Lessons Learned: Home Electrification Retrofits

Congrats to San Francisco for banning gas in all new construction starting in less than 2 months! I never would have guessed it would move that fast!

San Francisco is the perfect climate for heat pumps, and putting in 100 year infrastructure that’s likely to be abandoned/stranded assets within 20 years is a poor use of resources. It’s also a great example of state’s, or in this case, city’s rights. 

Now to tackle the other 99%: Retrofits. 

We’ve gotten pretty good at doing electrification retrofits, and are now teaching HVAC contractors around the country how to do it, but it has not been an easy path. It seems like it’s a story that should be told so the lessons we’ve learned can be learned the easy way by others. 

The Journey

I got into this industry as a cellulose insulation contractor. By 2012 I had achieved the elusive HPwES Century Club Award by selling lots of small, mostly ineffective jobs. My wife was pregnant, I was working 100 hours a week, I hated my life, and was looking to get out. I met a guy who offered to show me how to sell bigger, satisfying, impactful jobs.  
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This changed the direction of my life for the better. I actually cried with joy. 

In 2014 we removed our first gas meter outside Cleveland Ohio. It’s an area with some of the cheapest gas in the nation and no assistance programs. We’ve electrified 12 more existing homes since then (with many more partial electrifications) using the sales process we developed. This is a small number. But when combined with our Google reviews, case studies, and sales ratios, it’s proof of concept. It’s probably the cold climate record outside of programs.

We’ve long been passionate about scaling comfortable, healthy, renewably powered homes, so we worked hard to develop a process that avoided the common failures we’d seen in the Home Performance world. 

We dedicated 2012-2015 to developing this client focused sales process. In 2016-2017 it became clear that consumers needed better preparation before meeting with us. During this time I wrote The Home Comfort Book. Part of my motivation was to express gratitude to my mentor/partner by putting what he’d taught me into a more digestible form. The other part was creating a good onramp for homeowners to understand building science, which underpins our work.  

In experimenting with sharing the chapters of the book, we’ve found that giving HVAC 101 to everyone that meets the “3 foot rule” has surprising and positive responses. It’s been very satisfying to watch it turn on mental light bulbs for both HVAC contractors and homeowners.

Low Risk, Big Reward

On this journey we learned that people will spend 10-20% of the value of their home to fix the problems we can fix. The biggest barrier is confidence in outcome. If the risk of failure is high, people won’t take that risk. Our process seeks to reduce that risk. 

The process successfully fixes homes for the meat of the market, from about the 40th to the 95th percentile of household income. It engages and educates homeowners in the discovery and design steps so they understand the what and why of their problems, and are partners in designing solutions. We’ve found that the rich and poor are hard for us to serve, but this works great for the middle classes because they can afford to do the work, but it's a serious financial commitment for them. 

Our marketing filters did a nice job of qualifying people with problems others have not been able to solve, finding frustrated people, educating them and partnering with them to solve these previously unsolvable problems. We began to call the process Home Performance 2.0 and look for a way to scale it. 

Pivoting to HVAC

Through all this, we’ve been wrong a lot. We were told the HP 2.0 process we were developing wasn’t scalable. Recently we finally have come to agree. Our process requires too large of a training, sales and marketing lift, and reaches too few homes, likely only 1-5%. 

So in 2018 we pivoted to applying an expanded version of the process to HVAC contractors, renamed it HVAC 2.0, and aimed to make it available to any homeowner that wants it. 

It has been going far better than we expected. A number of homes have been electrified without programs by our alpha testing group. They are seeing huge gains in closing ratios, ticket sizes, margins, job satisfaction, and client happiness.  

The pivot to an “every home” approach has been interesting. Instead of invisibly filtering people before they reach us, we are developing more active filters that the HVAC contractors explicitly use with homeowners after contact. 

It’s a filtering/matching process that all leads back to the blower door where we began. A blower door tests how leaky a house is. Once you truly become a member of the cult of the blower door, you start to have this overwhelming desire for every homeowner to have the opportunity to have a blower door test and a blower door based load calculation before they make their next 15-25 year commitment to a new heating and cooling system.  

If a load calculation is run using a blower door test (to repeat, they test how much a house leaks air) and actual energy consumption, the variance of heat load calculations drops from +/ 70% to +/- 10%. And yes, it really is +/- 70%. That means without knowing the air leakage and energy use of a home, it is literally a guess which size HVAC is correct. When we get down to +/- 10%, it becomes obvious which size is correct. 
Right sized HVAC is the key to residential electrification. In general, the smaller the HVAC, the better the comfort. Also, heat pumps are almost all smaller than furnaces, so if we can downsize enough, the right piece of HVAC is almost always a heat pump.

But this is risky for contractors. Get too aggressive and the contractor fears getting a callback on a very hot or cold day when the house is uncomfortable, and they are on the hook to fix it, which typically involves pulling out the equipment they installed and putting in a bigger one for free. This happens on the hottest or coldest days of the year when they are otherwise making a large percentage of their year’s pay. So naturally they size larger to avoid those callbacks, but sacrifice client comfort 99% of the year in doing so. (Much more about this in Comfort 101 from my book by the way… you are within a virtual 3 feet right now!) 

The hopeful part is that our early HVAC contractors are absolutely loving selling blower door tests and running what we call a Comfort Consult in HVAC 2.0.  There are 105,000 HVAC contractors in the US. They are in homes more often than any other contractor, they deal with comfort which is the key selling point for electrification, and they are the only army large enough to be able to handle the 2 million residential electrifications a year we need in the US have any hope of reaching 2050 goals. It’s hopeful! 
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Our founding contractors have already performed a number of electrifications, it’s a natural outcome of the HVAC 2.0 process, no arm twisting of either homeowners or contractors required. This can hopefully avoid this problem: 

​The Narrow Path We’ve Found

Here’s the path we’ve found for scaling electrification: we’ve created a sales process that makes the HVAC contractor’s life better. They are able to solve previously unsolvable complaints by expanding their understanding of conditions from just the HVAC equipment to the whole house. Their clients are ecstatic, a common comment is that they can’t believe it is the same house. Both contractors and homeowners are well served.

We’ve created a map, or subway map if you will, of the steps they need to follow, and made following it natural and easy. 

We are helping them track data that they hate tracking manually. We are helping them avoid the overpromise and underdeliver trap, and other practices that lead to general distrust of the HVAC and Home Performance industries. 
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 Because they are right sizing HVAC, they will largely be selling heat pumps, or at least hybrids (heat pump + furnace). This is the guerrilla path to electrification. As a friend put it to me, it’s like getting kids to eat vegetables by putting them on pizza.

Let’s talk about do’s, not don’ts

Through all this, we’ve learned a number of things that should be helpful if California wants to avoid inadvertently slowing down residential electrification, which is a remarkably narrow path. Anybody who wishes to hear about the horror stories, let me know. Rather than talk about the failures, cautionary tales, and “don’ts”  let’s talk about the “do’s.”

This is perhaps the biggest point: simple and predictable can spark markets, complicated and unpredictable kills them. If you want simple, it needs to be upstream of the consumer and contractor. For example, if you want to have all air conditioners replaced by heat pumps, make heat pumps cheaper than air conditioners at the supply house. 

We have never sold an air conditioner. If the government wanted to do one really powerful thing, they could put an incentive on heat pumps that makes them cheaper than air conditioners, and the industry would jump forward 10 years overnight. 

With that one action you could end the manufacture of air conditioners.  That’s one big item on our wish list. Here’s the rest of it:

HVAC 2.0 Electrification Wish List

• Put the incentives of homeowners and contractors above all else. They write the checks and do the work. Without them, nothing happens.
• Heat Pump incentives at the supply house
• Blower Door incentives at the supply house
• Energy Use Transparency, with consumer opt out rather than opt in.
• End all Home Performance programs except low income.
• Begin to price unpriced pollution externalities via Carbon Fee and Dividend. 

​Thank you so much for your time and interest in our path. HVAC 2.0 is becoming a movement, and we invite you all to be members. We now have free accounts so you can explore the methods, you can sign up here if you like. 

Good luck California as you begin to #electrifyeverything! We’ll be watching, and if you’d like help, we’re here for that too.
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