HVAC ADHD
Where duct design meets dopamine. Hosted by Jeremy Begley, founding shareholder of HVAC 2 Home Performance, this biweekly show dives deep into the intersection of HVAC, building performance, and green design.
HVAC ADHD
HVAC Education, Apprenticeships & Building Better Technicians with Brad Cooper
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In this episode of the HVAC ADHD™ Vodcast, Jeremy Begley sits down with Brad Cooper—Advanced HVAC Instructor at Arkansas State University-Beebe, former HVAC contractor, industry educator, and contributor to HVAC School—to discuss one of the biggest challenges facing the HVAC industry today:
Developing the next generation of technicians.
Brad brings decades of experience from both the classroom and the field, offering a unique perspective on workforce development, HVAC education, apprenticeships, and the skills modern technicians need to succeed.
From load calculations and commissioning to MeasureQuick and diagnostic technology, this conversation explores how contractors can move beyond reactive training and build technicians who understand systems, testing, and performance.
We dive deep into:
• Why HVAC education must evolve to meet modern industry demands
• The gap between classroom instruction and field experience
• How apprenticeships help solve workforce challenges
• Why load calculations remain one of HVAC's most overlooked skills
• The role of MeasureQuick and modern diagnostics in technician development
• The true cost of callbacks and poor commissioning
• Airflow, static pressure, and system performance fundamentals
• Building technicians who think critically instead of relying on shortcuts
• Why contractors must invest in training for long-term success
• Leaving the HVAC industry better than you found it
This episode also explores a central idea shaping the future of HVAC:
👉 Great technicians aren't born—they're developed.
👉 The companies that prioritize training, testing, mentorship, and continuous improvement will lead the next generation of the industry.
Whether you're an HVAC contractor, technician, installer, service manager, educator, trade school student, or building performance professional, this episode offers practical insights for improving technical skills, reducing callbacks, and building stronger teams.
🔗 Brad Cooper's Links
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-cooper-cmhe-hvacreducator/
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/hvacreducator/
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Hey everybody. Welcome back to the HVAC ADHD vodcast. I'm your host, Jerry Begley. Today we're talking with Brad Cooper from Arkansas State University BB, where he serves as the advanced HVAC instructor. But Brad's not just an instructor, he's somebody who grew up in the trade, owned and operated an HVAC company, and now spends his time helping the next generation of technicians entering the field. In this episode, we get into the real challenges facing HVAC education today. From the labor shortage and technician retention to airflow, load calculations, commissioning, and how technology like MeasureClick is changing the way contractors import their teams in the field. We also talk about the disconnect between code requirements and actual enforcement, why so many systems are still oversized, and what the industry needs to do differently if we want better outcomes for contractors and homeowners alike. This one turned into a really solid conversation about where the trade has been, where it's headed, and how education has to evolve if we're going to keep it up. Let's get into it. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the HVAC ADHD vodcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Begley. Today we're here with Brad Cooper from the Arkansas City HVAC BB. Brad, go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do, what your company is, and why you're here today.
SPEAKER_02My name's Brad Cooper. I'm with Arkansas State University in BB. I'm the advanced HVAC instructor here. I teach, build the curriculum, and I am also part of HVAC School. I help contribute with some of their videos and editing.
SPEAKER_00Okay, tell us a little bit about your background. Like how'd you wind up teaching HVAC? What'd you what brought you, what was your pathway through the trade?
SPEAKER_02When I was nine years old, I rode with my dad for the first time in his company truck. He owned his own company in 1986 and went out riding with him, taking pictures. By 10, I was insulating ductwork. It to say heat heating and air runs in my veins, it really does. Both my brothers work in it, one of my sons work in it, and of course my father owned a company and taught me and my brothers how to do heating and air. And then when long story short, my father passed away. I ran the business for another four or five years, and when they asked me, they asked the Arkansas State University asked if I knew somebody that wanted to teach, and I was like, you know what? I think I'd want to teach. And I started teaching five years ago and just fell in love with the teaching aspect of it.
SPEAKER_00Did you say you sold the company to your brothers, or you guys were owners, or how did all that work out?
SPEAKER_02I ended up passing off the customer base to another company that I trusted when I went to work here. It was too much. The first year I taught and worked, and it was just too much. It was getting off at three or four o'clock in the afternoon and then going to work until dark every night was it was a bit much. It is a bit much.
SPEAKER_00So the the market down there in Arkansas, where you see is it mostly a heat pump and electric furnace or AC an electric furnace? What do you guys mostly see there in Arkansas?
SPEAKER_02Really, it's a big split. When you hit subdivisions around here, our gas company will come in and they will supply gas to every house and every meter for free just to get them to put in gas furnaces and gas hot water heaters. And so that's a big builders, it's hard for them to pass up that because they're getting a lot of free stuff there, so they're usually going to put that in. And so it's a mix. You get half heat pump, half gas furnace.
SPEAKER_00What's your guys' weather like down there? What's the climate zone?
SPEAKER_02We are two weeks out of the year we get down to about twenty, and two weeks out of the year we get up to about a hundred and five. But other than that, we are usually above freezing and below a hundred most of the time. Or I can't remember what zone we're in.
SPEAKER_01What's your design temps? Indoor and outdoor? Just outdoor.
SPEAKER_02Or yeah, that's what I meant. I'm I meant winter and summer. I believe it's ninety-five in the summer, and it's uh I'd have to look. Okay.
SPEAKER_00It's uh yeah, I think it's similar, sort of, oh, closer, a little bit close to what Knoxville is here. We're like we're not 95, we're like 91 in the summer and like 20 some 18 degrees, I think, in the winter or something like that, like right around there. It's probably a close to that. So that's the same. We see like there's like a lot of 80% gas furnaces, and there's also a lot of package units that shoot underneath the house into the crawl space. So then you got just a pat whatever it may be a package electric heat and gas heat or electric AC and gas heat or package. Now there's new the newer package units do have heat pumps available to them. They could get a package heat pump. I don't know how much people are really selling those, and then you just see a ton of split systems and some gas furnaces, a lot of heat pumps, a lot of electric heat, electric furnaces still around here in play that could easily be switched out to heat pumps if it's not like some kind of wiring issue with multifamily or something like that. Yeah. What do you in school? What is the curriculum that you teach in in the HVAC school? Is it and is it a full like it just tell me how the course is set up.
SPEAKER_02When I got here five years ago, there was eight courses or eight classes that made the course for a technical certificate. And so I it's a very basic course. It gets the students a lot more than they a lot more than you learn in your first couple years. You get the basic brazing, flowing nitrogen, pulling a vacuum, all the hands-on stuff they really need. And so what I did was I split the class up, half hands-on, half learning. And so they learn how to do something, and then we turn around and actually do it in class. And since I've been here, I have added an associate's program that's not quite fully intact yet, but the classes are there. And so now I'm teaching like my air distribution one class is over static pressure, checking CFEM, and building ductwork. The second air distribution class is psychometrics. It's like more on the psychometric chart. I actually use I think it's psychometric, it's one of HVAC Excellence books that Eugene Silberstein wrote. Psychometric Without Without Tears. So that's my main book for that class. And so I start off basic, like they need to know how to do ductwork, they need to know how to check airflow, they need static pressure, but then the second year, that's when we start really getting into the more of the technical stuff with the psychrometrics.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so it's a structured, but going to be an associate, it's a certificate program at the college right now, but it's going to end up being an associate degree for the students as well as an HVAC certificate, so they get both out of it when they take the pathway. So what is is there an extra value to having the associate's degree, or does it just give them a longer time to learn stuff like airflow and the other things that you talked about that maybe not won't you don't go in depth in a pure HVAC certificate course?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the associate's degree is two things. It gives them more hands-on experience because that's one thing I'm big on is the hands-on. If you go through class, it's gonna take you a year to really get familiar with it if you go outside and do your hands-on. And so the second year is really getting a extra hands-on, and it's gonna be more geared around your technical people that are gonna be doing service work, the people that might want to do more with air conditioning, want to own a company. Uh but for somebody that's just wanting to run duct work, somebody that's just wanting to install units, that technical certificate's a good one. And then the associates also, one thing that I've noticed, I grew up in heating air, so I never went and got my degree until I started teaching. And I started teaching and I had all my stuff on LinkedIn. I had all my experience, I had all my certifications, all that stuff up there. And then as soon as I put that I had an associate's degree, shoot, I started getting people were calling me, recruiters calling me, wanting me to get jobs. It was it they the recruiter said there was something about the associate's degree just showed that you could complete something. And so there was a lot of jobs that they want the associates just to see that you can complete something or a bachelor's. It's not necessarily that they want you to have a degree. They don't think you're smarter, they just think you're actually going to sit and do something. You're gonna be there for a while. It's you're not somebody that's gonna bounce around from job to job.
SPEAKER_00So are you talking about recruiting inside the trades or for jobs outside the actual what we would call the trades, like the pure trade of turning a wrench or out there in the field?
SPEAKER_02I am talking more about the outside outside edge of our field. Like some of the, I believe some of the data centers, they're wanting people with degrees the to run those. And and I said that, I think it gives them a leg up having an HVAC degree. And that's where it comes. It gives them a leg up, it shows them that they went above and beyond. And especially for contributing roles and instructor roles, the degrees really matter.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Yeah, 100% for that.
SPEAKER_02Right now.
SPEAKER_00Does it does your degree include anything with design, like the front end of the stuff, or is it right now just driven by the trade end of it? Design is in as in JSD and engineering and stuff like that. Yeah, but at least being able to do a uh understand manual JSD like 101 or something like that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that we do that. We this year we went over it was one of the my mind just went blank, it's one of the softwares that you use on the iPad. And then we went over Manual J, but we didn't the students didn't get to play with the manual J like they did the one on the iPad. But actually, I think you may know Jason Julian, but he came up here and actually did a class for me and went over. Do you know the different load calculation software?
SPEAKER_00We got Ampli, we got Conduit Tech, we got Quick Model Conduit I think it was Conduit he brought up here and he taught a class on that for the students.
SPEAKER_02And so that that's the stuff. They're basic classes. I want them to get out here and understand that windows, doors, bad insulation, holes in the wall, that's your big heat gains. The second year is when we get into okay, now how much heat gain is that window costing you? How much heat gain is your ducks gaining in the attic? All that stuff.
SPEAKER_00Okay. I like it. That's a much more in-depth class, it sounds like some of the most of the peer certificate classes are mostly to just get you out there understanding the refrigerant cycle, understanding the EPA laws and turning a wrench a little bit. They don't really go into too much of the design and a lot of the stuff that really makes the stuff work. If you do it right on the front end, then you're you you stop having a lot of the problems that you have on the back end who don't have as many callbacks and things like that. I think it's important to include that. I've been talking to, I haven't talked to them recently, but I was in a conversation with the college down here, the trade college, to try to just get a little one-off design class where we just come in one day and we just expose them to the design stuff and say, hey, this isn't part of this class, but it should be. And here's some stuff that you definitely should take the time to learn once you get your your certificate and stuff because it's the way the HVAC's been the it's a the way it's taught right now is the old school, just get out there and do it way, which we still need that, but we need to get guys going quicker and we need them to understand the proper procedures a lot quicker too. I don't think that I think there's a lot of revamping in the HVAC education space that needs to be done. The way you guys are doing it is one way to do it, which is make it a longer class, offer a little bit more of a carrot, which is the associate degree, to get people to go through it that way. The one thing I think that the college I went to did right that a lot of colleges don't have is they had their second year was co-op. You had part of that one whole entire semester of that second year was co-op. You had to go out and get a co-op and work in the space or work in the trade and apply what you learned and show that you could apply it. And they had it, they did it for everything. It wasn't just for the trades. I was there for environmental engineering and you had to do co-op in the environmental engineering field your whole entire last portion of your second year there before you got your degree. They had a renewable energy program, it was the same way. You had to go out and work with solar panels or work with some kind of renewable wind or something like that before they would let you graduate. So I think that like college, if you have that hybrid model there, especially with something that's so hands-on, like the trades, I think it becomes a super, super valuable way to learn stuff for these guys. And even probably they most companies, if you're already working with them, they're just gonna hire you on. They're not gonna tell you to go to work somewhere else if they really like what you're doing there and you're a good fit.
SPEAKER_02That's what's we actually have a meeting next Thursday here with the state. They're coming in to they're fixing to give a bunch of money to all the contractors to do apprenticeships. And so that's we got a big meeting Thursday. I'm super excited about that because it that's the the school, the associate's degree by itself matters a little bit. Your hands-on to me by itself means a little bit. You put both of them together, and especially if you had a good boss and a good teacher, you're gonna be a great tech. But you gotta have the hands-on.
SPEAKER_00Are you guys gonna is the apprenticeship gonna be worked in with the degree program or is it after and separate, or how's that gonna work?
SPEAKER_02Right now, I'm not sure. We're gonna that's what our meeting Thursday. Okay. I think they they got it started about six months ago, and the last six months have been weeding out all the exact rules of how everything's gonna work. And so I think that's what they're coming Thursday to tell us is exactly how all this is gonna lay out. So I'm hoping we're gonna be able to add it directly to the class.
SPEAKER_00What do you see the biggest challenge for these kids that come out of your course once they start working and maintaining their their selves in the trades? And for the people that are out there hiring these guys, what do you think the biggest challenge in just getting the labor force that we need out there is based on what you're from the educator space?
SPEAKER_02As far as what they need to know or what they need to get out there and do?
SPEAKER_00Just the biggest challenge of retention in general. So, like, I I guess the context is we have a big labor shortage in the trades right now. Everybody that I talk to is, yeah, we just need people, man. It doesn't matter where they come from. We need to find somebody to hire. Busy season's coming, we have a fraction of what we need, and or we can't keep people, we can't keep competent people. These guys out of HVAC school suck. I hear so much stuff about like why people can't keep people, why people in the trade, specifically HVAC, cannot keep staff, and it's a big ongoing issue. And I just was wondering if you had any thoughts about which is there something that we could do be doing better while we're teaching these kids? Is there a way to get them started faster and learning quicker, where operating quicker at full speed, so that people feel like they want to keep them around? I some of the stuff I hear, yeah, they just never catch on. They once they come out of school, they think that's the end of it, and they're standing around on their phones or they're doing this or they're doing that. They just never really get into the flow of work and actually pick up and become a good tech for us or a good installer or whatever their role ends up being. That seems to be an ongoing issue for these business owners, the contractors.
SPEAKER_02And that's where when I started teaching five years ago, I come in, ask them what they needed. They told me I started teaching, and then I went back to the advisory board again and said, Okay, what am I missing here? And first they was like, they don't know how to talk to us. They're rude, they're pompous, they're there's all attitude problems. And I was like, okay, so I started teaching attitude in the class, how you should talk to people. I started I was already teaching soft skills, but I was doing it for customers. I wasn't doing it for your boss. And so I had to start teaching soft skills for bosses. Then now my big issue has been they're calling me complaining that these guys aren't ready for attics and under floors. You need to get a hundred and twenty-degree room for them to go sit in for a few minutes and actually change something or braise something. And so that's my next goal is to start bringing in hot rooms and they need to crawl under a house once or twice. They need to know what they're getting into before they get there. And telling them is one thing, but again, hands-on, you setting up in an attic for 20 minutes while you braise something, that's a completely different story.
SPEAKER_00It's Navy SEALs for HVAC tax, so we got to put them through it so that they know what they're going through because they get out there, they're not ready for these addicts. These guys are soft these days. I don't know. And the other side of it is a lot of these, a lot of kids today aren't coming up like the kids that were in the trades earlier. They came up working outside with their fathers, up under cars, in attics, in the woods, whatever that guy was doing, they were doing too. And now kids are really stuck in their rooms playing video games with their moms down in the kitchen and sitting out with their dad. So they never really you make an awesome point. They have never really experienced the hardship, and that may be one of the things that they get in and get right back out. Man, this ain't what I signed up for. I didn't know anything about I didn't think I had five hot days in a row. I'm on the I'd rather be playing video games. Do you see technology helping with any of this at all? Is there a way like the what the technology that's coming online, whether it be Measure Quick or Conduit Tech or anything, any of the AI stuff, do you think that is gonna help with employee retention in any way, shape, or form?
SPEAKER_02I think it should, especially with Measure Quick, where you can you can be sitting in your office right now looking at what I'm doing here in Arkansas on what a unit I'm working on. And so, yeah, I I think that stuff, we're gonna be able to get some of these students. I had one in particular this year that was a brilliant guy. He just he and he learned all about air conditioning, he just doesn't really want to go out and work in it. And so that's understandable. But he needs to be engineer, he needs to be uh tech support. He needs tech support makes pretty good money usually for most of these companies. And it's like tech support, he could be great at tech support if he doesn't want to go out in the field. And that's what I tell the students you don't have to go under houses and in attics, but that's where you're gonna start. You're gonna have to get the basics out of the way, but then after you get a couple years of that, you can get out of attics and go do something else. Or, like we talked about the engineering part. We have another school here in Arkansas. We're a two-year school, so we don't offer anything higher, but there's a bachelor's degree that's heavy in HVAC pretty close to us. And so they can even do engineering for mechanical engineering here in the state pretty close.
SPEAKER_00So that's it's an interesting point about the techs and being able to sit in the office and use measure quick, and you use a term called tech support. So that's something that I don't normally hear guys talking about as a position inside a shop, but I think that it is a position that's gonna exist, or else the bet the worst thing that could happen is your front office support, your CSRs, they become your default technical support, and then they're answering questions and try to feel guys in the field. Service manager is the service manager, but it I guess let's talk about it like this. Is service manager now tech support, or is tech support a position that works under service manager to support the technology that's in the field and the way the guys are working in the field? Because I'm I it's super interesting. I have not heard this particular terminology applied except from behind the counter. Okay, tech support is something I associate with the guys behind the counter at the OEM shops when you go there and you're asking for help and they're back there trying to figure out help you, or you call in and are trying to help you. But inner office tech support is a very interesting concept. I I think that's something worth exploring. And what is where what was the basis of using? Is that a real position that you've seen, or like how does that work?
SPEAKER_02It is. It's one that I'd seen not here locally, it was at a bigger company. And it was a bigger company that had two or three tech supports that had access to all their techs. And I don't remember which company it was. But the great thing about all this is like you were saying, if you've got a company that's got five people, well your tech support is probably gonna be the owner or maybe the second in command. And so they're gonna have to know, okay, you can only sign me up for three service calls today because I'm I'm gonna have to help other people. But then if you have a company that's got ten people, now maybe your service manager is also tech support. And so he's just gonna have to carry his laptop wherever he goes so he can pull stuff up. Which I'm assuming even now, Measure Quick, you probably pull it up on your phone and be able to check it out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, handle it at a minimum. Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_02That and again, I the problem with that is Measure Quick is so dang detailed, it's hard you almost don't need m tech support with Measure Quick, but that's where I thought, and the more people you get, you could have dedicated one or two people doing tech support. And of course I think they would should have another role in the company. That's what I think it's great about it, is you could have somebody that now CSRs, it'd be hard to have a CSR be tech support too, I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it is hard, but you see it happen a lot. A lot of times these guys, they by default get thrown into the fire and they're the one answering the technical questions that they definitely 100% should not be answering. That is why I'm like, it can't be that person because that person has to deal with the customers, they got a whole different job to do. But I think there is some value in having somebody that's really good with measure quick and really good on the technical side and understands everything about they that everything about everything out in the field back in the office with the tablet, and then they can, like you said, stream the measure quick screen right to that guy, and he's yeah, yeah, I'm putting out this fire. Okay, hold on. I got another fire to put out. Because if you got a big enough company, you could make a whole day out of doing that. That definitely is something that uh somebody's day could be spent just supporting those guys out in the field. Now, like you said, in smaller companies, it's de facto going to be the service manager and andor the owner if the owner's a technical owner. Some owners are not technical owner, they're sales owners and they default to other to other owners. So it just depends. But if that's the i it does, it is a good point to be made that the service man, because of the technology, now the service manager does have the bandwidth and the ability to not only be the service manager support, but also the tech support for the guys out there running the service calls as well. And he might not have been able to do that duty that way before because he's just too worried about running the whole the department as a whole and making sure those guys are in places where they Need to be doing the things they need to do and stuff like that, and handling customer support, that sort of thing. Tech support, I think about it two ways. One, yes, supporting the actual techs out in the field, but also supporting the technology that those guys are using. Because the more we lean on the technology, the more we need something because we all know the technology is only as good as it works. The minute it don't work, it's not any good anymore. And if you're depending on it, then you need somebody that can get it back working pretty quickly or understand the best use case for it. And I think that having a tech support that's also a technology support for the trade tools that we use, it's probably going to be a big deal moving forward in today's world.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I have an advisory board member just called me up the other day and he's wanting to slow down. And so he's wanting to become the CSR of the company and he's wanting to hire somebody replace him to run service. And so he that would be a perfect opportunity for him to be able to do tech support because he's the CSR owner, everything. So he'll be able to just sit in the office and do tech support.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, it's great. It's a whole new position that's opening up for these guys that are a little bit savvy with what they're doing out there and can get their time in and absorb. That's one of the best advice you can give everybody is just be a sponge, learn the whole entire trade, don't silo yourself. That way you're always going to have some kind of opportunity because inside HVAC, there's so much you can do. There's so many different moving parts and pieces to it, whether it's residential or commercial, that you don't see that from the outside looking in. All they see is making the hot the heating and air work. But there's so much that goes into actually doing that the right way that it behooves a guy to all to learn everything in the beginning and then find out where his specialty is versus just trying to focus on one thing right away. I think you need to open yourself up to the way everything works together and then go at it from that angle.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, when I got here our it was called air conditioning technology. And so that was one of the first things I did. I was like, we've got to change the name. I said, because I got to teach heating, I gotta teach ventilation, and I gotta teach refrigeration. And I said, So we're missing three things there. And then that was the point was they didn't want those three things taught originally, is because the adv the older advisory board members wanted installers. They wanted them to know how to install ductwork and that was about it. And maybe braise. And I was like, no, we gotta teach them the whole thing. And so I brought refrigeration in and started teaching refrigeration first thing because that's the refrigeration cycle is refrigeration. And we do a tour at a local company here in town next town over, and we go over and they've got rack rack refrigeration. And so we go in there, they've got a reversing valve just like we do, except for it's huge, and it's called a four-way valve instead of a re reversing valve. They've got receivers, but instead of being eight, eight, ten inches tall, they're ten foot long. So it's all the same stuff. The only thing they have is the EPR and the oil separator. That's the only two s really big things he's got in that shop that we don't have in our shop. And so that's what we teach here is all everything. I want him to know everything because again, I've got one student moving to Wyoming next this year. He ain't gonna deal with any heat pumps. He's probably dealing with all gas and oil stuff. And he needed to know all of it, not just what we're t what we do here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. So you said we were having a conversation about the code officials. You want to tell me what was going on with that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we uh in our code it says that there's a few things actually. You gotta pull a permit on every construction job. So if it's a fifty percent of the ductwork or you're replacing a unit or installing a new unit, you're supposed to pull a permit. You're supposed to, if if you're installing a unit, whether it's a change out or a new install, it's gotta have a load calc. And then there's gotta be a return path from every room. And those are three things that the only time any of those get checked is when there's an actual issue. And so the state they require permits, but nobody ever uh actually pulls them, and then there's no penalty for nobody pull for somebody not pulling one. And so nobody ever pulls one, and so the state only gets called in when there's problems usually. And so when they come in, they initially ask for a load calculation. That's the first thing they ask for as soon as they get there. But most of the cities, they do their own inspections and they go and inspect and they don't even look at load calculations unless there's a problem. And which age I would probably say 70 to 90 percent of our units in yeah, units in Arkansas are probably oversized.
SPEAKER_00So do they collect the load calculation and just file it? That's what a lot of places do, and then they don't at least they have it on file, but they don't ever look at it. They just put the whatever the piece of paper is given them to given to them on file and do it like Hamilton County, Cincinnati, Ohio, Hamilton County that I'm most familiar with, they city of Cincinnati is pretty good at collecting the load calculation. They'll even maybe make some comments on it or something like that if you don't have it all the way filled out or to the what they the par that they fill, but they're definitely not like checking the calculation or checking the inputs or anything like that. Now on the commercial side, they do a full design review and plan review. And if they I have had them push back on some of my loads before and not say they were too small, but I've or too big, but I have had them say somewhere too small, you're not gonna have enough heating. Or and I even had one inspector, like we went up and down the tree on it, and he made me change, even though I was using the ACA design temperature, he made me change it to something that he felt was more conducive to the area based on whatever anecdotal information he had. And those guys, there's nothing you could do, like jurisdiction having authority is it. So, like, boom, we had to change it to and you check all these loads, even backdate all these loads to change it to this design temperature that he all of a sudden won it for some reason. But like, by and large, those guys, like, as far as I've ever seen, like they might say they collect them, but I don't snow of many miss municipalities that are doing any kind of good load calculation review on them. Now, I have had I forget where it was, somewhere, some municipality one time asked me to give them a proposal for putting together a design review class for those guys for the Lacode inspectors, but they didn't, whatever the my number was, they didn't like it. They never got back with me, and they never did the class. But that is a big education piece that's missing, I think, for the guys that are in the code is like understanding loads, understanding why we they why the code even says you need them, because somewhere, somehow it got voted into code. Somebody on some board saw value in the fact that you do need that, but that is as far as it ever went. They never gave these guys one ounce of education about what the thing is, why you need it, how it's used, what to look for, like any of that stuff. Most of these guys have very little to no idea. Now, I do know like some of them, like the city inspector in Cincinnati, a couple of them are ex HVAC guys, so they get what a load calculation is. But even when they were doing HVAC, they weren't really doing load calculation, so they don't really understand the value of it and the use case and why it should be like the thing that sets the standard for what's going in the house there. So I it's just a huge disconnect. You got any thoughts on how to get through to these guys? Because I certainly have tried and have not had much success.
SPEAKER_02No, that's where I've hit a wall because the inspectors, they're underpaid and underappreciated, and they work with a bunch of pretty rough characters, eight HVAC, electrical, plumbing, carpenters, and they have to pick and choose what they can do. And with our state, if at least one of the inspectors that I dealt with in the past, I gave him load calculation and he looked at it and it was just so happened I was so busy I couldn't do it myself, so I sent it off and had it done. And since it was a third party, he didn't even r he reviewed it, but he didn't actually take it back and do it himself. But he was XHVAC, and so whenever he would come to your house, and if I did the load calc and gave it to him, he would take it back to his office and redo the load calc again to make sure it was correct.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that's amazing.
SPEAKER_02But that was one inspector that I don't believe is with us anymore. But yeah, he he used to be really good at that. That's great. I believe him and some other people have got it now, to where all inspectors in Arkansas have to take continued education on HVAC. And so hopefully this is where maybe we can get some of this stuff in where we teach them how to do load calculations, which most of them may already know, they just don't have the resources. And so maybe we can figure out how to get them the resources and get them checking these loads, because the state inspector yesterday flat out asked me, he said, Why would you install a unit without doing a load calculation? I said, I wouldn't. He said, Exactly. He said, We need load calculations on every single house. And I said, I agree. I fully agree. And so they get it, they just they don't have the time nor the money nor the manpower to be able to do it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it's a really the biggest one of the bigger problems too is it's a garbage in, garbage out process. So even if you do get people doing it, like you gotta make sure they're doing everything, all the inputs have to be pretty precise to what the house is that's being built down to a blower door test. It's another thing. Like they don't you don't really get you definitely don't have any code anywhere in life saying that you have to do a blow or door test on an HVAC change out. And you so you might get some duck leakage requirements, but you're definitely not getting blower door requirements. And so that's one thing there. If you don't know the infiltration in the the the blower door driven infiltration number for the load calculation, it's a lot less precise than it could be. So right there is one thing that's almost never getting done. Then you got people like how many of these guys are actually getting in the attic and measuring insulation levels, how many of them are actually getting into crawl spaces and looking at the insulation and grading it the right way for or doing some kind of weighted calculation for the highs and lows of the insulation to get the right R value for that needs to go in there. And then how many of them are actually looking at the windows and seeing how many are double pane, how many are triple pane, how many are single pane, how many are wood, how many are aluminum? Like it just goes on and on. Even with these LIDAR technologies that we have, these guys that run that own these softwares are encouraging these people that buy them to use the defaults that they have. They're calling them AI-driven defaults and saying they're good enough. And really, it cheats the customer or it cheats you as the contractor too on getting the value of the data that's inside that load calculation, which is like thermally what that house is actually doing and being able to understand the ins and outs of the comfort problems and the health problems and the IAQ problems that are going on in there, all that stuff is exposed during the course of doing an actual detailed load calculation. So it's just it's a soapbox for me. I it really irritates me that people now we have the technology to actually do a good load calculation in a reasonable amount of time, and people are still trying to find a way to shorten it. And I get it. If it's a change out situation and you got to have something, you got to right there, and you're against five other guys, that's one thing, man. But like you got customer base that you could go, you could pick the time you want to go in their house, make an appointment with them, make it one of their service calls, get the right load calculation, and have all kinds of information on their house into perpetuity. It's so obtainable now, and it's just being taught to these guys the wrong way. It's a checkbox for them instead of a valuable piece of information and data.
SPEAKER_02And you're right about the duck test and the airsill test. Both of those are very important. Now, again, if you guess, I mean, you're gonna have a correct load calculation, but you're still guessing. So if you're guessing that it's a tight house or very tight house or not very tight, you're just guessing unless you're a blow door.
SPEAKER_00And also, too, those default, like the thing you're talking about, tight, semi-tight, loose, and average, which are the metrics, the default metrics inside the load calculation, like those things are nowhere near close. Every single house has a different level of infiltration, and like even if you use those, there's such a wide range of metrics inside each one of those that the chance of actually getting the right size equipment, what you need, especially like the latent, is something that you can never know from that stuff because the air infiltration measurement actually can help you predict what the latent uh load on the home is and how much as far as like the air that it's bringing and how much that adds to the latent load. And then on the heating load and heating dominated climates, it's insane the amount of load that's added by air infiltration or taken away by air infiltration. So if you don't know that piece of information and you're sizing a furnace or a heat pump, you're gonna be way off, way, way off. And that's why some of these guys, like Manual J is getting a little bit banged up out in public because there's these guys going around doing billing calculations based on billing and weather data, and they're getting a more precise heating load calculation. And it's not because the manual J methodology is that bad, it's because of the information going into it is that loose that it's not really giving you a precise calculation that these guys with these billing calculations are coming up with. And if you're not having to worry about latent, it is probably a faster way to do a load calculation, too, if you have both pieces of information right there and a software to dump them in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And I like that new software. The LIDAR that it uses, it's very accurate. And yeah, and to me, the way I did load calculations, because my computer originally set at the house, I didn't have a laptop, so mine was a hard regular desktop. And so I would go out, draw the house, write down all my measurements, I would write down all the windows, everything just like that. I would go back, draw it all out on RiteSoft, get it all done, and then it would do my load calculation. And I would still every time have to go in the back screen and make sure all my windows, ceilings, everything was exactly correct. And I would do that and make sure it was right and then go on. Now with the new LiDAR stuff, you go through and it does all the drawing for you, and then you just go through and pick, then you go in the back screens and make sure all the windows and doors and all that's correct, make sure your measurements are right. And man, it cuts out a lot of time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but guys are even skirting that part, they're just using the defaults, the AI inputs for the back screen stuff and not even filling in the back screen. And it could probably, because of the way sizings are, because we're half ton increments, and then that's not even exactly correct, it can probably get you close enough doing that as long as that there's not been a lot of major updates done to the house, but you're not getting the true value of the load calculation when it comes to the understanding thermally what's going in and on in the house, and it's not really ACA says you need to do a precise load calculation, and that used to mean like you had to be pretty close in variances on what was going in to the house and whatnot. It's just a different, there's two different ways of doing stuff being taught, and they have to come together in the middle somewhere so that we can be fast but also be correct and get the value out of what we're doing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, definitely. The that that's honestly why I started teaching was because there was my dad always complained about having to go behind other HVAC contractors and fix stuff, and I was like, that's just money for us. We get to come back and fix their work, and dad's yeah, but the customers paying twice. And I was like, ah, yeah. And so when they called me to teach, that was my first instant. I had just flipped around uh there was a unit that was six years old. The tech that installed it had been out there 12 times. He'd been out there every summer and every winter since he installed it. He called me out there, he wanted me to replace it. So I got out there, was like, man, this is only six years old, it's still under warranty. Why are you replacing it? And he said, They can't get it fixed. And so I put my gauges on it and I got 180 suction pressure and 240 head pressure. I'm like, You don't have a piston in there. And so I go look, and sure enough, the piston's backwards, so I flipped the piston around, turn it on, and uh take out like three pounds of refrigerant and he was good to go. And that dude just paid me a few hundred dollars to fix his unit when he probably paid this other guy several probably a thousand dollars over the last six years coming back and forth to add refrigerant and take it out. And it's and and if it was working with a backwards piston, that means it was way oversized. So that right there, when they called me to go to ask me if somebody if I knew somebody wanted to teach, that's I think that was the part that I was like, yes, I want to teach, so this quits happening. I don't want customers need the best from us. They don't need what we have right now, they need the best from us. And uh it's unfortunate, but in my twenty years of experience, I probably swapped out two pistons a year just flipping them backwards because somebody would put them in wrong.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, stuff like that always happens. I used to do commercial tab for a long time, and I would always see fans put in backwards, they'd be spinning backwards. They're like, the stuff's not working, yeah. The fan's spinning backwards, your guy put it in the wrong way. That's the first thing. Anytime you got bad airflow, the first thing we'll do when we're on the roof is check the way this fan's spinning to make sure it's spinning the wrong way, because a lot of times people just put the dang fan in backwards. That stuff definitely happens when you're out there and it's just a process that that's why teaching commissioning and startup and all that stuff is so important because it's another step. The guys just set it and forget it a lot of times. And we see it all the time with residential furnaces and air handlers. The airflow is just not set up, man. They just set it down and leave up out of there, and then you ask them, and they're like, Yeah, our boss told us to get it done and get out of there. They didn't tell us to set it up right. And I've actually had owners tell me that's the way they run their shop. Yeah, we want them in and out. We got a service department, they'll come back and tune it up. Tune it up. What do you mean, tune it up? They should be set it up. We should be setting it up. You shouldn't have to go back out for a service call two weeks after a system got installed. That's unacceptable. You know, that's a callback that's costing them money, it's an unnecessary trip, and it irritates the homeowner and over time erodes trust. If that has to keep happening, if they have to come back every time they supposedly fix something, then that's not a good look for you. And then it's gonna be harder and harder to compete out here in this private equity world that we're in.
SPEAKER_02I I heard somebody say the other day, I believe it's the owner of a company, said that every callback cost him four service calls. He said, for every time I've got to send somebody back out, I've got to have you do four more service calls to make that back up.
SPEAKER_00Well, never heard it put that way. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_02But that was the that was him because he's not getting paid to go back and fix this unit. And then on top of that, he could have been doing another service call or two, and so altogether they lose four service calls because of that one callback. And I was like, that I was like, I'd have to see the math, but that sounds right.
SPEAKER_00In the financial world we call that compounding interest. Yes.
SPEAKER_02That's exactly it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's the you suck tax. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That's I've had a couple advisory board members ask me, how do we need to make more money? I was like, less callbacks. I was like, how many times are you going back on units? We're going back on three or four a week. I was like, no, you need to go back on one or two a month. Callbacks are gonna happen, but it's gonna be ridiculous stuff. Not normal. You forgot the breaker or you forgot to put the disconnect back in.
SPEAKER_00I think the national average is seven percent. Guys that consider themselves great contractors run around a two percent callback. I had Bryn Cookie tell me that his company's doing a half percent callback since implementing Measure Quick throughout the company. So that is a game, and Measure Quick is a game changer on the callbacks. If you implement it, stick to your guns and do it right every day, and you're using the stuff the way that it's meant to be used, and the guys are asking questions when they need to. That's just one of the things that technology, the one of the ways that we taking advantage of technology can really change a game for these guys out there.
SPEAKER_02And when you first use Major Quick, it takes a little bit because you've got to get used to everything. But once you're used to it, it doesn't take hardly any extra time. And if you're on that house for the second time and you've already got your porch drilled, you just pull out your plug and stick it in and then pull it back out and put your plug back in.
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_02So you get to save all the drilling time. And it's coming, I believe. I believe something like measure quick is gonna have to be used eventually.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think measure it should be measure quick. They're so far down that road. Alright, we're running up on time here, so before we get off here, I'm gonna do two things. One, that's just something I do with everybody, is if the world ended today and somebody asked you to leave advice on the wall for the society that comes after, what would that advice be?
SPEAKER_01Leave what you're working on better for the next person.
SPEAKER_02So if you're working on a unit, I I always pretend like it's gonna be my unit. So if I'm working on your unit, I'm gonna expect I'm coming back. And so when I get done with that job that day, I'm gonna make it completely set up perfectly for the next person to come in there and make it easy on them. Just like here with me teaching, I have went through and built classes for or built books for every one of my classes. So just in case I'm not the next instructor, my next instructor will be able to come in, pick up these books, open it up, and go, oh, day one, we do this. All right, great. And he can go through and do it. So important.
SPEAKER_00That what you're talking about, document processes, that's so important. So important.
SPEAKER_02Leave it better than you found it.
SPEAKER_00100%. And last but not least, do you have any socials or any place you want to shout out where people can get a hold of you or talk to you if they want to or chop it up?
SPEAKER_02Facebook, and somehow I guess Facebook's linked in with Instagram. So I guess I'm on Instagram too. I didn't realize that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's better the whole comp they own it all.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I started getting followers on Instagram. I'm like, what in the world? And I got to look, and I was like, oh, I've been posting that from Facebook somehow.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's hilarious. That's awesome, though. All right, Brad, good stuff. Thanks for coming out, and I will talk to you next time.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me.
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