How HVAC Technicians Use Smart Heat Pumps and AI Tools to Cut Energy Use – Michael Richardson Part 2
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AC SmartSeal, the professional's choice. So we're back talking with Mick in part two, and I'm going to relay a message to you guys during this podcast. And Mick's going to agree. The technology that is in the residential equipment nowadays, or it's transitioning into residential, like the inverter and the IOT connectivity, all that kind of stuff. This has been in the commercial space for a very long time.

It's transitioning into residential. A lot of residential installers and technicians are losing their mind because they think it's too complicated, but it's been running in commercial for decades, proven out. So I'm going to give you a message in this podcast. So pay attention, listen up. Again, this is Mick, part two. This is the HVAC Not All podcast. I'm your host,

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.

Especially when you're coming up to like older systems and because a lot of the newer ones you could either pay for the Wi-Fi module or the customer will pay for it for a more of a high level type or high level model that includes Wi-Fi in them. We see that probably more and more here now, but it's kind of a nice go-to and sort of low cost solution to

you know, start making your smart home really, you know, and most of those devices also linked to Amazon Alexa or Google Home Assistant, you know, and that kind of thing. And so we were sort of exploring that idea, mainly because for our trial, we wanted to get that user experience. We also knew there's a cost to roll out a technician, you know, if you're going to put a

a device that needed to be physically installed on a system, wired into the system, then you needed the certain trades to be able to do that, qualified trades to do that. And so these devices are, the home user sets up, they connect the power on, plug it into a little wall outlet,

walk through the setting up procedure with their smartphone, pairing their smartphone to the device and then setting up the type of unit manufacturer model in those smart devices and then you're off. So within like maybe five minutes, even less than that, now you've got your heat pump that's Wi-Fi enabled and controllable from anywhere in the world.

And so we sort of wanted to get that experience as well. And then working with the manufacturer, we used their native mobile app. So using the same app that the consumer uses, but we added some smarts behind it. And that was creating the demand response measures, demand response signals,

And, and so that was, that was fun too. So setting up different parameters of different levels of response, some that were more severe. Can you explain the demand response just so they know, just everyone that's listening knows exactly what you're talking about when you refer to it. Yeah. So demand response is how I interpret it is if we're constrained at certain times of the year, whether it's summer peaking issue, winter peaking issue, because everyone's plugged in and using energy, um,

What I can do is send a signal to a device, like a smart device, that can tell a mechanical piece of equipment, in this case a heat pump, to duty cycle the compressor, shift set points around, so we can

either slow down the compressor or stop the compressor and what that does is it stops using energy and when it stops using energy and you get like hundreds or thousands of these devices that are doing something similar in a coordinated fashion orchestrated fashion then the overall congestion potentially can move away or go away because we're using less power over a broad range of people or others that are doing it so it's flexing energy down and typically demand response is lowering your usage and lowering your power usage

It can go the other way, which is quite interesting. When you get too much renewables oversaturated, too much energy on the grid, then you need things to turn on. And sometimes you can do that either large industrials or something that can absorb a lot of energy. Batteries can do it and that kind of thing. So yeah, it's quite unique. It's an area that I've been passionate about 15 years, playing around in demand response. So I have some follow-up questions on it.

Yeah. So we've over here talked about utility companies shutting down your thermostat type thing. And it's it seems like it's it's similar. And there's there's a lot of people

saying don't get a Wi-Fi stat because the government will control your thermostat. And I'm like, well, as far as I'm concerned, this is an opt-in program, is it not? Correct. You have to opt in. The customer says, yes, you can. If you're having energy issues in my area, I give you permission to take control of whatever it is to reduce it, to prevent any overloading of the grid type thing. So it's got to be an opt-in process, right? Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

Yeah, and so part of that design with this third-party manufacturer that we're playing around with, AmbiClimate, was making it as user-friendly as possible but always giving the customer the option to opt-in and opt-out. And so for instance, you know, if we were going to call a demand response event targeting a certain region, a certain type of unit,

But the homeowner had a party that day and had guests over and there was no way in hell that they would be able to do it. They would get notified via the smart mobile application. They'll receive emails as well. They could receive text message. And they would just go into their app and say opt out, unable to do it. They wouldn't have to leave anything else. It's just one click button.

A lot of times with those types of programs that you mentioned, the thermostat programs, I used to work for Honeywell and that's what I did, rolled out these programs throughout the US with other utilities. The challenging with those ones were they sometimes were locked and set, you know, and that was the frustration that customers were feeling is, you know, especially around, let's say California where it's a summer peaking issue. They couldn't, unless you were smart and you had a rewire system quickly, you couldn't

couldn't get out of the event, you know, your system was locked in. And they, you know, they also provided some other type of benefits, whether it's a X amount of dollars off your energy bill at the end of the month because you did a number of events or, you know, they gave away a thermostat or something like that. So there was other, I guess, incentives around

being involved in a program like that. But yeah, I mean, over time we've just got smarter. I think systems have got smarter too, to be honest, you know, as you said, you're seeing more the inverter type where you don't have to turn them completely off, but you might, you might limit, limit the compressor to 50% or 25% instead of, um,

completely duty cycling them you know and um and so you've got a few levels of demand response that you can do and and obviously you try to pick ones um that are less impactful for the for the end user because the last thing you want to be doing is getting you know hundreds of calls from from people that either are too cold um or turn them away from a program like that you know you get a bad experience and and they just say well fuck this i'm off you know like i'm not doing it

And so, yeah, and also if something goes wrong with this system, you own it, you know, you, it's so sort of navigating around those things. And so we had some, we had a lot of fun with the AmbiClimate stuff and, you know, creating and helping to develop the mobile application and then getting customers working through some of their own issues and

And sometimes the pairing process was tedious, you know, sometimes it was difficult. You know, Wi-Fi signals were stretched and, you know, it only worked on 2.4 gigahertz. It didn't work on 5G, you know, like there's those type of things you have to navigate around in people's Wi-Fi network dropping out. But yeah, we learned a lot going through it. And yeah, it really, really sucked when I got a letter saying the company was going out of business and there was no

no backup, you know, there was no follow through. Um, and we, we did Sulsers, we know we did, you know, we could have stacked it with multiple different types of, of those types of technologies, but we were sort of really interested, uh, in this one because it had this self-learning AI, uh, built in around, um, learning the behavior and temperature for the end consumer. Um, and, uh, there was just some, yeah, we had a good working relationship with the founder and, um,

Yeah, it was, um, it was good, but it was frustrating to, you know, at the same time. Um, cause as, as I've got everything, everybody set up and everyone happy using it just as I was starting to play around with the demand response side of things, you know, um, unfortunately they went out of business. Yeah. Um, but, um, but others, you know, around the country here have taken out the mantle and sort of running with that. We're seeing some more of the energy retailers get more involved. Um,

I think they have Octopus Energy there. I know they have that in the US. They're quite strong in the UK. You know, they've developed their own heat pump and now selling those to their customers with pretty, in the UK, they're doing it with a fair bit of rebate and help from the government.

Yeah, if you get a chance have a look at Octopus Energy UK and just type in heat pump and you'll see the type of heat pumps they do and utilize. And they're doing two things. They're doing low-cost heat pump installations but then taking the energy resource and energy arbitraging that on the market, on the energy market. So they're making money that way.

And what they do is they get a whole bunch of customers who have got these heat pumps. And when there's a local area network need, they're able to sell that energy and use that energy and basically, you know, clip the ticket on the way. And they've been quite successful in the UK. I think the other thing I might have sent you the other day was the heat pump company that's done an add-on retrofit to

bring in the EV charging station inside their heat pump. I thought it was pretty... An EV charging station in their heat pump. Interesting. Yeah. So sometimes I get too excited about it. This one actually got me pretty excited. I'll send you the link. The company, what's the company called? It's EVHACS. They're based out of Ireland.

and they've got a sort of a retrofit solution for domestic heat pump systems. So what they do is they take an outdoor unit, let's say they take an outdoor unit, we talk about kilowatts here, which is more around horsepower, but like a five or six kilowatt outdoor unit from Mr. Bistri Electric, let's say, that can be taken to their shop and then they basically implant

a EV charging station inside the outdoor unit

And so if you've got applications where you know you've got your driveway and there's a heat pump serving let's say a living room area or whatnot and you just happen to have the outdoor unit alongside the driveway you know you could plug into it and it's got some pretty amazing tech in there. It's I guess what they claim is that you know you don't have to run separate cabling, cabling's already there because it's serving the heat pump and it's that sized at the right size.

Um, it does load balancing between the two. So it knows when the heat pump's running and it won't draw from or draw minimal, uh, charge at that case. And when the heat pump turns off, then it goes the other way and then starts boosting and putting power. Interesting. Yeah. So like seven kilowatt and, uh,

I thought that was kind of unique and pretty interesting given the topic of electrification and other ways these amazing resources can be used and leveraged, you know, air conditioning world of things. And yeah, I'm not quite sure what else I'm going down the train here, but... I want to get your opinion on one last thing before we end the podcast. So...

There's a lot of advancement in technology, connectivity, IOT, all that kind of stuff. So I had one of my colleagues, Ben, went down to AHR and he filmed a video at the E-Core booth. E-Core booth. Oh, yeah. It's E-C-O-E-R. So they have an inverter driven heat pump. Okay. But it's got.

It's got a self-charging mode on it. So this, this blew up. This is like almost, it's got over half a million views on Instagram, just this video alone. So the way it works is you install it, you pull a vacuum, you open up the, the valves, allow the line set to go, uh, the refrigerant to go into the line set.

And you turn it on and you let it run and it's got a self-charging mode. So all you have to do, and this is only for the trim charge or the top, like the, the charge to get the, so if the line set is longer than what the charge accepts. So let's say in the manual, you open it up. It says, okay, the charge in the outdoor unit is good for 25 feet. Well, let's say it's 50 feet and you have to add refrigerant to it. Yeah. Well, it's got a self-charging mode. So you just, you attach your hose, obviously you're going to purge it of air, whatever you got to do. And.

directly attached to the tank. You put it into self-charging mode and it's obviously got like some sort of solenoid that will open and it will just pull in the right amount of refrigerant till that thing is running optimally. You don't have to have a technician calculate the weight and weigh it in. It's just all done through its smart technology. So the video on that got a lot of

a lot of negative reviews or a lot of negative engagement, I should say, because they think that this technology will steal their jobs. They think the technology is too hard to troubleshoot, just so on and so forth, just things like that. And my thing here is,

It's just the trim charge. It's just that the additional bit and it's, it's smart. It, it does it on its own. It, it erases error from the equation, makes you look better as a technician, but there's a new skill involved here.

There's a new skill because that same unit, it comes with an app where you can access, you can, if this is a separate purchase, it's basically a gateway. You tie it all into the system. There's an app. You can see the fan speed, the compressor speed, superheat, sub cooling pressures. You can see the current, the incoming voltage. You can see all of this on the app.

But you need to go through a process of connectivity and an IoT procedure and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, guys, this is not going to take away your job. This is actually learning something new, right? It's learning something new that's adding to your skill set. And the people that go out and learn it and add it to their skill set are the ones that are going to advance further in the trade.

The techs that are reliant on equipment being simplified with just a compressor, a capacitor and a contactor, these days are coming to an end. So if you're listening to this, guys, you need to dig in. You need to research. You need to educate yourself on this new type of technology that is being implemented into our trade today.

and it's just going to make you a better tech. This is my viewpoint on it. You tell me what you think. I totally agree. Yeah, no, I think you hit, yeah, totally agree. And some of the, actually a lot of the high level manufacturer brands that we see here and you have there, you know, they have those diagnostic apps for technicians. You know, it's not just a mobile app where you've got troubleshooting codes.

but you plug in a diagnostic tool and so they plug into a PCB board. Daikin has one, I use one for a Panasonic here which actually uses their existing thermostat. And so you get a lot of those readings too Gary on fan speed, temperature, the sensors around the system, you know indoor temperature, outdoor temperature, gash pressures.

to help you as a technician diagnose. And they come at a cost, you know, there might be three or $400 New Zealand dollars or, you know, to get those tools and the individual tools for individual manufacturers. But if you're a technician that's working on those multiple types of systems, they're valuable. You know, once you start seeing that live stream data,

and you're troubleshooting a system that let's say it's slightly short on refrigerant and it's really hard to diagnose something like that when you've got those electric expansion valves and they're trimming all the time, you know, and knowing what position that

that electric expansion valve is in is hard, isn't it? If you don't have a tool like that to tell you it's actually 80% off and you sort of, you know, but by having those diagnostic tools, you can see quite quickly that you're, you know, on an average day, but you're maxed out on your electric expansion valve.

then more than likely, you know, if everything's clean and your, your, your filter's clean, your coils are clean, you've got your, your super in sub cooling starting to move around, uh, you might be short, you know, and, um, and just all, all that information helps you become a better tech. And, and I love that, you know, and I'm sure I know, I know from hearing your podcasts and the things that you, you kind of similar mindset, you know, you've got more information, makes you a better tech. If you can help understand it and share it with others, it's, it's all a good thing. And now I've learned a bunch from your channel. Um,

And, you know, I think one of your recent stories was, you know, those heat pump systems that come pre-charged that a DIY, you know, I think, you know, it was the last one I heard them. And probably a similar mindset to you. I'm like, well, if that's some of those systems, if they're going that way, that's...

I don't think that you wouldn't be able to hear in New Zealand because you've got to be licensed. But I guess homeowners make mistakes and you probably end up getting the service call anyway. And to be honest, it's probably not the type of systems I'm going to be working on. Well, here's... Not all the customer that I really want anyway, you know, and...

I want to say something about the technology that I asked you your opinion on. Most of this is coming from the residential side because this was a residential unit that this video was in. A lot of these residential techs don't realize is we've been plugging laptops into machinery for decades now to get this information. For decades. The first Mitsubishi multi-zone system I ever installed was commissioned with a guy from Mitsubishi that showed up with a laptop.

And he plugged it in and that's how, and this is like over 20 years ago. So it's just transitioning into the residential world and they're freaking out.

They're literally freaking out, but the technology has been around forever and it's been proven and it's been proven to be efficient. It's proven to work well. Everybody thinks that they're going to be changing out boards and compressors within a short amount of time. But if we protect our machines, right, with surge and over and over under voltage protection, these things are minimized dramatically.

big time. And it's just all about the correct install of the machine. The troubleshooting side of it, as I said, if you don't understand how a circuit board works in general, my suggestion is you figure it out. You figure out how a circuit board works and it's very simplified.

To me, I mean, it takes power in, it's got logic in the middle and power goes out. It's also got some inputs from sensors and stuff like that. You need to know that. You need to know what sensor inputs are. And it's easy. There's usually a thermistor chart. You can look it up. That thermistor at 70 degrees should read this. If it's not, it's probably faulty. So there's so many...

ways we can learn how to be better technicians and saying that it's too hard, it's going to break, more things to go wrong. It's just an excuse of stepping out of your comfort zone to me. That's all it is. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. A hundred percent. I used to, when I worked for train Pacific coast train there in the States, it was, you couldn't work on any of the trailers at the time without having a laptop plugged in.

you'd have what you'd see what's on the display yeah but you know you being able to have the factory plug-in tool and it gives you a just a wealth of information that you'd bring up and

But that's right, yeah, so great point. So yes, for residential installs and things that I'm doing, I have a smart application that I use to configure and set up systems, and this is residential. I have a laptop there which plugs in different tools to help me troubleshoot. Yeah, that's a great point, moving from the commercial-based application down to the resi. We're seeing it in the resi level now.

And there is a lot more learning you can do, but a lot of those manufacturers have those classes you can attend to get their certification. And I'd encourage the young techs or even the old techs out there to reach out to those brand manufacturers that you wanted to get behind. You mentioned City Multi, Mr. Bishi Electric or Dakin or whatever it might be that you're interested in and

do those courses, get a little bit more knowledge and, you know, you won't be as dangerous on site, you know, you'd be able to troubleshoot and, you know, some of those tools, as you know, can communicate out to, you know, a journeyman, you know, if you're on site and you're young tech and,

You're collecting information and you're still having issues with troubleshooting a system. You could share that live information with a journeyman or someone more senior. That's cool. Yeah, it is cool because that's the first thing when you call a journeyman and you go, it's not working. Okay, so what's the Android? What's the sub cooling? Oh, I haven't checked that yet. Well, go check that and call me back. Well, now all they have to do with this kind of stuff is take a screenshot of it all

and go here. Do you mind looking through this and helping me out a little bit? And it's all there. It just makes everything a lot more efficient. I think you're probably from the similar generation where we were probably, you and I, probably a little bit scared to call our journeyman at certain times if we didn't have that. Terrified. With all that stuff. Terrified. There were times where you'd hear, you know, cussing language come down the phone and it would hang up. You know,

And those days, you know, if they didn't want you to call back, they should just take their antenna out of their mobile phone and then you'd, uh, you couldn't get them anyway. There was, there was one journeyman that I worked with and this is, I wasn't with him at this point in time, but somebody else was with him and an apprentice called him. And I guess the apprentice was annoying him with the amount of questions he was asking. And he was talking, he's like, he answered again for the third or fourth time. He's like, yeah, what now?

And he just, he threw his phone across the roof and then just kept working. And you could hear the guy like 20 feet away, the phones on the ground and he's still going on. He's still talking, like not even realizing. So yeah, I, I've been, I've been there with the grumpy journeyman that, that gets frustrated easily, but yeah,

Honestly, if the apprentice is not calling with the correct information, it is frustrating because you can't help them if they don't have it. Right? So anyway, catch 22, I guess. But I mean...

I know you got to go. I know you got to get, get running there and stuff like that. So I really appreciate the time today, Mick. And, uh, yeah, it's good to talk to you too. It's nice to share. Always talk about different countries and similarity there. And man, if you, um, ever down this part of the world, you've always got a place to stay with the family or whatever, mate. So, um, uh, yeah, it's a beautiful country. Encourage anyone to pop down to New Zealand, check it out. Perfect. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.