we've built the system to be able to do that. So whatever the level of difficulty of your electrification or whatever project you're trying to accomplish in your house with the HVAC system, this system, the HVAC 2.0 system will help you get there. Help your contractor get there. And it'll be as smooth as it can be. If you want to see what these deeper projects look like, by the way, so we don't call these deep energy retrofits. By definition, that's like 70% or greater energy savings. And A, we don't really talk much about energy savings. But B, getting to that level is really, really intense. And typically you're talking upwards of $100,000 to do that sort of thing. Or an insane amount of DIY work. So we do what we call comprehensive projects. So we're looking to figure out what can we do to get really good results without going crazy far. And so we call those comprehensive projects. So if you go to energiesmartohio.com that's the website for our practice. You can see what some of these projects look like. So if you need a bunch of insulation and air sealing, your project's probably going to look something like that in one of these. And also, so you know, I've been showing you the simplified version of the HVAC 2.0 process. You don't necessarily have to know all the steps to dive in. Same thing for the contractors, it freaks them out because they don't see that it's all coming. This whole thing is sketched out. And it has a lot of different steps to it. And then three different paths. So all of this is here. It's all thought out. It can be worked through and we've designed this. So most of this work about 80% of the work in HVAC 2.0 can be done by entry level talents. So this is doable. Just about anybody can lean in and do this. They just have to be curious and want to learn and dive in and figure it out. That includes you as the homeowner. So just know that even if you can't see where everything's going it's all in here. And so that's what I wanted to come back to. You don't have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step. So great line from MLK. Alright, back to finding that contractor. So remember at the beginning I talked about learning, planning and doing. So the learning you're now basically done with. This is the end of the electrify everything course. So you signed up to get the free course. You've now taken the time to go through everything. At the end you're going to get multiple options for the plan and do steps. Here's your multiple options. One. And yes, I realize this is pushing people in the direction of our program. But we built this program. It's a really narrow path. We've spent eight years figuring this out. Closer to ten actually. This is a really difficult narrow path to put everybody on and have it come out the other side. So I'm sure there's other ways to get there. I don't know what they are at scale that are completely market based. So if you can find an HVAC 2.0 contractor and so here's the URL for it. It's easy. If you happen to have one near you, call them. The network is really thin still and so option two is to go create an HVAC 2.0 contractor which I'll show you how to do here next. This is going to take some work. You're an early adopter. You take longer, be harder and probably cost more than it will in five years. So you do really want to consider is this something you want to do today or do you want to kick the can because you don't want to deal with the extra friction. If that's the case, kick the can. It's okay. But if you want to help electrification in general, there's nothing better that you can do than to create an HVAC 2.0 contractor. Third thing is you can wing it. Call somebody. Try and work through it. That's a very, very high risk thing, frankly. And I don't mean to scare you, but there's a lot of things that can go wrong in this. Particularly if you are in a colder climate, like where I live. And then the last thing is you could hire us to help you remotely. But that's not going to be a super scalable solution. So if you want to interview a contractor, we've actually set up a Google form for doing this. So you will get a copy of it. So again, it's going to ask for some information for you that you've already given me. Your email and so forth. But this is going to help us as well because when you submit it, we're going to understand who has been called and we'll have an idea of how open they are to the idea of electrification in HVAC 2.0. This is not going to be easy. So, gird your loins. You know, it's put on the breastplate of righteousness and all the other stuff. There's a lot that needs to be figured out here. But here's what it actually looks like creating an HVAC 2.0 contractor. So you want to call a local supply house to you for the brand of HVAC that you are interested in. So I would suggest Carrier or Bryant or Mitsubishi or Fujitsu. And actually train an American standard can be fine too. So there's a bunch of these out there that you can use but you want to call that supply house and ask who buys a lot of their top of the line equipment. So when you go into call you want to know what the top of the line is called. So like it's Carrier Infinity Green Speed or Bryant's Evolution Extreme or Mitsubishi Hyperheat that's the cold climate version. So you want to know what the name is of the top of the line equipment. So ask them who buys it and they'll know a couple of people. I mean I used to be an inside sales. I could tell you who bought one just off the top of my head. So then you use the interview form that is towards the bottom of the HVAC 2.0.com slash map page and call an interview two to four of them. So see what you're comfortable with what you're not comfortable with. And if you find a comfort level with these people with any one of them you want to ask them if they're willing to run a comfort console for you. So we've now set up the HVAC 2.0 software so that you can create a free account and you can basically use all of the software up to creating a report and to create the report the contractor needs to pay 25 bucks. Very minimal. Now they don't get any support doing that. So they need to subscribe to get support which isn't particularly expensive either. But at least at that point you can get yourself through the comfort console process and if they're used to doing load calculations you can get a load calculation. So pay them to do the comfort consults and then you may basically just sit down right next to them and work through it and help them figure out the report and how to use the software. So yes I know that's an extra lift but if you want to reduce the odds of failure and increase the odds of success this is a path that I know works. So we have built it to do this. And we're seeing where this is already really starting to change the lives of the people that are involved in the program. So that's how you do it. You can create an HVAC contractor call a supply house ask who buys the good stuff call them and interview them and then ask them if they are game for doing an HVAC 2.0 comfort console. And that is the end of the electrify everything course. So if you do happen to want to hire us remotely at the bottom of the HVAC 2.0 dot com slash map page there is a link for doing that. So you can either hire me or I'll send you to one of our guys and for now they're pretty much all guys but thank you for making it to the end of the electrify everything course. So good luck as you find a contractor hopefully you've got your head around things. This is the first time I've done a course that is this involved. So do send me an email and let me know what you like or dislike what could be improved so constructive feedback is good. Don't tell me it sucks tell me it sucks here but you could do this and it would be better. That's that's immensely helpful to improving this because we want to see electrification scale and we've gone to a great deal of trouble to create a system to allow that to happen. So if you happen to get here because a friend sent you the video or forwarded you this email here's how to get the rest of the course so you skip to the end. But please sign up get the course it's free and if you just enjoy this and you don't intend to electrify in the near future you can buy me a proverbial beer. So I'll put a link underneath and you can send a couple bucks my way or a thousand bucks my way you know whatever strikes your fancy but don't feel any pressure to do that I just leave that option there because we are doing this free and it's a lot of time invested and you're getting the benefit of thousands of hours of experience at this point. So if you find value buy me a beer or just send this on to other people so please share this we'd like to have this go and help us build the HVAC 2.0 network because that's probably the biggest piece of residential electrification is to get that system out there and being used by hundreds thousands and eventually tens of thousands of HVAC contractors across the country. So thanks again for watching I'm Nate Adams I hope this was really helpful to you and I'll see you around on social media so thanks again have a wonderful day bye bye