‘Climate-Focused Clients Tend to Be Rude’

Residential buildings in the U.S. pour out millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. Air conditioners are inefficient energy-guzzlers, and burning fossil fuels for heating and cooking can worsen indoor air quality, leading to asthma and other health problems. Buildings that let off greenhouse gases also contribute to climate change, and fossil fuel air pollution may be responsible for as many as 1 in 5 deaths worldwide, according to a study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The Inflation Reduction Act put billions of dollars toward modernizing American buildings, with tax rebates for clean-energy manufacturing, as well as home energy efficiency upgrades and electrification. But real people will need to be hired to tear out oil boilers and gas furnaces, and replace them with electric heat pumps. Currently, many contractors are skeptical of how the industry is being overhauled.

The Prospect spoke with Nate Adams, a home performance expert who consults on insulation and air sealing for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) technicians. Based in West Virginia, Adams is a passionate promoter of heat pumps for comfort and air quality. He runs a Facebook group called Electrify Everything, and produces meme-filled slideshows on winning over skeptics. He is increasingly worried about how political polarization could stall electrification.

The Prospect reached Adams in Chief Logan State Park, where he spent July 4th camping with his family. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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The American Prospect: How did you get into home performance and electrification?

Nate Adams: My parents had two manufacturing companies. One made high-precision steel sleeves to fix steering gears in early-’80s GM cars. My dad helped figure out how to fix a significant manufacturing defect. He also had a company that made creepers—what you lie on when you work under a car—with plastic injection molding.

I grew up as a cross between white- and blue-collar. I saw a lot of machinery get sold and shipped to China for pennies on the dollar in the early 2000s, which was personally painful to watch. In 2005, I found myself selling insulation to contractors for new homes. That disappeared with the housing crisis in early ’09.

Then I started an insulation contracting company, and ended up doing consulting, what I call being a “House Whisperer.” My sales process helps figure out what mix of insulation, air sealing, and HVAC equipment solves clients’ needs. We approach homes much like a doctor—or really, much more like a nurse, because doctors have crappy process. Nurses have very good process, in general.

When you ask clients what they want to fix in their homes, what stuff bothers them—are rooms too hot, are floors too cold for bare feet—they tend to buy better stuff. But many HVAC contractors don’t ask those questions. Most are former HVAC technicians. They’re good at looking at a piece of equipment and figuring out what’s wrong with it, getting the right part changed. They’re mechanics, not engineers. Which is fine—that’s most of the job. I am actually a mediocre mechanic and an OK engineer. But they overlook the shell of the house.

So you focus on the air flow, the insulation, the more holistic analysis?

Yes. In the classic HVAC business model, that’s overlooked. That problem is getting worse, since private equity is getting into HVAC. They’re just looking at the equipment and maximizing topline sales, leading to a lot of shoddy installs.

How has home performance and HVAC changed in recent years?

Until about a decade ago, we were in “Back to the Future” territory. You could have pulled an AC technician out of 1955, stuck him in a DeLorean time machine to 2010, and the equipment wouldn’t have changed much. He’d have to work through some culture shock and learn circuit boards, but he wouldn’t have a hard time figuring out single-stage equipment, which is still most of what is sold.

But inverter-based equipment gives us all sorts of new tools. That’s what has opened the door to electrification across the country. The U.S. is split into eight zones. Climate zones 1 through 4—the Southeast—are not very cold. The Southeast has had heat pumps for years. With newer inverter-based heat pumps, we can push into zones 5 and 6, which lets us tackle the majority of the U.S. population.

That’s equipment. What about air quality and efficiency?

Building science has been revolutionized in the last few decades. But home performance has been stagnant. It’s led by too many nerds and academics, and there has been low project volume.

We learned building science the hard way, during the oil crisis of the late 1970s. We had never cared much about energy efficiency, but suddenly, we had to care about saving energy in order to keep the lights on. We started making homes more airtight, to preserve energy, and suddenly we found that people couldn’t breathe. Moisture couldn’t get in and out, and outdoor air couldn’t get in. We created “sick building syndrome.”

Over the 1980s and 1990s, we figured out how to build more efficiently while letting buildings breathe, letting moisture in and out of a building. Joseph Lstiburek’s work at the Building Science Corporation was important here. He was very experimental. He went out and saw what actually worked.

The other key innovation came with affordable measurement tools. In 2016, the first generation of consumer-grade air quality monitors came out. Now you didn’t have to be a national lab with $50,000 worth of equipment to be able to understand the air quality inside a house.

We dug into that with our insulation practice, and learned a lot. But I was frustrated that I saw all this knowledge not being applied, because of the narrow focus on HVAC.

Why are heat pumps so finicky? Why do there seem to be so many bad installs?

Heat pumps are tough to get right, because they have smaller output. A furnace may only need to run half the time or less to heat the house, because output is so much higher. The smallest furnace is 60,000 BTUs [British thermal units, a measure of heat], and most are 80,000 BTUs. The most common heat pump size is 36,000 BTUs.

OK. So when you install a heat pump, there’s less wiggle room to screw things up. It needs to work correctly at all times.

Exactly. Furnaces are often installed so badly that after running for 20 minutes, the temperature sensor shuts them down. But because the equipment is so oversized, you only notice on the very coldest days of the year, or you may not notice it at all.

The same thing may happen with a badly installed heat pump—it may reach pressures it shouldn’t be running at, and shut down. But you feel that immediately, because heat pumps need to run basically 100 percent of the time when it’s cold out.

That makes me more nervous to buy a heat pump if I live in a cold climate.

Right. That’s the logical conclusion, and it makes electrification harder.

So it’s essential to pick the right heat pump, and install it correctly. Why is that so hard?

HVAC is almost always an emergency sale. Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of HVAC replacements are done on an emergency basis. If you have a sudden large expense, you tend to minimize the cost. You may choose whoever can show up the soonest. “Where do I sign?” The transaction is hair-on-fire.

You should get three quotes on whatever you’re doing. But you also don’t necessarily want to buy the cheapest option or bottom-end equipment. The point of a free quote is often also to get free consulting, so you understand the best system.

The cheapest quote is often single-stage, simple on-off equipment. But to solve comfort problems, you need right-sized variable-speed equipment, which means inverters. Those pieces of equipment are more sensitive to install quality. So if they are sold cheap, do you have the margin to train your technicians and also spend the extra time and use the extra materials to install well? Maybe not. Particularly when HVAC contractors are being bought out by private equity firms.

The contractors that do good work are prone to go out of business. I did this with insulation—I learned how to do good work, but I could never figure out how to sell it at a price that I could do it. My margins collapsed, and I ended up closing the company.

Have you now figured out how to sell better work?

On insulation alone, no. People view insulation as a commodity.

What percentage of your deals involve electrification?

I’ve never sold an air conditioner. Anybody who buys HVAC gets a heat pump. About a quarter of jobs are full electrification. But that’s a big lift—you have to change the water heater, the stove, the dryer, and the HVAC. So it happens less often. But we do partial electrifications on basically every job.

If you move from a furnace and an air conditioner, which is your most common northern system, and you change that to a furnace with a heat pump, at a bare minimum you reduce gas usage by 30 percent. And we are oftentimes seeing that we can push 90 percent.

How has the Inflation Reduction Act impacted your work?

Man, I’m pretty pissed about the IRA. It messes with the sales process. It brings equipment selection and pricing to the beginning of the conversation, when that should be at the end. Everyone thinks HVAC is a commodity, and it’s not.

When you bring price and equipment selection to the beginning, you’re taking a whole bunch of potential prescriptions off the table. It’s bad for the consumer, and bad for the contractor because it destroys trust. And trust is already in short supply. Do you trust contractors? They’re viewed as one step above felons.

The IRA also incentivizes equipment that is bad at dehumidification. We’re in for a redux of sick building syndrome.

An air conditioner is always doing two things: One, it cools the air, taking heat from inside and pumping it outdoors. Two, it dehumidifies the air. Humidity condenses on the air conditioner, and that condensation runs down the drain and out of the house.

Old-school air conditioners did that at a 50:50 ratio. The ratio of cooling to dehumidification is called the “sensible heat ratio.” Increasingly, we’re seeing systems run that do darn near 100 percent cooling, and no dehumidification. That’s due to regulations. The cheapest way to get a system that meets the IRA standards is to find a system that does little to no dehumidification. That’s because IRA is focused on SEER [seasonal energy efficiency ratio] ratings.

Older systems were a 6 or an 8 on SEER. Like my 1999 camper, which still has an air conditioner that runs like a champ. It has a huge stream of condensation dripping off a little tiny air conditioner. You don’t find that with new machines. That’s because SEER is marching up. As of January, it’s 13 or 14, depending on your region.

Now, we’ve done an amazing job raising energy efficiency in recent years. Look at the LED light bulb [which consumes much less electricity than incandescent bulbs]. We haven’t seen significant power grid load growth since the year 2000. But in air conditioning, we’re gaining efficiency by losing dehumidification, and leaning towards making homeowners sick.

It’s like that saying, “more heat than light.” We want light bulbs to create light, and not waste energy producing heat. With heat pumps and ACs, regulations are doing something similar, channeling energy into “more cooling than dehumidification.” But in this case, it could be a problem.

Right. It’s not a problem inherent to heat pumps. Inverter systems can vary the temperature of the coil, which determines how much it can dehumidify. But the current standards incentivize choosing systems with maximum cooling, with no attention to dehumidifying. We’ve done indoor air quality monitoring for years, and it’s bad. When a house gets too wet, the materials get wet, they grow mold, and the person inside gets sick.

This is something where policymakers and boots on the ground just don’t communicate enough. The manufacturers don’t care that much. But at some point, there’s going to be a sick building syndrome lawsuit that hits not only the contractor but the manufacturer, because they have deeper pockets.

How else has the IRA changed your work?

Well, I hate climate-focused clients. And keep in mind that I’m a climate hawk. I am politically conservative, just a little right of center, and a climate hawk.

We find that climate-focused clients tend to be miserable to work with. We’re now driving climate-focused clients to HVAC contractors who are already skeptical of electrification, and they’re having bad experiences.

Right—you’ve written that some electrification advocacy groups, who are trying to steer more people to use the tax credits in the IRA, are “messing up the kitchen table transaction.” Why is that?

These advocacy groups are viewed as trusted arbiters by the people reading their information or taking their quizzes. But clients are set up with wildly inaccurate price expectations. And trust between homeowners and contractors is already challenging.

Climate-focused clients usually want to electrify for electrification’s sake. It’s just virtue signaling. Since they don’t have other issues they want the HVAC system to solve, they’re very low-budget, and they tend to be very entitled in their dealings with contractors. It’s not worth anything to them beyond their climate beliefs. They tend to take a lot of time, ask a lot of questions, then not spend the money.

Climate beliefs on their own are not worth much. Other things are. Having a more comfortable home is worth real money. If you have kids with asthma or allergies, you’ll want to improve that. But about 75 percent of climate-focused clients, I don’t want to deal with. And advocacy groups are drawing in more of these climate-focused clients that tend to be super price-sensitive.

I want to pull up at a McMansion with a Trump sign and a BMW. I can sell them something. I want someone who leans towards the best in general, and also is willing to listen and learn, who would value improved comfort. Basically, I want somebody with problems to solve.

Also, climate-focused clients tend to be rude. White-collar people looking down on blue-collar is the last acceptable prejudice.

How so? Have you experienced that personally?

I’ve definitely experienced it with doctors, for example. I have, like, a personal struggle, internally, with doctors. I view them as arbiters of good things—I view them as intelligent, because they made it through medical school. Not that I couldn’t have. That wasn’t the path that I chose. But I still feel bad that I oftentimes get talked down to. And there can be innate assumptions that my time doesn’t matter.

Engineers are also classic at triggering contractors. They tend to think they know more than they do. I had one engineer who lived in a house with three fish tanks running, and he had all these humidity problems. He had mold in his attic. I pointed out, how often do you refill your fish tanks? He said he needs to add a gallon or two a day. I said, either you have to remove them, or you need to dehumidify. And he kept insisting that his attic ventilation was the problem. After a while, I’m like, Look, why did you have me here?

You’ve written that you’re worried about HVAC services overemphasizing climate change. But you’re doing a lot of home electrification, and you call yourself a climate hawk. How would you describe the purpose of your work?

We’re trying to improve indoor and outdoor air quality. In 2015, childhood asthma was causally linked to damp buildings. Bad indoor air quality causes a lot of problems.

Right. Gas stoves have become another flashpoint in the culture war.

Gas stoves are hideous for air quality. It’s not hard to figure out with indoor air quality monitors.

Are you worried about how gas stoves are being politicized by the right wing?

Oh, 100 percent. Although I do have to say, the memes were lit. They were really funny. Which is a weird thing. It used to be the liberals were funny. Now it’s the conservatives. Coming from a conservative background, I remember thinking, we’re just never going to be funny. But now I laugh at conservative jokes more than liberal ones. Everything up is down.

But the danger of the politicization we’re seeing is, as soon as we connect things too strongly to climate—because climate has been so politicized—you get knee-jerk reactions. If we change all one-way air conditioners to two-way heat pumps, it has to be framed as increasing consumer heating choice. Otherwise it could be framed as “they’re trying to take our air conditioners away.” Which is not true. You’re keeping your air conditioner, you’re just getting another function out of it. You’re getting reverse gear.

Clean energy gets a lot of pushback now. And 80 percent of contractors vote conservative. So if we’re pissing off conservatives, we’re pissing off the people doing the work. Heat pumps haven’t been a huge issue yet, but I’m bracing for it.

It’s like how car dealers are overwhelmingly conservative, and many of them oppose electric vehicles.

There you go. I sold cars for a while. What a messed-up trade that is. Mental illness is like a requirement. It’s the peaks and valleys. I definitely felt it. You’d go two weeks without selling something, and feel like you’d never sell something again.

The other big thing about the IRA is, incentives tend to draw hucksters, who come in and sell based on those incentives, but end up swindling the client.

Well, hucksterism is always bad. But if you zoom out, maybe it’s a good sign? Maybe the existence of low-quality projects, and the need to weed them out, is actually a signal that the energy transition is happening at the necessary scale.

There’s an argument to be made for that. But I suspect we’ll create so many negative experiences on both sides of the kitchen table, that we’re going to stall, stop, or most likely reverse progress.

With the IRA, I’m also curious about what happens with batteries and solar. We’re onshoring a bunch of stuff, which I have mixed feelings about. It could be viewed as saber-rattling. But on the other hand, I’m glad to see manufacturing coming back. So, mixed feelings.

But as far as the heat pump stuff goes, this is not going to be effective policy. It just isn’t.