In 2019 we made the very hard decision to sell one of the coolest homes I've been in and the coolest house we've ever owned, an 1835 former general store in Mantua Ohio. 

While a lot of this decision was financial, a big chunk of it was because the house was so hard to electrify. If it had had duct work, I could have simply installed a hybrid/dual fuel system (a furnace plus a heat pump) and moved on. Hybrids are the far simpler path, but this house does let us look at boiler heated homes and some of the options for those.

I'll give the background on the house, the 3 plans I considered, and how these lessons apply at a broader scale. 

Home Background

When my wife was young and her family was driving to the St Joseph's Ox Roast Festival in Mantua, they'd often pass this 1835 home and she'd say "someday I'd love to have a house like that but I'll never be able to afford it." We bought it when she was 25 and through hard work paid it off when she was 28 (until we hocked it in again...) It was literally a dream come true. 

The house was a HUD foreclosure which are normally the worst of the worst, but this house was in remarkably good shape. We went from not thinking about moving on Friday to having an auction offer accepted on Monday. It was a wild ride! We bought it in early 2010, my wife and I lost both our jobs in 2009 with the housing crash, so we couldn't get a loan because we didn't have 2 years of self employed tax returns. Her parents were kind enough to help us buy it.

This house was the general store for the town of Mantua until 1855 when the train line was put in 3 miles south and downtown moved. It's now on a quaint little aborted New England town square complete with a church, a historical society, and a town hall. We lived there for 9 years, our daughter was born there, and we expected to spend most of our lives there.

I became a House Whisperer while living there thanks to the mentorship of my old partner Ted Kidd. It became really clear to me that heat pumps were the best way to create a healthy and comfortable home.

I began to help clients electrify their homes, removing my first client gas meter in 2014. Naturally I started looking at my own home, and found it was one of the hardest homes I'd looked at to electrify.

Then my wife started listening to the ChooseFI podcast. FI stands for Financial Independence, basically you save up enough so you can semi-retire early and do whatever you want day to day. We've always been financially conservative, but we'd had a fairly tough road in our careers until then. We knew we were behind on retirement savings, so we decided to sell the house, buy a fixer upper, and put the balance in the market.

Portage County Ohio was not an expensive housing market in 2019, $100/square foot was pretty common outside of high end suburbs. It's now about double that. 

The house is 2200 square feet above ground plus about 750 square feet of finished basement. The house had been lifted to put a 12 course modern foundation underneath it, not the terrifying old cellar you'd expect.

We sold the house in November 2019 for $200K which will give perspective on the packages I considered. If this were a $1 million home, the decision matrix would have been different.

High Heating Load, No Ducts, and the Wrong Radiators

One of the biggest challenges was how much this house takes to heat. My former partner Ted Kidd and I are fastidious about doing accurate heating load calculations and truing them to actual energy use. I found that in Cleveland every 300 therms of natural gas use works out to roughly a ton of heating load. This house used 1500-1800 therms/year, so that's a 5-6 ton heat load or 60,000-72,000 btus. That matched our detailed load calc.

A heat load that high basically requires two heat pump systems to do since the most common sizes are 2 and 3 tons (24,000 and 36,000 btus.) The house has no duct work, so those systems would need to be installed as well, or run ductless units which is not my favorite.

If the load calculation were done by a traditional contractor, they would likely come up with 120,000-150,000 btus, over double what reality is and likely preventing a heat pump. I've consistently found that the US industry standard Manual J load calculation comes up with numbers that are around double what's actually needed, especially if you don't know how leaky the house is (tested with a blower door.)

Being a historic home and already having a reasonable blower door of 3800 cfm50, (under a 2:1 leakage to square footage ratio is well below average for a house this age), and not really wanting to dig into the siding & windows, there really wasn't much I could do to improve the heating load. 

The house also has a hot water boiler system (as opposed to steam) that uses low mass Slant Fin radiators. There's very little water or mass in this type of radiator, so you have to run hotter water in them than you do with large, heavy, and voluminous cast iron radiators. The radiators were built pretty nicely into the baseboards, so I didn't really want to change them to cast iron radiators. 

I tested how low I could turn the water down to on a 5F heating design day, it was between 170-180F. This means that I can't easily use an air to water heat pump because in general they max out at 150F and that comes with a significant efficiency penalty. They are most efficient in the 90-120F range which wasn't possible on this home.

This meant that changing the boiler out was not an easy option.

The house also didn't have AC, although you may be surprised that I could cool it with only two 5,000 btu window ACs. One upstairs and one downstairs. I had to plan ahead, if there was a 90 degree day coming I needed to close the house up 48 hours in advance and crank the temperature down which drove my wife nuts, she shivered every time I did it. 

The basement is finished and the drywall ceiling is only 7' high, I can touch it by reaching up and I'm only 5'8". So adding duct work and killing another foot of ceiling height is not ideal, but it's also the best way to heat and cool half of the first floor. There also isn't a great way to run a duct from the first floor to the second floor so I can either use one system or put the second system in the basement and run it upstairs.

To summarize the challenges, the house has a high heating load, the wrong radiators for low temperature operation, no duct work, and a finished basement with a fairly low ceiling. This is a hard one.

So what could I do to this house?

Never Half @ss Things: Three Plans

I mulled different ways to electrify this house and came up with three plans that reference one of my dad's favorite sayings, "Never half-ass something when you can do it right." I came up with half @ss, reasonable but effective, and whole @ass plans.

Half @ss: $40-70K

• Ductless heat pump in the 750 sf living room area
• Ductless heat pump in the basement
• Ducted mini split heat pump in the kitchen/office/laundry area
• Ducted mini split heat pump in the attic to serve the bedrooms separately
• Santa Fe XT155 ventilating dehumidifier with mini duct system to basement and first floor
• Maybe spray foam the top attic so the heat pump for the second floor would be in conditioned space

To be frank, this plan pretty much just ticks me off. Ductless mini splits only kinda do one of the 6 Functions of HVAC well: load matching. Load matching is when the HVAC matches exactly as much heating or cooling output as is required by the house at that moment, it's a requirement for true comfort. They aren't good at filtration, dehumidification, fresh air, mixing, or humidification. I hate how much compromise is involved here. The ventilating dehu is an attempt to take some of the edge off of this, as I could hook it to one of the two small ducted systems and provide better filtration, dehumidification, and fresh air. 

The attic has a decent air seal and R-60 cellulose in it, which is pretty good. But if you're going to put a ducted system in, it's by far the best to bring it into an enclosed space, which means sucking out all of that cellulose, the fiberglass batts under it, and installing closed cell spray foam on the roof deck. This is pretty easily a $20K project. 

But with a likely sale price of $200K, this also wasn't going so far into the house that I was setting back retirement that far. But spending this much money knowing I'd kick myself seemed dumb. So what's next?

Reasonable But Effective: $80-100K

• Carrier GreenSpeed heat pump in Common Sense HVAC configuration with new duct system in the second story attic to run the second floor and maybe part of the first floor below it
• Carrier GreenSpeed heat pump in Common Sense HVAC configuration with new duct system to run the basement and part or all of the first floor (I'd need a room by room Manual D report to decide)
• Encapsulate the second floor attic by removing all the insulation and spray foaming the roof deck

This plan at least delivers the 6 Functions of HVAC well (read the free HVAC 101 chapter of The Home Comfort Book or the upcoming Common Sense HVAC Guide for more on what those are), so I'm not compromising nearly as much.

I'm also giving the upstairs heat pump a nice place to live, and I'd pick up some storage space in that attic, not that this house needed any more.  

But now I've spent about half the value of the home electrifying. Yikes. I'd really like to retire someday and this is not helping. With higher housing values or a different financial position, I would strongly consider this plan.

Whole Ass: $250-400K

• Reasonable But Effective plus:
• Remove wood siding and add continuous exterior insulation and a suitable new siding layer like Hardie Board to suit this historic home. I'd look to approach Passive House performance.
• Replace windows with very high performance ones, again probably looking at Passive House type tilt/turn European windows. 
• Attack any air sealing opportunities with gusto. I'd target 1000 cfm50 or so blower door, about a 75% reduction.

I've learned there are two ways to do anything: right and again. This is doing it right. My dad would be happy.

But my dad also went bankrupt trying to restore another historic home. I don't really want to follow that path, although if I was older and had plenty set aside for retirement I would consider this.

Another reason I'd consider it is if housing values could support it. If this house was 10 miles away in Hudson, a high end suburb where I went to high school that has double or more housing values, that could be on the table. But it wasn't. So we had a decision to make.

Reasonable But Effective Solutions

What I was searching for on this house, and on my client projects, is a "reasonable but effective" solution. The typical "low hanging fruit" aka half @ass solution seldom achieves desired results on complex projects like this one. This is not a new thought process for me, in fact I said that Low Hanging Fruit Is Poisoned all the way back in 2015.

"Reasonable But Effective" solutions cost more than low hanging fruit options most of the time, but they carry 80%+ odds of success and don't ask impossible things of contractors. Two ducted systems plus fixing the top attic was the path for this home, but the cost was more than we could justify at that time. 

I've recommended selling their home to a few clients, it's far from my favorite thing to do, but sometimes it's the logical option, so I always consider it. 

You can also go whole @ass and nearly guarantee good results, but it's often not worth the time, money, and effort. My friend Quint David reminded me today that when it's cheaper to buy solar panels and generate the energy than it is to do the performance project, strongly consider adding the solar panels. Or just switching to renewable electricity suply so the money is being used to put up solar panels or wind turbines somewhere. There's a place for full bore projects, but they're pretty rare in my experience. 

I'll write a proper article about Reasonable But Effective solutions in the future, it's a guiding principle to my work, and I firmly believe it should be to all pros. It's as simple as offering an array of solutions with rough costs and rough odds of success, then letting clients choose. It also shares responsibility so that if results aren't what's expected, it wasn't actually unexpected, and there's a plan for what to do next if desired.

Also, if this house had had a duct system, I would have installed a hybrid/dual fuel system which is a furnace plus a heat pump. This typically reduces gas usage 50-100% (less in older homes in cold climates, more in newer homes in warmer climates). That's often what a reasonable and effective job looks like in my work. 

The New England Challenge & Some Hope

A brief aside before I wrap this article up. The Yellow House as we called it is very similar to many New England homes which are very heavy on boiler systems, much more so than anywhere else in the US. 

There's more hope now on this front, if you have large radiators you could replace the boiler with an air to water heat pump to cover about half the heating load in many homes. Then you could use ducted/ductless systems to cover the cooling load and the rest of the heating load. There are definitely more options today, but boiler heated homes remain some of the most challenging home electrification scenarios. 

I'm hearing prices in the $35-45K range for changing a boiler to an air to water heat pump in New England, which is expensive enough to put other options on the table. It's a surprisingly difficult and detail oriented process, it requires far more thought than a boiler replacement. Ductless mini splits typically run around $5-9K each. Most homes will need 4-8 of them, and you also get AC. This is why mini splits with the boiler left as backup are so common. I dislike how many of the 6 Functions of HVAC you lose with ductless systems, but they are very pragmatic. 

I expect in time this will get more reasonable, but I doubt they'll ever get to the price of replacing a boiler because there's more labor involved (at a minimum there's an outdoor unit and running water/coolant lines to it, plus new radiators may be needed) and the equipment costs more. These systems are pretty common in Europe and the UK, check out Heat Geek's homeowner Facebook group in particular to learn more. 

I should repeat, if the house has duct work, you can always do a hybrid (furnace plus heat pump.) If you are looking at homes and would like to electrify, look for one with a duct system. 

The Decision & Results

Between how hard and expensive this home would be to electrify and our goal to actually get on track for retirement, we made the hard decision to sell the home. We fixed all the stuff we'd been dragging our feet on and put it on the market with our friend Heather Lutz-Neal (highly recommended if you are buying or selling a property, she found our fixer upper then a buyer for it too.)

This was our personal decision on this one home. I'm not saying it will or should be your decision.

It's worked out really well, largely through dumb luck. We sold the house for $200K, bought a fixer upper for $72K and put $30K into it, and put the other $100K into the market. As it turned out the timing was great as I pushed much of the money into the market during the major dip caused by the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Dumb luck. We have since sold the fixer upper (AKA the River House) and nearly doubled our money on it. Again, dumb luck as the housing market got hot. 

After seeing how well the River House did on AirBnb, we bought an 1150 square foot double wide in southern West Virginia with the New River Gorge National Park literally in the backyard. We originally planned to use it in the summer, but liked the area so well that we sold the River House in Ohio and officially moved to West Virginia. WV is one of the cheapest places in the western world to retire, and we were planning to do so, we just moved that date up 20 years or so. 

We've now created a number of themed all electric AirBnbs: the Game House which is board game themed, the Wizard House where you can stay in a small version of a famous wizarding school, Mothmanor which is themed after the West Virginia monster Mothman and is also a whole house escape room, and the Lucky Penny camper. We're gearing up to create a bunch of cool glamping units too which help satisfy my wife's extremely strong artistic drive. If you'd like to see what a kick butt all electric house feels like, come stay in one sometime! 

I'll write about the HVAC and performance projects on the other houses in time as well. I greatly enjoy having all of these laboratories where the only person I have to convince is my ever tolerant wife Rachel. I do chuckle though as I've long given fellow pros a hard time for only writing about their own homes when the real learning comes from selling and executing these jobs for clients. If you'd like to see some of my client case studies check this page out. I do remote consulting if desired, check out the contact us page on this site. 

I'm confident that the technical challenges of creating high temperature water with heat pumps will be solved so that the electrification of the Yellow House can be a drop in replacement of the boiler. It's already possible with carbon dioxide refrigerant (although you would need 4 of them because they're small, and you couldn't do cooling.) Or you can use two different refrigerants to do the lift which is called a "cascade" system. A few of these exist but they are very low volume at the moment. It was obvious that those solutions were 5-15 years out as we made the decision to sell in 2019. 

Many of these hard to electrify homes will get far easier to electrify in the next 5-10 years. 

Meanwhile my wife, our daughter, and myself all miss the "Yellow House" as we called it. Our newborn son will never miss it though. =)

It went to a really lovely Connecticut couple who had recently retired and were following their grandkids to the area. They said they'd done the same downsize routine at our age as well. It was a really warm transaction and we stay in touch. I know that he and his wife will continue to steward the home for future generations just as we did for 9 years, including our daughter being born there. After all the Yellow House was 30 years old when Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation, what else will it see in the next 100-200 years of its existence?

That said, selling it opened up a bunch of new possibilities for us, and did indeed get us on track for retirement, so it turned out to be a very good choice in the end! Hopefully this discussion of various options helped you as well. 

Looking for Help?

If you are reading this and trying to figure out how to electrify your home, I highly recommend reading my book The Home Comfort Book, much of which is available for free download on this site, and also taking the free #electrifyeverything course. Then you may want to buy an hour (which is usually 1.5-2 hours) here. Good luck!

PS I emailed Eric Werling, head of the Department of Energy's Building America program on 9/8/19 to ask for an air to water heat pump with 60K output at 180F water temp when it's 5F outdoors. He said that's a very challenging specification and nothing he knew at the time came close.  Lack of a high temp boiler replacement is the only significant technical hole in home electrification. Like I said, I expect it to be solved in the next 5-10 years, but it's 5 years after the decision to sell the Yellow House. =)

Nerd Level 5/10: TLDR Warning: Data Heavy To Make a Point: Reheat Dehumidification Is a Great Tool At a Reasonable Operating Cost When Used Correctly

Last time I showed how reheat dehumidification works to keep your house both healthy and comfortable. If you haven't read that, I'd start there first so this article makes sense. Reheat is a great way to keep your house dry and healthy while only requiring one piece of equipment (a higher end heat pump system.)

Once I explain what reheat is, the next question is always something like this: "you mean I'm running both my air conditioner and backup resistance heat that's known for being expensive, doesn't that make reheat dehumidification really expensive to run?"

I'll let my client Brad Mueller answer with a LinkedIn comment about my last article showing how reheat works:

I let Brad steal my thunder: done right* reheat dehumidification costs about the same as a traditional $250 dehumidifier you see at big boxes like this one. 

Standalone dehumidifiers typically use 500-1500 kwh/year in my experience, that's the number to keep in mind when looking at reheat dehumidification usage. 

In this article I'm going overkill on projects and data to show that this is more than anecdotal: this is effectively a small study and carries a pretty high level of confidence.

My goal is to show that reheat dehumidification is a useful tool that doesn't carry an unreasonably high energy penalty when used correctly. In fact typically it carries little to no penalty at all. 

We'll look at a number of projects from different angles:

• A deeper look at Brad's house
• Clients with high energy usage for reheat, why, and how we got it fixed
• Typical clients of mine to show what to expect
• Friends' houses in humid North Carolina and Louisiana to counter arguments about how this varies a lot by where the house is located. (It varies some, but not THAT much.)
• A comparison of our four houses in the New River Gorge National Park area in West Virginia. Three are AirBnbs, the fourth is our house. 1 has reheat, the other 3 don't.  

My Goal: Only Require One Small Dehumidifier

My goal is to reduce the dehumidification needs of the house enough with reheat that one of the above inexpensive dehumidifiers is enough to make up the slack when the reheat can't do it's job (there are times when dehumidification is needed in heating mode, which no residential system is presently capable of.)

These low cost dehumidifiers last longer because they don't have to work as hard. I'll show this with one of our own AirBnbs at the end of this article. But first let's look at the usage from Brad's house. 

Like we discussed last time, I like whole home dehumidifiers, but they consistently have shorter lives than new home HVAC systems, so you'll probably need to buy two in the lifespan of your new system. If I can get that work done without one, that's my preference. I do like them and use them when clients recently bought a system and don't want to replace it. 

Detailed Look At Brad's Energy Usage

​One of the many reasons I like the Carrier Infinity thermostat and system is that it tracks energy use. Until 2016, energy monitors were quite expensive, about $1000 for circuit by circuit monitoring. Plus install. I only had one project willing to spend the money to get one. 

In 2016 the Sense energy monitor came out to track whole home usage and some of the individual appliances that were obvious on/off items like dehumidifiers, microwaves, vacuums, etc. It did not pick up variable speed equipment like the heat pumps I use. At $300 vs $1000 I used a number of them, but I couldn't learn much of what I wanted to learn and they didn't improve their detection substantially over time. 

In 2019 or so the Emporia Vue Gen 1 came out which was very nicely priced around $150, however it was missing voltage monitoring which is key for accuracy. The Gen 2 Emporia Vue came out in 2020 and added voltage monitoring, and Gen 3 just hit the market late last year. I recommend using them in any electrification project so you can figure out a) how equipment is running and b) figure out high usage when it's an issue.

But early on, the only way to watch usage of my systems was with the Carrier Infinity, Bryant Evolution, or ICP Ion thermostats, which is what we're going to look at.

What's particularly fantastic is that these products break out usage by task: cooling, heating, fan, backup heat, and reheat dehumidification. No other system I know of does this, and whole home monitors can't break things out like this either. Take a look at this chart because I'll be showing many like it. 

Brad's system went in in December of 2017, here's a screenshot from 5/1/20, note the electric reheat line for 2019. 

627 kilowatt hours for dehumidification is not uncommon, at least in the Cleveland area. I usually see 50-200 kwh/month or so. Your mileage may vary by climate and month. 

I believe he has a separate dehumidifier, but I'm not sure and I have no way to know how much energy it's using. Like I said energy monitors got inexpensive right as I quit practicing in person. I'll show data from our WV homes at the end of this essay.

Power was about $.14/kwh at this time, so reheat cost Brad about $90 this year. 

Here's a fresh screenshot as I write this on 11/24/24. Note that reheat usage has dropped to zero. This is possible in homes that have a vapor barrier below them so that little moisture comes up through the earth. Combine this with a system that does a good job on dehumidification and zero reheat usage is possible. 

By the way, you can get a good idea if your home has a vapor barrier under the basement or crawlspace floor by testing with an inexpensive (~$40-50) pinless moisture meter. Measure on a day after rain so it's likely to be wet. If you put it on the floor (set to masonry mode) and it reads green, you probably have a vapor barrier. If it reads red you probably don't have a vapor barrier. 

These readings are at my client Kevan's house, you can read his full case study here. The walls of Kevan's house were incredibly damp, they were the main moisture source in the basement. We coated them with closed cell spray foam which improved it greatly. 

Usually most homes post 1960 or so have a vapor barrier under the slab, but not always. Post 1980 nearly 100% do. 

Back to Brad's house.

Brad's shell work is now complete, basically the entire house has closed cell spray foam on it now. Here's one wall we did from the outside in December 2017. The house also got an addition which you can see in the rear. It was colder than I would have liked when we did this work, thankfully it was successful, we purposely overheated the interior to make the "substrate" we sprayed to warm enough to cure the foam. 

A Few Notes on Projects

We'll get back to reheat shortly, but I wanted to show that these are real projects, I generally have 1000+ photos from each of my house whispering projects, of which I did nearly 50 from 2014-2019. For more case studies see energysmartohio.com, which is an archive site now that we've moved to West Virginia.

One other thing, you'll probably notice that most of these screenshots are 4 years old or more. That's because:

• We moved to West Virginia and I closed my Energy Smart Home Performance in person practice. I stick to remote consulting now.
• I was hot and heavy learning how these systems worked in 2017-2018, at some point you learn most of what you're going to learn and stop pushing as hard to learn.
• Carrier also updated the app and I don't like it as well. =P

OK, let's look at actual projects. If you're like me and you see one star reviews, you go read them to see if the reviewer has a legitimate complaint or if they are just a complainer. So let's start with the 4 projects of mine that were, um, learning experiences. 

The Worst Client Systems

I've had four clients that used more electricity for reheat than we initially expected. There were two main causes: not having wifi so I couldn't catch high usage before it was an issue, and new construction homes where the concrete needed to be dried out. I prefer to be upfront with less than perfect projects, so let's look at them. 

My Cousin Ryan

My cousin Ryan is one of my whole home electrifications, he has a nice 1600 sf ranch style home in the Akron OH area. Note his incredibly painful electric reheat usage of 4215 kwh in 2018, by far the worst of any of my clients. Cost is at $.13/kwh or $463 for the year which was right at the time. By far the highest usage of any client.

There were two main culprits here: no wifi so I couldn't monitor his system, and operating the house the wrong way for reheat. 

Ryan and his wife weren't home much in this period, so they just used their phones when home for internet. In this period I was watching client homes like a hawk and was bummed I couldn't see what was going on, I even bought him a new wifi router when his failed. 

Then one day I got a call that his usage for electric reheat was insane. So I asked him to send me screenshots. 

I was flummoxed for a bit, but then asked him how he was running his AC. He said he ran the AC during the day but opened the windows at night. 

AHA! In most of the Midwest in spring/summer/fall, it's humid at night. So if you open the windows and you've painstakingly dehumidified your house all day, you let that outdoor humidity back inside where it soaks into the walls, ceilings, floors, furniture, and so forth. 

Then the next morning he would close the house back up and turn the AC on. The AC and reheat dehumidification would dutifully dry the house out again but use a ton of juice doing so.

With reheat dehumidification engaged, his 2 ton Bryant Evolution 288 heat pump worked like crazy to dry the house out all day, only to have him open the windows again at night and let all that hard fought dehumidification work go to waste.

We agreed to turn off reheat dehumidification on his house and I helped him do it on the thermostat. That stopped the usage, but note that it was a windows open/closed strategy mixed with no wifi for me to watch the equipment that lead to this issue. It wasn't the equipment's fault. 

​New Construction Project 1​

In 2018 Ed Kisiel of EKA Build built the tightest home I've ever tested, a 2200 sf ranch with a 535 cfm50 blower door west of Cleveland.  It is very nearly Passive House tight yet only used traditional methods and products. If you live in Cleveland and want to build a house, call Ed. I'm seldom impressed by builders, I very much am with Ed, his attention to detail is amazing.

We offered the clients multiple HVAC choices, they chose a heat pump system, a 4 ton Bryant Evolution 288. It was bigger than I would normally do because it was the first time I'd used this system I was a chicken. 

A month or two after completion, but before they'd moved in, I got a text that the electric bill was far higher than expected, about $200 for an unoccupied home that was supposed to be efficient. I asked for a screenshot or photo of usage and got an earlier version of this:

This was a case of where assuming had its usual you and me effect. 

New homes are still quite wet, we build with basements in most of the Midwest, so the mortar in the basement walls and concrete floor are wet for as much as a year post construction. 

I assumed that the clients would a) move in quickly and b) set the AC in the unoccupied house to 75F or so. 

I was wrong on both counts. They set the AC to 70F and waited about 4 months to move in. I had set the dehumidification target to 46% relative humidity (as low as the system will go), and a lot of energy use ensued. 

That was the cost of drying the house out. From experience a regular dehumidifier would have used a similar amount of energy, but it would have spread it out over several months and made it less noticeable. Asking for a dry house with a powerful dehumidification system (the heat pump with reheat) meant we got a dry house quickly but somewhat expensively.

We changed the humidity set point to 52%, which is where I start client homes now, and this is what happened:

With a more reasonable humidity set point and a tight new home that doesn't let much moisture in (once it dried out of course...), reheat dehumidification doesn't run much. 

No Wifi Take 2

The third client with higher than expected reheat dehumidification usage was similar to my cousin in that his thermostat wasn't connected to the internet so I couldn't check on it. In the end his usage wasn't that unusual.

He's a private guy and an IT professional who's concerned about data breaches (and a real pleasure to work with), so he didn't want any internet connected devices and he uses Proton Mail for email. All good, I roll with the punches. 

But, you guessed it, I got a text that the usage was higher than he'd like as he bought solar panels and wanted it to cover all his usage. 

300 kwh in a month is not low, but to be frank it's not that high either. It's about $40/month at the time. The dehumidifier in my basement a few houses ago was using 200-400 kwh or $35-55/month in electricity. So this isn't really that bad if your house needs dehumidification. 

​We adjusted his relative humidity set point higher, I've found 52-54% works well. I asked for an updated screenshot, he just texted me this:

771 kwh is a little on the higher end, but this house was built in the 1960s, so it likely has no plastic under the basement floor like most older homes and therefore needs a bit more dehumidification. 

I'd like to note the electric heat (backup resistance) line too. This is a 3 ton model of midrange Carrier Infinity VNA8 which has just ok cold temperature performance. This is in a ~2200 sf 1960s house with a 600 sf 2019 addition.

Despite that it's only using 400-500 kwh/year of resistance. If this was a GreenSpeed VNA4 it would be near zero, but at $50-80/year of usage, who cares? I've gotten much more comfortable using this unit in Cleveland and other fairly cold climates. It does not qualify for the federal IRA incentive though. 

We got the house quite tight, a 1460 cfm50 blower door at the end, we started at 4100 cfm50 and 1600 square feet to begin. Pretty amazing to add 30% to square footage but reduce leakage by 64%! Good attention to detail helps a lot here, R-Tek insulation did a nice job. A decent shell makes heat pumps work well in cold climates like Cleveland. 

One more new construction one

I'm writing this while visiting my inlaws for Thanksgiving, and had dinner with my spray foam contractor Gary Smith of Affordable Foam who just built an 1800 sf barndominium with a remarkable 340 cfm50 blower door, the tightest I've had direct experience with. He bought my old blower door to test it with. 

He had a similar experience to the other new construction example, and used a fair amount of energy drying out the home which is built on a slab. 

The reheat usage is high at nearly 2000 kwh or $258. That's the cost of drying out the concrete and other building materials. 

That said note that the total cost to heat and cool his home is $942 so far this year and unlikely to break $1100 or $92/month.

Paul's house drove me bonkers, the dehumidifier in the basement would keep the basement super dry, but the rest of the house was consistently breaking 60% relative humidity. You can see when I made adjustments at noon 9/19.

By adding a return in the basement so the dry air down there could get mixed with the rest of the house and turning on reheat dehumidification, we finally got control of Paul's humidity. 

I started using Indoor Air Quality monitors in 2014 with the AirAdvice, then dug into them deep in 2016 when the first generation of consumer grade sensors came out. I quickly figured out that I did not have control over humidity on our projects which frankly scared me. 

Here's what reheat usage from those first two days looked like. On humid days the about same amount of energy was used for reheat as it was for cooling. Tuesday is the day I turned it on at noon. 

Here's what the energy usage looked like for 2017.

Paul's house has used around 700-900 kwh/year for reheat since then. His dehumidifier is also running, but this is before I could buy a reasonably priced energy monitor. An Emporia smart plug is only about $10 and can measure dehumidifier energy usage, I'll show data from our 4 WV homes at the end of this essay. 

Paul's house is where I cut my teeth on reheat. I'm thankful because I was really worried I might make him and his lovely wife sick if I didn't keep the house dry enough to prevent mold from returning. 

Cindy's Condo

OK, let's look at a modern home. I define modern as anything built since 1980, construction methods have changed little in about 45 years. 

Cindy's condo is near Youngstown Ohio and is 1250 square feet. It had a 57,000 btu furnace that we downsized to a 2 ton/24,000 btu Bryant Evolution 280 heat pump (that turned out to still be oversized.) I also did a little air sealing and knocked the leakage down from 1150 cfm50 to 830 cfm50. 

Her house is on a slab (rare in my area) and almost certainly has a vapor barrier under it aka plastic or visqueen. So it doesn't have the humidity problems that Paul's 1900 built home with a damp basement has. 

​North Carolina System

I want to head off any complaints about only looking at reheat dehumidification in systems in Cleveland Ohio. We'll look at two.

The first is from my friend Reedie Ward's house. Reedie is a former technician and now works in sales. He has a 3 ton Carrier Greenspeed. His house is about 2000 square feet and is moderately tight (I forget the exact blower door number.)

Note that the house is using far more electricity for cooling vs heating, it's a fairly mild climate, although it's hot and humid in summertime. 

Note how it's using near zero reheat because the system is sized well, the variable speed heat pump is very good at dehumidification, and it's hot enough that the air conditioner can tackle the dehumidification work. 

Louisiana System

My friend Mark Hanneman is a long time technician and business owner who lives north of New Orleans and recently built a new 2700 sf house with a 3 ton Carrier GreenSpeed. It's pretty tight but not crazy tight. 

I think you could argue that Louisiana is the most humid climate in the US alongside Miami,  their dew points are above 70F for most of the year. Around 70F dew point it feels like you can cut the air with a knife.

Like Reedie, Mark's heat pump does far more cooling than it does heating. It's so humid that the reheat needs to do some work, and you'll see that his usage is in the ballpark of the other projects I've shown, 1200-1500 kwh/year.

Louisiana has some of the cheapest power in the US at about $.10/kwh. US average is about $.15, a few places like CA and MA run over $.40/kwh. 

To repeat what I said at the beginning, done right reheat dehumidification costs about what a dehumidifier does.

OK, onto the last set of data: a comparison between our houses in southern West Virginia. 

Comparing Houses With and Without Reheat in West Virginia

I've accidentally created a dehumidification experiment in the New River Gorge National Park area. 

We bought a house here in 2021 intending to use it seasonally and AirBnb it the rest of the year. We liked the area so well we sold our house in Ohio, and we've been creating themed AirBnbs: a board game themed one, a Wizard themed one, and a Mothman themed one. 

Naturally I've electrified all of them: they're all small and don't justify a furnace, plus a heat pump can provide far better comfort. None have a gas meter anymore.

The house with reheat actually used quite a bit less electricity than the houses I use standalone dehumidifiers for. I don't think you can come to a firm conclusion from this one data point, but it's interesting. All of them have vapor barriers in the crawlspace or basement. 

We live in the mountains, so the summer temperatures are usually cooler than Cleveland where I'm from, but the humidity is pretty high still, we usually spend most of the summer above 70F dew point which is pretty sticky. 

This is a very challenging climate for dehumidification because it's often not warm enough to run the AC hard, but there's still a ton of dehumidification work to do. Hotter climates are often easier in this regard. So dehumidifiers get worked pretty hard. 

Another key note is that it was an exceptionally dry summer, we were in severe drought this year, so dehumidification load was lower than normal. 

Let's take a look at each house. 

Our House

I'd been wanting to try a Bosch heat pump, it's priced lower than many higher end heat pumps. I didn't want to recommend it to clients until I had personal experience, so I put one in our house.

Sadly, I have not been impressed. The first year I thought that the condensate drain had come disconnected because I never saw it dripping. I asked a bunch of friends for help setting it up, it was indeed connected but it was doing such a bad job at dehumidification that it was not removing enough moisture for the drain to drip.

It has a switch to run a colder coil, but even with the switch flipped to run the coil at 38F and dehumidify better, my dehumidifier uses more power than the AC some months. The house is 1150 square feet and is pretty tight, about 1000 cfm50 with an encapsulated crawlspace. 

​Without running the dehumidifier the relative humidity in the house quickly climbs above 70% RH which is both uncomfortable and unhealthy. 

Here's monthly usage for the AC and dehumidifier. The AC is measured with my Emporia Vue energy monitor, the dehu with an Emporia smart outlet. 

Note how the heat pump (air conditioner) is using about 250 kwh/month in summer and the dehu is using 150-200 kwh/month. Last year the dehu used more power than the AC most months. 

​Here's total annual usage to 11/28/24. Note the dehu near the bottom at 1160 kwh, more than my water heater this year and the second largest user in my house. Dehumidification season is over for the year, it just turned cold, so this and the other readings should remain valid for the year. 

​Note 1160 kwh is as much energy as Mark Hanneman's reheat used in Louisiana. 

Mothmanor

​OK, let's do the house with reheat next. Mothmanor has a 2 ton 5 stage Carrier Infinity VNA8 (in Heil brand, but the same product). 

It's a small 620 square foot ranch with a full basement. It was built about 1950, so no vapor barrier in the basement, although I added one in the renovation. I need to do a final blower door test but I'd guess in the 1200 cfm50 range. Not super tight, but controllable with HVAC. It's super comfy. 

Here's a 11/28/24 screenshot of year to date usage. 

Reheat was a whopping 271 kwh this year. 

​Here's the annual usage according to the Emporia Vue energy monitor at Mothmanor. Note that the Carrier Infinity thermostat seems to be overestimating usage by about 10%. 

I also have a dehumidifier at Mothmanor for a belts and suspenders approach to dehumidification. The house was really rough when we got it, and animal hoarding situation, so I want to keep it very dry to prevent any potential odors from returning. 

271 kwh of reheat plus 326 kwh of dehumidifier usage is a whopping 597 kwh, right in range with what we've seen on middle of the road projects elsewhere. 

That's about half the 1160 kwh our house used.

Mothmanor also has twin fresh air intakes which add a fair amount of humidity to the house, ironically I don't have a fresh air intake on our house yet. 
​
Just for giggles, here's the monthly dehumidifier consumption. ​I'm probably missing a few kwh from March and April to those with a sharp eye.

The Game House

The Game House is actually an apartment over a 4 car garage, it's 800 square feet of living space above an 800 square foot garage. It has a 1.5 ton Daikin Fit (thanks to Roman Baugh for helping me get it set up right.) It was built in 1979 and is pretty well insulated with a 1300 cfm50 blower door. It has a vapor barrier under the garage floor. 

I just have a dehumidifier downstairs. Here's the annual usage to date for the house:

The dehumidifier has used 1022 kwh so far this year, I doubt it will use much more as the weather just turned cold. 

​This house serves as our laundry room for our AirBnbs, hence the high water heater usage. I put a heat pump water heater in in June. The laundry room is a bit of a confounding factor because the door to the basement gets left open a lot in summer, letting humidity in. 
​
​Here's monthly usage for the dehu and heat pump:

The Wizard House

The Wizard House is directly next door to the Game House (it was the mom's house, the Game House was built by her son). It also has a 1.5 ton Daikin Fit heat pump. It's a 672 square foot ranch built in 1950. It's badly insulated, the walls are empty and the attic only has 2" of insulation in it. I left it that way on purpose as an experiment (and we had run out of money lol.)

The basement was horrifically wet, I joked it was like A River Runs Through It only without Brad Pitt. I encapsulated the basement/crawlspace and spray foamed the walls down there. I never blower door tested it though. Shoemakers' kids and all. 

I'm concerned about mold returning in the basement, so I set the dehumidifier in the basement to 45% RH, normally I run a 50% set point. It runs quite a bit, and is a confounding factor to be aware of. 

Here's annual usage to date at the Wizard House. 

The dehumidifier here used 1269 kwh so far this year. 

The water heater is also interesting to me, this house runs nearly 100% occupancy March-October with groups of 4-6 and an electric resistance water heater only used 1571 kwh, just a little more than the dehu. 

Here's monthly usage for the dehu and heat pump for consistency's sake. 

West Virginia Conclusion: Reheat Ain't Bad

To review, here's the usage in kwh and cost at $.18/kwh so far this year of dehumidification in our 4 WV houses:

597,   $107  Mothmanor (271 reheat, 326 dehumidifier)
1022, $184 Game House
1160, $209 Our House
1269, $228 Wizard House

This is not a perfect study, but the houses are comparable in size, and the Wizard House/Mothmanor are nearly identical in build year, construction, and size. 

I think it does help illustrate how reheat dehumidification is not a giant energy cost. It's comparable to running a regular dehumidifier. 

Conclusion: Reheat Is A Useful Tool 

If you made it this far, thank you! And maybe grab an adult beverage, you've earned one!

You've seen a ton of examples from clients with higher than expected usage, clients with expected usage, friends' houses in other states, and our 4 houses in WV. 

In general I see energy usage from reheat dehumidification in the 600-1200 kwh/year range which works out to $60-240/year at $.10-.20/kwh that most of the US sees.

Like I said at the beginning, standalone dehumidifiers in my experience use between 500-1500 kwh/year. 

So does electric reheat dehumidification. If you use it right, which includes:

• Stick to set points of 50% relative humidity (RH) or higher.
• Use the right equipment - results are nowhere near this good with equipment that can't dehumidify well (I'm planning an article on that, but it'll ruffle feathers, so I may not.)
• Don't open windows and use reheat (it's a bad idea in general in humid climates).
• In new construction be aware that you'll need to dry the house out and it's not free.
• Pay attention to electric usage, a $15 smart plug can tell you about a dehumidifier, a whole house energy monitor is a good idea if you are using reheat with anything other than Carrier/Bryant equipment. 

If you live in a humid climate along with 80% of Americans, perhaps you'll consider a heat pump system with reheat dehumidification capability. 

I'll be releasing my Common Sense HVAC Guide soon which will add more detail to what the actual install looks like, keep an eye out for it!

* I've definitely seen reheat done in an inefficient matter. One small study in North Carolina found that using reheat dehumidification was projected to use $768/year more electricity vs a whole home dehumidifier. That study used a Bosch heat pump which is not that great at dehumidification, so you have to add a lot of heat for it to dehumidify well.

Jim Bergmann of MeasureQuick and I both bought a reheat capable thermostat (American Standard 824) paired with a Bosch heat pump. We tried reheat on his shop and my house respectively, and quickly concluded that it was good at burning a lot of electricity. The NC setup was better, but judging by the wildly higher energy cost, a product better at dehumidification should be chosen. 

I've also heard about usage on a restaurant in the Miami area using their single stage AC for reheat. It worked, but the bills were eye watering.

​I've come to firmly believe that you need a fully communicating system that can run the indoor coil very cold if you want to keep energy use down while using reheat dehumidification. It's possible to do it other ways, but hard to get set up correctly.​

Nerd Level 5/10 - I'll go slow but this is a bit technical. It's one of the most important concepts I teach though, it's often the key to a healthy home. Part 2 is about what it costs, read that once you've read this post. Link at the bottom.

A Dry Home Is A Healthy and Comfortable Home 

Reheat dehumidification is a fairly obscure topic, it's common in commercial HVAC but not residential. In all my years of house whispering, humidity control has been by far the most challenging part, especially in older homes that don't have a plastic vapor barrier under the basement floor, or homes with vented crawlspaces. 

Keeping a house dry during humid seasons is critical to indoor comfort, reducing thermostat wars between spouses,  reducing the growth of nasty stuff like mold, mildew, and rot, and keeping the house and indoor air quality healthy. I target 45-55% relative humidity (RH) which is 45-55F dew point in cooling season. 

In humid climates where the grass stays green without having to water it* there are typically several months per year where it's humid outside, but not warm enough to turn on the air conditioner or have it run very long. Sadly, the days you'd like to open the windows when it's 70-75F/20-24C out are often these times. I don't make the rules, physics does, I don't like this either!

If you have noticed your house feeling sticky in spring or fall, or noticing where the dog peed last year, humidity is probably getting too high in your home. If you break 60% RH in your home, the odds are high something bad is growing somewhere in your home, often inside walls, crawlspaces, or attics where you can't see it (but you still breathe it.)

As air conditioners have gotten more and more efficient, they are actually getting significantly worse at dehumidification. 

Myself and fellow building science nerds have noticed a significant bump in mold and humidity complaints in the last five years, in fact I did a presentation in 2018 called The Coming Mold Explosion. 

So what's the solution? HVAC systems that have excellent dehumidification capabilities, in particular those with "reheat dehumidification". I view it as real world magic like air conditioning and flight: even though I understand how it works, it still seems like magic!

Let's take a look at what reheat dehumidification looks like. First, we need to look inside your air conditioner. 

​The First Nerdy Part: The Indoor Coil

This is a picture of the air handler unit (AHU) now installed in my house, AHU is the name for the indoor part of a heat pump (a heat pump is an AC that can heat and cool where an AC can only cool.) If you have a furnace and AC, the coil sits on top of your furnace and the furnace unit has the fan in it. 

On the bottom is the fan, the air handler itself. Above that is the indoor coil. This unit is set up for downflow operation, where the air blows from the top to the bottom and into duct work in the crawlspace. If you have a basement your system is almost certainly setup as an upflow unit, and in an attic or crawlspace as a horizontal flow unit. 

​In this case it's an "A coil" because it's shaped like a letter A, some are flat (aka a slab coil), some are shaped like a letter N (you guessed it, an N coil.) 

When the indoor coil gets cold, it removes heat from the air inside your home so it can pump it outside. 

​When the coil gets cold and it's humid inside, the coil will get wet with condensation. I don't have a good picture of that, but here's condensation on the bottom of another air handler that is in a very humid crawlspace (since fixed.)

Hitting Set Point Too Fast to Dehumidify

When your air conditioner is running, it's removing both heat and humidity from the air inside your house. 

An AC needs to run for a while, 5-15 minutes, before the coil gets cold enough to dehumidify. Until then it is just removing heat from the house, which you think of as cooling.

This is problematic on mild days because the air conditioner will remove heat too quickly so the thermostat is "satisfied" and the AC shuts off before the coil gets cold enough to start dehumidifying. This leaves your house cold and wet which is a recipe for high humidity, mold, and discomfort. 

A Partial Solution: Variable Speed AC

If an air conditioner is too big to run long enough to dehumidify, one option is to make it smaller. You can choose a smaller size in a typical single stage on/off model, but the real key is to buy a variable speed AC or heat pump that can turn down to a very low output.

The best variable speed ACs or heat pumps can turn down to about 25% of their full capacity. A 2 ton/24,000 btu AC or heat pump can turn down to 6,000 btus. For reference the smallest window air conditioners are 5,000 btus and this is for an entire house. As small as this is, it still typically leaves several months where it still shuts off because it's not warm enough to run the AC for long before the thermostat satisfies.

The other key is that variable speed units need to turn down low while also running a cold coil so that condensation forms and they dehumidify. Only a few systems do this well. That's for another article. 

The problem is that on mild days in the 70-80F range, even very low outputs will often cool the house before dehumidifying it enough. 

The Actual Solution: Cool and Dry the Air, Then Reheat It

Here's why I had to tell you about the coil inside your air conditioner. It's the first step in reheat dehumidification. It removes heat and humidity from air going through it, making the air cold and dry. 

But we've already established that this is bad, it overcools a house without dehumidifying it, and bad stuff can start happening. 

To fix this, we need to "reheat" that cold dry air so that it is room temperature dry air. 

We can do this two ways, by running it through a second coil with the now warm refrigerant in it often called "hot gas reheat", or by using electric resistance that looks a lot like the coils inside a toaster but larger that's called "electric reheat". 

In commercial systems, the second coil/hot gas is quite common, but in residential systems this adds a lot of cost, complexity, and risk of early equipment failure. Lennox has a product called Humiditrol that does this, but the two times I mentioned it to contractors they practically ran away screaming afraid of the potential failure risk. 

You can set up a standard heat pump system for reheat by running a Honeywell Prestige thermostat in commercial mode, but note that it will likely use a painfully high amount of electricity because the heat strips will be running for 15 minutes or so before the coil gets cold enough to dehumidify. And you'll want to be sure you have the airflow settings right so the coil can get cold. It takes a good technician with holistic understanding of how homes work and how to set up the equipment to get this right. I'd love to say that's easy to find, but it seems to be under 1% of HVAC techs in my experience. 

My equipment preference, shockingly, is variable speed equipment with 2 or 3 stages of backup heat so that they can run low and slow while dehumidifying which is both more efficient and more effective. More in a minute.

Let's look at a few other factors about reheat and alternative methods to see why I've settled on using it as the first line of defense in my projects. ​

Superior Longevity

I've been called crazy for my near obsession with reheat dehumidification, but there's a really important reason why: it basically never breaks. 

I've done energy audits on homes with ancient 40-50 year old heat pumps and while the heat pump may not work, the resistance backup strips worked every time. As long as the fan turns on to flow air over them and prevent them from melting themselves, they almost never break. 

Another Solution: Whole Home Ventilating Dehumidifiers

In the typical home furnace and air conditioner system, the furnace comes before the AC coil, so you can't reheat the air**, you can only feed very hot air into the AC coil which is very likely to break the system.

Therefore home HVAC systems with a furnace can't do reheat dehumidification whether it's paired with a one way AC or a two way AC heat pump (aka hybrid or dual fuel system). 

What's the Best Way to Do Reheat Dehumidification?

Remember how I talked about the best partial solution to good dehumidification is a variable speed AC or heat pump that can run a cold coil at low 25% capacity to provide the best comfort without reheat?

The best reheat dehumidification is done with that nice system running a cold coil at low capacity matched with as small a resistance backup heat strip as possible. 

This means the system will run for a while at low capacity, sucking as much humidity out of the air as possible. 

What's the Worst Way to Do Reheat Dehumidification?

While you can do reheat with a basic single stage AC or heat pump with electric resistance backup heat strips, it tends to burn far more energy. 

Remember how I said that an AC needs to run for 5-15 minutes to get the coil cold enough to dehumidify well? If you don't want to overcool the home, you need to run the resistance backup the whole time the AC is on. 

The resistance backup is running while the system is not dehumidifying, so you are wasting energy. Plus the AC is very oversized when it's 70-80F outdoors, so it will cool the house faster than you want, using more energy still. 

Ideally you also want to get the AC coil cold fast and run as little resistance backup as possible. More on that in a second. 

What's the Worst System for Reheat Dehumidification?

Many (frankly almost all) AC and heat pump systems are really bad at dehumidification. They focus on cooling over dehumidification. I'll write about this in depth another article, but it's called the Sensible Heat Ratio. An AC can do 65% dehumidification and 35% cooling which is a 0.35 Sensible Heat Ratio (SHR), or it can do 1% dehumidification and 99% cooling, a 0.99 SHR. 

The 0.99 SHR system does almost no dehumidification, even when it's running correctly. 

Most ACs used to be in the 0.7-0.8 SHR range, meaning they did 20-30% dehumidification which is about right to keep a house dry if the AC is sized as small as possible to the house. 

The trouble is that efficiency standards are driving basic single stage minimum efficiency systems into the 0.85-0.95 SHR range. Even if they are running perfectly these systems don't dehumidify well. 

Sadly, efficiency standards have made it where if you want good dehumidification you either have to buy a separate dehumidifier or a "communicating" HVAC system. 

Communicating Systems or Bust

In a communicating system the air handler (indoor unit), the outdoor unit, and the thermostat are constantly talking to each other and making small adjustments in how the system is running to deliver efficiency, comfort, and dehumidification. 

A "communicating" HVAC system is fully variable speed. It can vary the speed of the air handler fan and the speed of the compressor that actually cools (or heats) the house. 

Most importantly, communicating systems can run the indoor coil cold for the best dehumidification and at 25% capacity so it runs a long time and also maximizes dehumidification.  

The challenge is that only two systems are both communicating and do reheat dehumidification: Carrier Infinity and Trane XV heat pump only systems. Each one has multiple brands that are the same products with different badges. 

Carrier Infinity Heat Pumps

While I have two close HVAC contractor friends that swear by Trane XV heat pump systems with reheat, Tim Portman and Stephen Rardon, I have only used Carrier Infinity VNA8 and Carrier Infinity GreenSpeed VNA4 heat pumps. I absolutely love them and finally bought one personally last year. 

Not only do the regular dehumidification and reheat dehumidification functions work very well, but Carrier has the only 3 stage resistance backup heat strips. There is a 3/6/9 kw model (3,000, 6,000, or 9,000 watts) and a 5/10/15 kw model (the glowing photo earlier is the 5/10/15 model running at 15 kw.)

The 3/6/9 kw model of heat strips is an amazing match with a two ton heat pump because it will run at 3 kw and the system at 25% capacity. 25% capacity is 6,000 btus, remember that a small window AC is 5,000 btus. That makes it low and slow, exactly what we want for maximum dehumidification and minimum energy use, something I'll show data on in the next article. 

I should say that Carrier is not a sponsor in any way, in fact I've had zero technical support from them in 10 years of using their products, I've either figured things out myself or learned from other HVAC pros. I can consult on setting your Carrier Infinity system up properly if desired. 

Some Real World Results

This is the relative humidity data from the Haven Indoor Air Quality Monitor in Mothmanor, our AirBnb with a Carrier Infinity VNA8 heat pump system with reheat. It also has a dehumidifier in the basement, I'll show energy use next time. I've noticed that the relative humidity runs a bit lower than what the Haven says, 5-10%. 

It's been a dry year here in the New River Gorge National Park, but the temperatures have stayed higher along with humidity through October. 
​
Here's a chart from Game House AirBnb that has a Daikin Fit heat pump system without reheat, it has a small dehumidifier as well. 

I warned you this post was kinda nerdy, but hopefully it makes sense now how your AC coil needs to be cold to dehumidify well, run as long as possible at as low a capacity as possible, and for the best dehumidification your system needs to be able to reheat the cold dry air that comes off the AC coil. 

To do this, it's best to run as small an AC as possible that is also communicating, which means it can run a cold coil at very low capacity. Only the Carrier Infinity and Trane XV heat pump only systems are capable of this, as well as their other brands like Bryant and American Standard respectively. 

​Done right, reheat dehumidification doesn't use a ton of energy, in fact I'll show how it's the same or less than running a dehumidifier. Like I said at the beginning, I view it like real world magic. 

Here's a comment on this article from cleantech entrepreneur KC Boyce in Atlanta about his Carrier Infinity system and my help setting up/commissioning it:

​Next Up: How Much Does It Cost?

​In the next article we'll talk about operating costs.  I'll show you actual energy use from multiple client systems with reheat dehumidification, friends' houses in warmer climates, and 4 of our own houses in West Virginia - 1 with reheat and 3 without. 

See you next time, and good luck choosing the best HVAC system for your home!


Footnotes
* Green grass climate definition borrowed from Ken "Teddy Bear" Gehring, inventor of the ventilating dehumidifier and a particularly good guy. He's semi retired from Thermastor/Santa Fe, but still active at hvactalk.com
​
** Someone is going to say that you could install a furnace after an AC coil and use it for reheat dehumidification. While technically correct and actually how many commercial rooftop HVAC systems work, it tends to rot out furnace heat exchangers in just a few years because you are running very cold air conditioned air over a heat exchanger that has room temperature humid air inside of it, creating condensation inside the heat exchanger and rotting it out. Those commercial rooftop units are famous for rotting out within 5 years. It's just not a good idea. ​

So what gets better? The easiest way to understand the opportunity is to think about the heating and cooling system in our cars, which is pretty amazing, they tackle 5 of the 6 Functions of HVAC:

• Load Matching: We can put out just the right amount of heating or cooling by adjusting the air temperature and/or fan speed.
• Filtration: Every car has a good cabin air filter to knock garbage out of the air we breathe.
• Dehumidification: For the 80% of North Americans that live in a humid climate, we can knock the humidity out of the air with a magical button that says “AC”.
• Fresh Air: Our cars can bring in outdoor air which keeps, um, odors at a minimum and the air inside our cars healthier.
• Mixing: We can aim the air wherever we need it to keep us comfortable. It mixes in the cabin because the fan is always on, helping keep the temperature more even.
• Humidification: Cars can’t add humidity when the air is dry, but our homes can. 

Our cars can handle 5 of the 6 Functions of HVAC above, but most homes aren’t good at any of them. Check this short video out, or read the free HVAC 101 chapter to see why.

Getting These Isn’t That Hard 
There are many home HVAC systems that can provide those capabilities, it’s simply a matter of choosing the right equipment and install for your home and situation. 

3 of the 6 functions are directly related to what system you choose, the other 3 are related to the install itself. Here’s a look at what it takes to get the 6 functions.

A hybrid is a furnace plus a heat pump rather than a furnace plus an air conditioner. They give you more and lower stages of heat to provide better comfort. A heat pump is what we jokingly call a "bisexual air conditioner" - it can cool and heat, it goes both ways. 

​Check out the various equipment and install options below, you can pick and choose what’s important to you, but now you'll have a better idea of how to get your home HVAC to be as awesome as it is in your car!

You may have noted that I haven’t written anything about air quality monitors in a long time. 

Why? I was frustrated that there wasn’t a product that had the attributes I wanted, and also that there wasn’t a product that could do anything when pollutant levels justified action. 

That has completely changed recently with the Haven central air quality monitor and controller, which can actually take action from what it measures, and it offers the feature list I’ve been looking for.  We’ve installed them in several of our AirBnbs, this column will look at how we came to that conclusion and how it’s going early in the experiment. But first, let’s take a step back a few years and look at air quality monitors.

IAQ Monitor Must Haves
After spending a bunch of time with 7 air quality monitors in 2016 to try and learn what they’re capable of and which ones were better than the others, I came up with a list of 3 things that are must haves to deploy these in client homes:

• Dashboard - Remembering or storing multiple client logins and passwords is not a scalable thing, so I want to be able to easily look at any client anytime with one login.
• Fairly Reliable Readings - Low cost sensors in the $100-400 range are not going to have the accuracy of a $50,000 reference instrument, but I’d like to know that readings are somewhere in the ballpark of what’s happening.
• Four Metrics - Temperature, humidity, tVOC, and PM2.5. Why not CO2? Because most tVOC sensors are cross sensitive to CO2, so if tVOC levels are low, so are CO2 levels., The tVOC sensor picks up a much broader range of pollutants, so it is a better proxy for air quality. Read more on this in To Catch a Health Thief.

I really didn’t think this list was that hard to meet. Yet since the Foobot went off the market a few years ago, no room monitor actually met all of these. While there are plenty that are good for one off applications, none were a good fit for a pro who wants to monitor multiple homes with ease.

Frankly I gave up on monitors. We’d learned enough to come up with the BAD ASS HVAC design, which does a pretty good job automatically controlling air quality without any sensors or actually turning things on and off when a pollutant gets too high. Essentially, I gave up on the dream of truly controlling IAQ and moved on with my life.

Enter Haven

Having tried and eventually written off all room air quality monitors because they were lacking one of the 3 things above, I heard about the Haven Central Air Monitor. 

The Haven Central Air Monitor is different, it goes inside the return duct just before the filter. At first I didn’t like this about it, I’d grown used to room monitors. 

They have their own proprietary PM2.5 sensor that has remarkable accuracy in the lab. It measures 6 things:

• Temperature
• ​Humidity
• Airflow
• Pressure
• tVOC
• PM 2.5

Note the four things I want to be sure to measure are in there - temperature, humidity, PM 2.5 and tVOC. 

They also have a dashboard and their readings are generally quite good. I have a struggle with two of their humidity sensors, but the others have been on point, and most importantly the PM and tVOC sensors match events that I know of - cleaning, cooking, painting, etc. 

Room vs In Duct Monitors
There are two big problems with room monitors: clients unplug them eventually, and the sensors get dirty and out of calibration after a year or two.

While at first I didn’t like the sensor being inside the duct, that placement solved the customer unplugging them because the light annoys them. They can’t see it,  it’s out of sight, out of mind in the attic, basement, garage, or crawlspace. 

The sensors are easy to clean with a Q-tip or similar when changing filters and doing easy maintenance, solving the other main issue with room sensors. So the Haven solves the two primary weaknesses we found in in room monitors. 
I was intrigued. I now know most of their team, they are highly focused not just on selling products, but actually solving problems, and they also value technical excellence. But there was still a problem.

The Car Alarm Conundrum

Have you ever heard a car alarm going off in your neighborhood and thought “why don’t they turn that thing off?!” That’s essentially what indoor air quality monitors do - they tell you there’s a problem, but they can’t solve it. Basically they are annoying without offering a solution.

In the commercial world there has been “demand control ventilation” for years that monitors pollutants like carbon dioxide and can turn on devices to solve the problem. 

For homes we haven’t had a solution - until Haven came out with their central air controller last year. 
The Haven monitor talks to the controller when something is amiss with IAQ. Each controller has two dry contacts you can use to turn on the equipment of your choice. You can use multiple controllers with one monitor, so you can control 4 or even 10 different devices if desired. Conundrum solved?

Trying It Out: Haven + BAD ASS HVAC

Being an early adopter, I wanted to try out the controller with my monitor. This is something I wanted to try in one of our homes though, it’s early enough that I didn’t really want to try it with a client in case something went wrong. 
We recently moved to Fayetteville, West Virginia near the New River Gorge National Park. We bought two little houses next to each other (700 and 800 square feet.) We themed them, one is the Game House with board games and the other is the Candy Cottage which has a Willy Wonka feel. 

The Game House is done to the AirBnb specification I proposed in this column late last year - the bath fan and range hood are both vented outdoors, it has BAD ASS HVAC (with a standalone small dehumidifier for dehumidification), and a 14-50 plug for EV charging. I still need to figure out how to show guests what their air quality looks like. 
They both got 1.5 ton Daikin Fit heat pumps (another thing I wanted to try out.) 

The Fresh Air Strategy of My (Very Realistic) Dreams

Dr. Joe Lstiburek has talked about bringing in 50% of ASHRAE 62.2 guidelines all the time, then ramping up to 150% as needed. I really wanted to see how that might work in the real world. 
For a long time we’ve wanted to try out two fresh air ducts, one open almost all the time, and the other open when tVOCs/CO2 got too high. 
​
I’ll write about fresh air strategies soon, so for now please suspend your arguments in your mind about supply only, exhaust only, and balanced ventilation. These homes have a supply only strategy.
In each of the houses, I had two 6” ducts run from the HVAC return to outdoors, each with a motorized damper, see the photo. 

So I propose four rules:

• BAD ASS HVAC - cover the 6 functions of HVAC 
• Point source ventilation - range hood and bath fans vented outdoors
• Induction stove
• Air quality monitor - with results visible to the renters

The 6 Functions are: load matching, filtration, dehumidification, fresh air, mixing, and humidification. Depending on climate humidity control strategies may be different, but should be noted, i.e. “dry climate” for not having a dehumidifier or “warm, humid climate” for not installing a humidifier. The other 4 are required in every home though.

Those will naturally lead to inverter driven heat pumps, better comfort, and better air quality while being fairly easy to achieve. Because short term rentals have higher margins, it opens up room for these sorts of upgrades, particularly if HVAC in a property is at end of useful life.

Did you notice that I am not talking about shell measures here? If an owner is ok with high energy bills and potentially poor comfort in a home that is supposed to be comfortable, the reviews and energy costs will naturally drive that work to get done. 

Huge Leverage

A few thousand of these around the country could host 50-100 families each per year and give them the #electrifyeverything experience. 

Say there were 2,000 properties that host 50 families a year each. That’s 100,000 families a year seeing what the hype is all about. That is likely to spark many more full or partial electrifications and likely more #electrifyeverything short term rental properties. 

All of the homes would be substantially improved as well, which is good for US housing stock. These upgrades are likely to buy these homes an additional 30-100 years of lifespan by making them future proof and far more moisture resilient.

We’re putting our money where our mouths are on this, by the end of 2022 we will have 4 #electrifyeverything properties complete. The River House outside Cleveland needs central HVAC but does have an UltraAire XT155 ventilating dehumidifier for filtration, mixing, fresh air, and dehumidification. Our West Virginia house recently got a Bosch heat pump, it just needs a fresh air line and it’s complete. I’m currently figuring out how to electrify the two properties we just bought.
​
If it goes as projected by AirDna, a service that scrapes AirBnb data to help understand how homes in an area are renting and for how much, together these will create $40-60K/year of cash flow for us, enough that we don’t have to work if we don’t want to. (Although we'll likely use the money to create more of them…)

And there you have it, a path to solve for Doubting Thomases, let many homeowners experience comfortable electrified homes with excellent air quality, fix up properties that otherwise are likely to be neglected, and make money for the entrepreneurs who create the properties.

This could be like a brick on the proverbial gas pedal of residential electrification.

It’s also a surprisingly easy thing to make happen: AirBnb, VRBO, and other short term rental services can create an #electrifyeverything class. 

So, what are we waiting for? If you know someone at AirBnb or VRBO, perhaps send this post to them?

This position typically takes people by surprise. To be clear, I'm talking about single family homes in particular. Let's explore the details.

First off, definitions. A heat pump moves heat from one place to another. Your refrigerator is a heat pump. It takes heat out of the cold air inside and pushes it into your kitchen. The source is the cold air inside your fridge, the place it rejects the heat is into your house.

An air conditioner is technically a heat pump, it takes heat from inside your house and ejects it into the hot outdoors through something called the refrigeration cycle, but let's just call it magic, it's easier.

An "air source heat pump" in US parlance is an air conditioner that can heat as well as cool. I jokingly think of it like a bisexual AC, it goes both ways. Sometimes silly jokes like that stick. In winter it takes heat out of the cold outdoor air and puts it inside your house. Again, think of it as magic, but it's EXACTLY what your fridge does. 

A ground source (aka geothermal) heat pump takes heat from the earth through a long pipe loop that is either horizontally about 6 feet down in a large field like a septic field, or vertically several hundred feet down that takes up very little space in your yard.

The Question

Joel Zook in the Electrify Everything Facebook Group asked me my position on ground source for his older home in a very cold climate (Climate Zone 6, Wisconsin and Minnesota are the only states with substantial population in those zones.)

My Answer

That would be a place to consider them. My issue is that even after the tax credit they are typically $10-20K more. That $10-20K can usually make a good sized dent in shell work.

This client spent ~$35k on a ground source heat pump, which is about $25K after the tax credit. He had very high energy bills and an uncomfortable house.

He could have forgone the tax credit, spent $5,000 more out of pocket, got an air source heat pump and an insulation and air sealing package, then had very low bills and a comfortable house. 

Instead, he's using 21,000 kwh/year (total annual usage, not just HVAC). Our other clients with similar sized homes with air source heat pumps are using 12,000 to 15,000 kwh per year, and report that they are amazingly comfortable.

But thank goodness he was able to reduce his income tax bill!

His house is very uncomfortable AND uses more energy AND it cost more to do (both him and the government) AND costs more to run. This is pretty typical in retrofits, I've had several other clients in the same boat.

Remember, for $5K more he could have had a very comfy home that uses less and costs less to run. I hate talking about payback because it's the path to hell, but it would have saved him $700-1000/year in operating costs with an air source and insulation/air sealing path.

Ground source heat pumps are typically poor resource allocation. Money is limited, spend it wisely.

The exceptions are CZ6 and up, particularly in larger homes that are tough to reduce load on. The big risk is undersizing the loops or poor soil quality. It's distinctly possible to remove more heat in winter than gets replaced in summer and end up running on resistance a big chunk of the winter. Design and install are very finicky on ground source and there are very few contractors in most markets that can service them.

Electrification for you is likely to cost $20-30K extra with geo than it is with a hybrid furnace and air source heat pump. I question if that's worth it for what is likely a few hundred therms per year. I'd rather you use that money towards an EV or other high impact fossil reduction (even donating to causes.) Does that perspective make sense?

Market Distortions
Now I was on a rant, because this whole topic drives me nuts:

Some will talk about Dandelion now. NY is THROWING money at heat pumps, plus there is a 30% tax credit. Take those away and the economics of ground source are positively laughable.

The rule of thumb in policy is that beyond 1% market penetration, incentives get too expensive to continue. So we incentivize a few systems, build a small contractor network, then pull the rug out from underneath them.

I watched this happen with one geo company local to me in Cleveland. I drove by their shops over the years, they had a little one, got a really big one when the tax credit was on, then downsized again as the ground source tax credit came and went. I have several friends who got into the business with the tax credit, then got back out when it went away.

The same thing happens with efficiency/rebate programs. Robert Brierley watched 30 competitors die over the last few years when the efficiency program in Portland shut down. This same cycle happens with every program if you look closely. It's one of the big reasons we are so anti-program.

If a product or program isn't 100% sustainable without any incentives, it should die. Period.

Why? Because sooner or later the programs will die.

This is how we've built HVAC 2.0. It requires no programs.

​In fact, most programs make it harder for the 100% market based path, they subtly or blatantly shift the sales process or product selection, which kills closing ratios and job sizes. Programs turn contractors into tame bears just like signs at national parks say not to do. But then programs stop feeding them.

​This ends up messing up markets and preventing them from ever growing.

Because ground source requires drilling a loop for $8-20K AND the equipment is the same price or more expensive than air source, it will always need help to be first cost competitive in the market. Therefore it will die when programs are removed, which will happen at some point.

PLUS, even with that 30%, they still cost more and create the client situation I mentioned above, which I've seen multiple times.

If we want electrification to scale, products and business models MUST stand on their own. If they don't they will die like a tame bear when it stops getting fed in its cage.

This is a critical point. If we pull for anything that can't survive without help, we are destroying our future chances at decarbonization.

The path is VERY narrow, but there is one. We've built HVAC 2.0 around it.

Technical Improvements

One other key point: air source heat pumps have improved DRAMATICALLY over the last decade.

Ground source often made sense vs crappy single stage air source heat pumps. 

Now inverters have changed the game. While ground source remains marginally less expensive to operate, typically it's a few hundred per year difference where it could have been as much as a few thousand 10 years ago. Read HVAC 101 to understand the differences between single stage and variable speed/inverter HVAC equipment. 

Ground Source Favors the Wealthy

There is a lot of discussion about equity right now. Ground source heat pumps don't fare well here. First, they are primarily for the wealthy because a) they pay enough taxes to use the tax credits that come out of these projects and b) they are best applied to larger homes with high heat loads.

Are we sure we want to use large amounts of government money to subsidize a market that really shouldn't need subsidies?

For example, let's look at the project above. It generated a ~$10,000 tax credit. With the 3H (Hybrid Heat Homes) proposal, that same amount would buy 20 heat pumps that would reduce gas usage 30-50% for those homes, and they would be predominantly middle class homes. So that $10K can decarbonize one home or the equivalent of 7-10 homes. What is the better allocation of capital and fairness? This is a question that could use more discussion.

Conclusion - Do the Math

In most single family electrification retrofits, the first thing to do is insulation and air sealing. Especially in cold climates. That is often the best place to aim your money (leaving aside the fact that you are VERY unlikely to get it back at resale, another major market distortion.) 

If we want to decarbonize, don't we want to do it in the most cost efficient way that provides a great experience?

This is exactly what we designed the HVAC 2.0 process to do. 

It is built to find the best path for each homeowner's goals, what their house needs, and their budget. Will it occasionally involve a ground source heat pump? Yes. But likely in well under 1% of circumstances. There are almost always better ways to spend money.

If we want to see electrification move quickly, it needs to be done in the most effective and efficient way possible that also creates huge value. That way the majority of the market will do it. We've done this a number of times with our practice in Cleveland, and the HVAC 2.0 network has already done far more electrifications than we have with our small practice.

This system works on the ground and without any incentives or programs, which avoids the feeding the bears problem.

For us to come out with such a strong position against ground source should carry a great deal of weight because of our boots on the ground experience. 

Want a much deeper and nuanced view of what it takes to electrify your home? Take the free Electrify Everything course, a dozen emails with videos over several weeks to walk you through all the technical pieces of electrification (with a view towards marketing and scale.) 

Guest post by Griffin Hagle, originally written in 2015, edited slightly for 2021. 

Do you remember the first time you fired up a blower door after air sealing and nailed -- or exceeded -- your target number?

The exact moment may elude you, but the feeling is hard to forget. If you’re like me, you’ve pursued it ever since, and delight in the satisfaction of hard work captured in measured proof. The world faces some grave, complex problems. But it’s empowering to think that with such nifty tools and a healthy dose of elbow grease (or sealant) our efforts can be part of the solution.

That realization arrived for me in 2006. I had moved home to Oregon the year before, tail between my legs, from flight school in Oklahoma. Still reeling from 9/11’s impact on the aviation sector, the school closed, stranding me and scores of other students short of their sky-high dreams with loads of debt. I needed work.
I was so desperate that crawling under mobile homes sounded like a good place to start. 

Over the next two years, as an entry-level technician, I helped weatherize about 250 homes for a nonprofit community agency. One of my favorite memories was replacing a broken bay window for a single mother of four toward the end of a multi-day project. Through tears, she said it felt like an episode of a home makeover show, and gave each member of our crew a big hug.

I eventually moved on from that job, bitten hard by the building performance bug and sure there was even more good I could do helping others chase the feeling. 

Nine years after that, despite making modestly better wages for generally less messy work, the difference I wanted to make seemed harder to come by. As an ‘energy-efficiency mentor’ for a utility-funded rebate program in Southern California, I was on-call to resolve contractors’ issues within the program. Every now and then, I could see light bulbs come on as I took the uninitiated HVAC installer through duct-leakage testing procedures, or called an insulation crew’s attention to an overlooked air-sealing opportunity. Like the folks I worked alongside in my weatherization days, these were mostly earnest, hard-working people ready to do the right thing. 

The problem was, the principles and priorities of the system we worked within didn’t allow them to think in broader terms than the minimal effort needed to grab a rebate. In fact, it put limits on my own ability to show them the bigger picture. For example, I was free to explain the value per square foot of adding new insulation, or reducing duct leakage below an arbitrary threshold. But if I pushed back on, say, the use of utility ratepayer funds to cheer the installation of oversized fossil-gas furnaces in a climate among the nation’s most ideal for heat pumps, I did so at the risk of embarrassing my paymasters and ostracizing contractors trying to make a living.

That’s partly why, in 2015, I walked out on a promotion and moved 3,000 miles away to Alaska. 

I’m not alone

The year before I left, I connected with Nate Adams of Energy Smart Home Performance in Ohio. Nate, an early and ardent proponent of efficiency program reform, swung us an invite to the Forum on Dry Climate Home Performance in Northern California. It felt like a secret society (no, not in the Eyes Wide Shut way). Its independent-minded organizers threw themselves into hot rodding HVAC systems and building enclosures for pure learning and amusement, rejecting the world of sponsored products and dodgy energy savings claims. One of its founders, Rick Chitwood, co-authored one of the best field guides for performance contractors I’ve ever seen.

While there, I asked a contractor from the L.A. metro for his thoughts on rebate programs. He said business was so inconsistent he wouldn’t have been able to come had he not booked the trip months earlier. Common sense kept him out of the program. It just cost too much to keep up with it. Another contractor, from Orange County, put hard numbers to his cost of participation: on average, chasing rebates added $1,800 more per project. 

Other encounters that week reinforced the overall picture. The factors propelling growth in clean energy and electric vehicles clearly hadn’t materialized in the same way for home performance. (SolarCity, later absorbed into Tesla, found this out the hard way when it shuttered its two-year old energy-efficiency division in 2013.) A lot of the difference can be attributed to the sheer technical complexity of fixing up existing buildings, but an increasing share today comes down to whose ox is gored by policies centering cleaner, safer, healthier housing in the fight to reduce global emissions and solve climate change. Need proof? Look no further than the silk-glove tactics of the fossil gas and homebuilding lobbies.

It’s not about the energy savings

This might seem like a heretical statement to people who, like me, have given too much of their precious time away hoping to guide others onto a “greener” path. I’ve literally climbed uninvited into friends’ attics and driven hours to run pro bono air-leakage tests. Almost all of it was in vain.

The truth is that we’ve been failed by the narrative that the rest of society can be led to care as much as we do about what’s under the hood of their homes. Personally, I blame an outdated reliance on an earnest but naive brand of conservation messaging that arose in the 1970s and still shows up as “energy saving tips” in the junk mail of today. 
Renowned wonk Amory Lovins, no less vexed by the blithe tendencies that took our planet to crisis, has been saying for decades that the keys to managing our way out of it lie in grasping the everyday human impulses that drive energy production and use. People want “hot showers” and “cold beer,” not kilowatt-hours, air changes per hour, or avoided carbon emissions, no matter how politely they nod and smile when we drone on about them.

Case in point: my wife has become the best crusader for induction cooking I know. We’ve used a portable hob for two years in our poorly ventilated rental in Alaska and plan to install a slide-in unit in our upcoming home renovation. One of the bright spots of our pandemic year has been watching her gush to family and friends via FaceTime how fast it boils water, how precise and even temperature controls are, how it doesn't blacken our cookware, and how easy cleanup is afterward. I don’t need to mention that it curbs indoor pollution that commonly exceeds federal laws governing outdoor spaces or enables homeowners to break up with their gas utility. 

So, if the good people leave, who stays?

The six years since I left the grind of carrot-and-stick home performance have given me a bit of a wider view on subjects ranging from human nature to policy design. Alaska is also the perfect perch from which to observe and reflect on dynamics in the “Lower 48” from a distance.

Basically, good people want to be recognized for their good work. It is within our nature to seek acknowledgement and praise for our efforts. In clinical use, this is extrinsic motivation.

The designers of the program I worked or relied on extrinsic motivation by prescribing a value for certain outputs to get contractors to play along in their schemes. Some of these make more sense than others: $50 for a smart thermostat or $200 to swap out a pool pump. It gets trickier when assigning dollar values to whole-home measures that require a strong foundation in building science and a global view of project dynamics to execute successfully.
Enter intrinsic motivation. Most true believers fall into this category. The self-satisfaction of a job done well and confidence in their contribution toward a better world drives them in a way that sets them apart from the crowd. When coupled with extrinsic reward, however, including praise and pay commensurate with their efforts, the possibilities are limitless and people truly shine. 

It’s impossible to survive on intrinsic reward alone. At least not for very long. We all have bills to pay, and we do a disservice to our cause when we throw ourselves into work that’s not properly valued. It means little to honor good work, of course, without defining it. Nobody wants to stick it out in a hot, cramped attic doing their utmost for clients left in the dark by an energy-efficiency industry that won’t measure results that matter and hold practitioners accountable for them. (Nate’s had a lot to say on the topic of energy metrics to guide real estate out of the dark ages.)
Put differently, industries that don't track results don't draw excellence. In fact, they repel it. People who put in effort get discouraged and drop out, making space for mediocrity to flourish. 

I saw this firsthand at the annual contractor awards banquets the utility sponsored. The only people genuinely upbeat at these things worked for the big HVAC shops with cheesy TV jingles raking in rebate cash for doing more or less the same work they always had. It was depressing.

After years of that nonsense, you might think I’ve had enough to put this kind of work behind me forever. I’m certainly done with Big Energy Efficiency. But just as bad relationships can teach you about your personal standards, I’ve drawn enriching lessons from that frustrating period of my professional life. There’s also been organic growth in the residential electrification movement and encouraging shifts in consumer awareness and sentiment as the coronavirus continues to lay bare the deep risks hidden in a business-as-usual economy. 

There was an HVAC guy, Tony, I once met who enthusiastically signed each of his plenums in Sharpie, confident he had installed a zero-leakage system. He was an equal parts trade worker and artisan, the kind of person we need more of by the tens of thousands, nearly always hitting his mark. I often think about him and his style of work, hopeful current trends drive the kind of interest and innovation in the home performance industry that convoluted rebate programs never could.

If we’re doing it right, his should feel like the most rewarding job in the country.

Nate's Note
Griff has been a long time supporter of our efforts, which have now turned into the HVAC 2.0 program. I hope this view from inside the belly of the beast is helpful in showing that traditional utility programs are highly unlikely to lead us to scale in either decarbonization or insulation.

Unless both homeowners and contractors see value in better work, we're in real trouble. Done right, like Griff said, electrification and home performance work should be some of the most rewarding work out there. He's felt it. I've felt it.

Griff mentioned the critical word several times: value. Homeowners need to have problems to solve that are worth enough to solve that they can buy high likelihood fixes for those problems. That requires building value. It also requires contractors to believe that they can deliver those fixes and to ask for enough money to execute them profitably. 

Only then can anyone experience the satisfaction of an electrification or home performance job done well - it has to solve problems for homeowners and be profitable for the companies doing it.

Achieving those goals is exactly what the HVAC 2.0 program is built to do. 

Want to learn more? Read the free chapters on this site of The Home Comfort Book, check out case studies at energysmartohio.com, or better yet take the free Electrify Everything Course that will walk you step by step through what you need to know about doing these projects, then give you access to the HVAC 2.0 network that can help you do it.