How HVAC Technicians Use Digital Tools to Prove Repairs & Prevent Liability with Tyler Nelson Part 1
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All right, welcome back, everybody. So listen, we've got a returning guest today. Tyler Nelson has joined us on the podcast before, and he's back again with some heavy insights. This time, we're diving deep into the shift from analog to digital tools in the HVAC trade. Why does it matter? Well, it's about protecting yourself, showing your work, and giving customers the proof they now expect.

From liability coverage to real-time data and smarter reporting, it's all connected. Tyler breaks it down. He's been out in the field speaking at conferences, working hands-on, and even using tools like ChatGPT to build trust with clients. Yeah, you heard that right. AI is on the job now. So let's get into it.

Tyler Nelson is back on the HVAC Know It All podcast. I'm your host, Gary McCready. This podcast is sponsored by Cintas, and if you're looking for blue-collar uniforms or anything that's an accessory to a blue-collar uniform, check out cintas.com forward slash HVAC Know It All for your blue-collar uniform needs. Welcome to the HVAC Know It All podcast, recorded from a basement somewhere in Toronto, Canada.

Your host and HVAC tech, Gary McCready, will take you on a deep dive into the industry discussing all things HVAC, from storytelling to technical discussion. Enjoy the show. Why the new tools?

As opposed to the older tools like analog versus digital are important these days because of liability purposes, just covering your butt. You have like data logging capabilities. You can print, you can use QR codes to get readings and keep them. You can email them to customers very, very easily. So it's all about CYA cover your ass these days. I mean,

if you write up a work order and you explain something, you don't do it right. There's no pictures or there's no evidence involved later on. If the customer comes back and says, I'm not paying that bill. Well, if you've, if you've done the right stuff, dotted your eyes, cross your T's, you've got your pictures, you've got your, your digital readouts and stuff like that. You go back and go, no, this is what actually happened on the job site. So you have a like to stand on. So give me your take on,

on the role of digital tools being able to do this kind of stuff for us and have this evidence to back up. Well, thank you again, Gary, for having me on. I appreciate it. And it's an honor and a pleasure. So continue on with what you just mentioned. It starts with the liability side and the CYA side of things, but it goes deeper than that. So before we go deeper, let's talk about the CYA and the liability. Our customers have a new level of expectation now.

We should all be learning on an analog gauge set. We should all be learning on the proper mechanics of a furnace and a boiler, and then obviously using combustion analyzers on those, and then using analog gauge set when learning on the refrigeration side, and then hopefully migrating to a digital manifold and wireless probes and all those other things.

But where our customers have the expectation is they need us to migrate away, especially on the air conditioning side or refrigeration side. They need us to migrate away from analog. They want the reporting. You know, they want concrete information because back when I first became a contractor, if we wrote on our ticket where it says our trained person will recommend, we wrote a recommendation on there, the customer would take it and say, okay, Ty, here's my deposit check. Here's my credit card. Let's get going. Now they don't do that.

Now they get a hold of their brother-in-law, who's an engineer, which, you know, when the engineer at the party is someone nobody ever wants to talk to because he bores you to tears. All kidding aside, Freddie Odie has engineers in their family and I do. But all kidding aside, they're going to do that or they're going to chat GBT or Google what you're telling them. Okay. So it's best to have all that information in concrete form now when it comes to reporting. So one of the changes I've made recently when I've been speaking at some conferences recently, and it's been eye-opening for some people and hopefully it carries forward, is

They're going to Google what you're telling them and they're going to chat GBT. So we're going to beat them to the punch. So as we're going through and analyzing the data off of these digital tools, I go into chat GBT now right on my phone and I type in.

symptoms of the system are this readings are this what is the next best course of action and it literally would generate it and what i'll do because it usually mirrors what should be done for the most part you got to vet that information but it normally mirrors it i'll then take that screenshot i'll incorporate that as one of the photos in my report

Because one of the things that we can do, for example, I don't know what other manufacturers can do. Actually, I kind of do, but it's with ours. You can include a job photos, whether it is our combustion app or whether it is our new Saruman pilot up for our new manifold that we have.

So as one of the photos I'm going to use, I'm going to take a snapshot of either Google, the information I Googled or on ChatGBT. I'm going to put it in there and I'm going to direct the customer to whatever reading I'm looking to direct them to and then direct them to the ChatGBT or the Google image photo and say, listen, this is my recommendation. But just so you know, for clarification purposes, I've also taken the liberty of Googling this for you or looking this up on ChatGBT. You can do the same for yourself. It's going to generate the same answer for you.

So they have proof now because before they just took our word for it. Now they want to vet everything we tell them because everybody wants to be an expert. So from a cover your tush, so to speak standpoint, it helps in that regard. So it helps for liability because we can say the system was fine when we left it, but all this data and all this information proves it. Okay. So for example,

One of the things you can do is if you're talking about efficiency, you can have all that efficiency information documented on a report now. And you can actually prove that to the customer by giving them either their combustion efficiency or in the case of, for example, with our manifold, we have the EER. So we can give them the EER. If the technician plugs in the electrical data, EER can be generated. So we can show them the efficiency of their air conditioning system, which is interesting nowadays.

But where we take that one step further is this. Liability is fine. So those are the basics. Now we start to accentuate what we do. Now what we do is contractors, we create a database.

And it's usually a SharePoint file. And you can then import that data into that SharePoint file. So the next time the next technician goes to go to that call, they can pull that data, that PDF from that SharePoint file, and they could see what the previous technician did. So they have that as information. You can also use it as trends to see what's going on with the piece of equipment for a customer.

You can build a case of, listen, we've been there X, Y, Z times. This system has been misbehaving. These are the readings. We think it's best now, based on this data, that we replace X, Y, Z components or your system or whatever it might be. So we use it from a proving of or to be able to justify the need for repair or replacement. But we also use it to cover ourself for liability. And this too. You know what that motion is? Yes, exactly. Leverage.

Leverage to get the customer to do what you think is right. Because if you don't have the right information, you don't have the leverage, then what do you have? Right. And what you're doing for them is when you have this information documented, and then you're going to Google it or chat GBT again, which they can do. And they can literally, you can say, listen, you can do this right now right in front of me on your phone. Don't take my work phone on your phone or your tablet. Do this. And they're going to do the same thing.

But when they see it and they see a recommendation and they see the same recommendation being spit out to them by a trusted, but someone they consider to be a trusted source, whether it's Google or ChatGPT, it's like the truth, Gary. When you see it, you can't unsee it. You know that I know that you know that I know that this is what needs to be done. So if you walk away from that, not doing that repair, that's on you. Don't call me in six months when your system fails and say, you guys don't know what you're doing there. You should have done this, this and this.

Oh, I beg to differ. And of course, you're going to say this very nicely. By the way, when I was there six months ago and you signed off on the report, because depending on the nature of your apps, we give the customer ability to sign right on the actual combustion report or from the manifold, for the digital manifold, but the actual refrigeration report or performance report that you declined said repair. And this is what was stated, but you signed it.

So no, we're going back to the same thing we did before. We're recommending the same repair, but you didn't do it before, but now your system's failed. Now it is the evening of July 3rd. So here in the States, we have July 4th as Independence Day. Nobody's open on July 4th and we're not going to be able to get you a part. But if we had taken care of this six months ago, it would have been not an issue. So we learned from how to kind of lead the witness, so to speak. We learned to give our customers as much information as we can to make the most informed decision.

And if you have a good reputation in the space or you're looking to build a good reputation in the space, it's like in school, Gary. When we did a math problem, if we just submitted the answer, the teacher would say, show me your work. How did you get there?

Everything we do now with contracting, we should be showing our work. And that's where digital tools come in. That's where like the measure quicks of the world, for example. And I don't know where you sit on the measure quick thing. I'm a big measure quick fan. That's where the measure quicks of the world come in. They're constantly showing their work. And not only that, they're the teacher giving the system a grade based on all those different performance criteria.

So it's important. And that's why we partnered with them. That's why our analyzers are the only analyzers on there. And that's why our manifold is now on there with our probe set. So it's important to us at Saruman to have it done that way. But it's important to me as a professional that I'm aligned personally with those out there that want to do things correctly, as you try to be with your affiliations out there.

Yeah, I'm going to give you an opportunity to speak about the manifold and the probes in a bit, but I kind of liked where you were going with some of this stuff. I want to throw in my two cents on a couple things. So,

Chat GPT, it's getting smarter. It's getting better. I mean, I asked, we're trying to, in our town here, we're trying, I'm a big soccer guy and I'm big in the community when it comes to soccer. And I, we're trying to write a proposal letter for a turf field. And I put the requirements into chat GPT and it spit out this fabulous letter for me. I'm like, wow, like I couldn't have wrote it any better myself.

But I do want to be give caution because I've done some chat GPT things for the HVAC trade industry, potentially like an outline for an article for my website or something like that, where I go in and now I fill in the blanks with what my personality and stuff like that. Right. And some of the things that show up are not always correct.

And even like the Google AI, like, you know, when you Google something now, there's like that top, that AI where it kind of scours the internet. Well, yesterday we were at a pneumonia plant and there was a King valve on the outlet of the receiver. And I was laughing because it was labeled King valve. But in our industry, we have guys calling every valve. They see a King valve, which is not the case. But when I Googled it, King valve to show one of the guys,

It said a King valve is a three positional valve where a King valve in that ammonia site wasn't three positional. It was a, it was a turn valve. It could be in a hundred different positions. So you got to be careful with what you read on Google AI or chat GBT, because it's not always a hundred percent true. The other point, the other point I was waiting to vet it. Yeah. You have to vet it. And you, and you did say vet. So I'm glad you said that. The other thing that I want to talk about is that if a customer is

finds a reliable source on like YouTube or the internet or whatever it is. And they're teaching them about their equipment. When a technician goes in and misdiagnoses, or they're talking a bunch of BS, if that customer has been researching the problem, they've been having in their own home for a while, which a lot of them do now because the information's there.

If they're getting it from a reputable source, they might be more educated on the issue than the actual tech that's going to the site. So the tech throws a lot of BS at them. They're going to know right away and they're going to say, well, I watched this video and they said you should be checking static pressure if my coil's frozen. You didn't do that. Why not? Right. So it's best that technicians know how to do their job correctly so they're not shown up by a customer immediately.

that has gone deep in the weeds and YouTube and reading articles and all that kind of stuff. Cause that information is out there. What do you think about that? The customer sometimes knowing more about the problem, because I've had customers call me and they go through a list of things that they've tried and read. And I'm like, this guy seems to have a grasp on what's going on. Like, what do you think of that nowadays? I think it's something that is only going to get better.

more intense meaning they're having more and more savvy customers because they have the ability to get information at their at their ready that they've never had before so they're able to research it it's almost like web md-ing yourself you have a rash you start web md-ing yourself what they're doing is they're essentially web md-ing their hvac system and they're getting as much information as they can it i have been asked by when i've spoken at a conference

And there's been homeowners in the conference that want to attend to just get smarter. I've been pulled this slide numerous times now to say you should speak at the home shows, letting homeowners know what their contractor should be doing when they come to their house. A lot of these people have said, we guarantee you will have a captive audience that people will go to this class because we'll know how to hire the appropriate HVAC contractor. What should be done in a maintenance visit?

If it's done where it's two cigarettes and it's changing with fiberglass filtering out the door, that's not the kind of company that you want. If they're spending the requisite amount of time, 45 minutes, hour, hour and a half, depending on the amount of systems, that's the kind of company that you want. You know, it's like duct cleaning. You're going to hire a certified duct cleaner that's going to spend a good portion of the day doing it, or you're going to spend, you know, somebody that's what they call the blow and go duct cleaners are there for an hour and a half where they, you know, they hook up the machine or they hook up the little vac real quick and they think they're done in an hour and a half to do a,

a 25 register house, you know, including returns. It doesn't work that way. If you're looking for HVAC parts, supplyhouse.com is a shortcut for part shopping. They have thousands of HVAC parts from all the leading brands and the orders get shipped and delivered in a day or two tops. Order parts the easy way and get them delivered right away.

right to your door at supplyhouse.com. Use promo code SH5 for 5% off your first order. That's supplyhouse.com promo code S-H-F-I-V-E. Code is valid through 9-30-25. So that would be September 30th, 2025. So we need to meet our customers where they're at, which is what I expressed with the reporting.

As you're saying, they're getting their increased level of sophistication with their level of expectation and their ability to be more informed of what we're doing for them. Since we know that now, we want to see around the corner. We want to

circle the wagon, so to speak, and meet them with reporting that is facing with them that gives them the information that we know that they're going to be looking for. So what do we do at that point? We bring the defenses down to the customer because we show them hands are above the table here. We have nothing to hide from you.

We are giving you all the information to make an informed decision because if you're out there doing it right, if you're listening to people like yourself and they're attending the appropriate training classes around the country here, whether it's here in Canada, they're attending the right classes and they're doing their job right. They, the contractor has nothing to hide. They should be able to make what they're looking to make from a dollar standpoint. At least that's my opinion. So yes, it's becoming more and more frequent.

That is why I said you can no longer just submit to them real quickly. This is what you should do. You have to prove to them what you what reasons why they need to do what they're doing. And then you have to assist them in vetting it for themselves, which means getting that research information and bringing that up as an image on your reporting, which is one of the reasons why I like our reporting, because it gives me freedom to prove whatever case I want.

And if I'm wrong, listen, I'll get jammed up. If I'm recommending a repair to somebody and I'm wrong, it's going to spit out right in front of my face and I am wrong. But I'm not interested in being wrong with that kind of stuff. You mentioned duct cleaning, and I'm not going to go on a tangent on it. But I think if something's dirty, it should be cleaned. But I installed this heat pump system for this guy, and he got his duct clean after because the house was under construction. And I went to go start the thing up, and I removed the panel.

where the, all the electrical connections and stuff were circuit boards of the air handler in the house. And the thing was covered in dust. I could, I'm like, Oh man, like this thing was clean. Like, so make sure your duct cleaners are reputable as well. Um,

I don't know what the guy was doing. Like, why is he blowing stuff inside of the duct and not sucking it out? They're supposed to be doing it the correct way. They're supposed to be dislodging. They're supposed to be air cleaning the coils without compromising and putting things in the coil pan. They're supposed to be doing all those things with different collection devices, different whips and everything else.

putting the system under negative pressure, using a HEPA collection machine, following if they should be NADCA certified, National Air Duct Cleaners Association, at least in this country, and the states being NADCA certified and following the protocol. And they should take a bit of time to do it. It should take at least a half a day to do a house, at least. Yeah. You know more, a hell of a lot more than me about duct cleaning because I didn't know any of that stuff there. But I don't use duct cleaners very often. So I guess I wouldn't. All right. So

Knowing how to do your job properly with the right tools in front of you is good. We've already established that because it provides evidence and backup. But there are technicians that will, like the comments on social media, like you'll never pry or you'll pry the analogs out of my dead hand before I'll give them up. How do we convince a technician that is in that mindset that

It's okay to use them sometimes. There are times where I still use analog just because, I don't know, just maybe one day I'll feel like, I'm like, yeah, I feel like using analog today. But 99% of the time I use digital. But how do we help them make the transition over? What can we do to convince them?

Some of the reasons are, I think the biggest reason is cost, to be honest with you. They don't want to go out and spend that much money on a digital device with their own money, their own earnings. They want their company to do it. I think when the company step in and buy them for them, I think they're a little bit more obligated or a little bit more easygoing with it. I think that one of the things you need to know is kind of what started our conversation off is that whether they realize it or not,

they are going to be forcing themselves out a little bit because their customers' demands are changing. If our customers' demands never change and we were able to still use analog,

and this technology was never developed, we'd all be fine. But this has been necessitated because the ways of the world have changed. Technology has infused itself into everything that we do. And we all know that too much technology is a bad thing. You know, people that are getting into the trade that have been raised on having everything right at their fingertips from their phone or their tablet. And if they can't figure it out in 15 seconds, they ask for help. But

Back when we were doing this when we were younger, if we couldn't figure it out for a couple hours, then we asked for help. So the things have changed. So again, whether or not they see it yet, it's coming. Their customers are going to demand more from them because they're going to find out that their neighbor got this elaborate combustion report or this elaborate refrigeration report that showed trending. They're going to realize that, listen, I'll give you a circumstance. You ready? Check it out. So

Here we go. We're not going to talk about this, but we're going to talk about this real quick. And I don't care who you use. It's like a Game Boy controller. Yeah, I like the size of it. That's very cool. So some of the feedback we'd gotten, just real two seconds. And, you know, I'm not a big product speaker when we do these things. But when we did the research on this...

The feedback that came back from trainers around the country and lead technicians is that can you make it so it doesn't take two adult males and a small child to bring this manifold into the room because it's so huge. I mean, the digital ones that are out nowadays. And can you make it smaller? So we just kind of met everybody where they're at. Everybody's playing video games. We designed this like a Game Boy controller. So the screen is the perfect size, legibility, the whole nine.

But what I can do with this is this. I leave this, which you can't do with analog because you can't do data logging. So say I have a customer that says, and I've been speaking about this since we've been kind of launching these. These actually go officially for sale June 2nd. So it's on Monday. So anyway, customer goes, listen, every time you guys are here, the system doesn't misbehave. You leave, it misbehaves. So for example, if somebody's got a zoning system,

And when it comes out of recovery in the morning during air conditioning season and say they have their zoning system set for the kitchen to be 76 degrees overnight, but they want it to be 70 at 6 a.m. when they get up in the morning, right? Because they're not in the kitchen overnight. They can let it get higher.

But they want it to be 7 at 6 a.m. And it never recovers. The intelligent adapter recovering, the thermostat, whatever. The system's not recovering. What can we do? You know what we do? Because we have, and not just us, but others have, but we have 300 hours of battery life. What do we do? We leave this on site and we start to record because this can record data for like two days. And we let it come in and out of recovery. And then what do we do? We analyze the data that comes off of this stuff to say, oh, you know what?

Exactly. At 5.50 in the morning on day number two, it did it. We realized it dipped down. The system cut off for some reason. We're going to go back and research it. We're going to look at the superheat and subcooling numbers. We're going to look at all the data. And we're going to figure out what happened when we weren't there because we're able to leave this while we weren't there.

You can't do that with analog. I don't care what you tell me. You can't do it. It doesn't exist. It exists with this. It doesn't exist with that. And again, we're not the only ones that haven't, you know, the manifold out. We're, you know, we're entering into a space where there's wonderful, great products out there. But this is what you can do with a digital gauge set that you can't do with the other stuff.

And then leaving probes hooked up, all that data, all that data streamed. The bountiful itself connects to the probes if you're not on site with your phone or your tablet. It records all that data. You can't do that. So ask yourself this.

If your doctor was using antiquated technology to work on you and couldn't run full-blown diagnostics on you, would you want that doctor? Or would you want a doctor that can run all these tests in you and run diagnostics on you, full diagnostics on you, when he or she wasn't with you with the different tools and equipment that they had at their ready? I think the decision is pretty evident. And that's just the tip of the spear.

When it comes to evaluating just customer trends as far as how their equipment is behaving, you're constantly looking at this because whether or not you people understand this, these customers aren't just your customers. They're your clients. Customer always has the connotation of a one-off transaction.

A client is a long-term relationship. We need to refocus how we approach all this stuff. They're not customers, even though we call them that. They are our clients. They're long-term relationships. If you want to foster the best long-term relationship, you're going to do it in a way that gives them the most appropriate data in ways that they can digest it.

And the way that they can digest it and understand it is this kind of reporting. You know, when I give somebody the ER of their system, I can relate it to the SEER rating.

which means I can let them know, listen, it's off or the EER or the SEER is very low. Your system is under duress, but I can further prove that to you by showing you your super sub cooling measurements and showing you all this other data. So I can reverse engineer any recommendation that I make, but I can spell it out as one plus one equals two to a customer so that they fully understand what I'm telling them. I'm looking to speak to them at their level.

I'm not interested in going talk over their heads because I'm going to lose them. Data that they can understand, formatted way they can understand it is the most applicable. That's what I would do in the space currently.