Hello and welcome to Talking Home Renovations with the House Maven. This is Katharine MacPhail, your host. I am an architect practicing in Eastern Massachusetts. My specialty is additions and renovations to existing homes. I started this podcast as a resource for homeowners. Lately I’ve been also interviewing homeowners about their renovation stories, which I’m really enjoying and I hope you are too. In this episode, my guest is Dennis Stinson, who is the vice president of sales for Fujitsu general America. He’s been in the industry for about 30 years. So he’s going to talk to us about practical, innovative, and creative tips and useful information regarding the latest in HVAC systems, maximizing energy efficiency, and some easy inexpensive changes homeowners can make in their houses. So without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dennis.

KM: So Dennis, you’re going to talk today about HVAC for homes. This isn’t a subject that maybe a lot of people know much about. So what do you think the best way is to approach this? Just to talk about the basics or what homeowners need to know when they’re choosing a system?

DS: I think you really kind of start with, what do you want to accomplish? As a property owner, what do you really want to accomplish? If you’re looking for comfort, then that can take us down a specific avenue. And maybe comfort takes us down the avenue of, maybe we look at zoning so that we have different temperatures in different rooms. Maybe in my house—I’ve got three kids—maybe I have a child that likes to sleep at 68 and I like to sleep at 72.

KM: What? 72? Do you really like to sleep at 72?

DS: Well, not really. I’m a [?] guy.

KM: Yeah, I got up last night and it was set to 66. Like it’s too hot, I can’t sleep like this. I had to go down and sleep in a room where I could open the window and it’s just 20 degrees on me, which is nice.

DS: Wow, okay. That drives home the point that people like different temperatures. So zoning might be that capability to do that. And then maybe also if you have more house than what you currently need. Maybe we have a four bedroom house and two of the kids are off. Maybe one’s off at school, maybe one’s off getting engaged and getting married, which hasn’t happened at my house. So now I have these bedrooms that I’m heating and cooling to the same temperature as if everybody lived here. Do I really need to be able to do that? So maybe one of the questions is what are your comfort needs? Maybe we have a room in the house that is uncomfortable. Maybe there’s a room in the house that we have repurposed maybe through COVID, we’ve moved an office into the house, and now we’ve moved some equipment into that, and that room that was intended to be a bedroom wasn’t intended to have things that create heat in it. So now that room is uncomfortable and we need to do something to change that. So comfort is a really big factor at the end of the day in the HVAC industry, we look at ourselves as selling comfort, that’s what we do. If somebody doesn’t notice their home comfort system, then we did a really good job with that. So we look at it from the comfort side. And then the next question is, well, how long are you going to be here, and what do you want your exposure to that to be? So then we start talking about the efficiency side of the business. What makes sense for me to do- I’m going to be in this house two years or three years or five years, or this is my forever house. Efficiency you pay for upfront. So the longer you’re going to be there, the better the return on investment that is. Most people, and you know this far better than I do, but most people when they buy a property, they don’t run to the basement and see what type of HVAC equipment is there, nor what the efficiency is. They look at a lot of the amenities that are upstairs. Are there solid surfaces, what does the architecture look like? They look more for the aesthetic side, not the bones side of the property. So the efficiency side comes in for somebody that’s going to be there for a little while when we are able to see the realization of it coming back.

KM: Okay. Around here where I am, there are a lot of houses that have forced hot water or steam heat without any air conditioning, really. So in that case, I guess I would want to either be redoing their entire system or adding on heat pumps to supplement their old system, and then still keeping them… I don’t know, I find that a little bit confusing.

DS: Yeah, and it can be. In New England and really from Philadelphia north, hydronics is, or at least was at one point the prevailing form of home comfort. That can go all the way back to whether it was steam at one time and then migrated into a full hot water system. But nonetheless, people will often have some type of baseboard or some type of radiator to take care of their home. And if you have that, it’s almost coal-like, because you really do like that heat. That is a really good style of heat. It’s good, warm heat. So instead of abandoning all that and the cost of removing all that, then maybe what we do is we supplement that, because if you have baseboard, you don’t inherently have air conditioning. And air conditioning in a home used to be a luxury, but not so much anymore. So people originally looked at our product as a supplement to hydronics. In fact, our largest marketplaces are the Mid Atlantic North through New England, and then the same mirror on the California coast because that’s a large hydronic as well. And everything else is filling in between, but they are by far the two largest markets that we have because of hydronics. With hydronics, you don’t have air conditioning, and that’s how we got the introduction. What we really found too is that for those homes that were hydronic, they liked that heat. They didn’t want to get away from it, but they want that air conditioning. So the choice was either to add ductwork to a home, and that can be pretty intrusive at times because the house wasn’t made to have that enter it. Plus the addition of drywall, painting, all the other stuff that goes with it, or you look at our product, which is a three and a half inch hole in the wall, to be able to Mount an indoor unit. So we can ease of installation and less obstruction that comes into the property has been a very attractive part of the product line as well.

KM: Okay. So you’re talking about mini-splits, or are you talking about heat pumps? Are they always the same thing?

DS: No, they’re not all the same thing, great question. So when we first came into the market way back when we were cooling only, we were air conditioning only, and then we migrated into heat pumps. And when we first came into the market, Katherine, we were chill chasers. And what that means is that we worked really good til about 40 degrees and then we didn’t work so good anymore. And that’s most people’s impression of a heat pump. That it’s really good until you get cold, and then it’s not so good. And if that’s your sole source of heat, then you’re introduced to a concept called resistant backup electric. That’s where you basically just have, for the sake of a better term, you have a hairdryer inside of your air conditioning system. And when it gets really cold, you’re a hundred percent electric backup and it can get very, very expensive to be able to do that. Mini splits have really come a long way. So we went from chill chaser to primary source of heat, meaning you used us for most of the time, but when it got really cold then you would still kick on your boiler and run your baseboard. And at this point now I am easily a sole source of heat. My product is rated to beyond nameplate rating. So if I got a one ton system, I produce more than 12,000 BTUs of heating when it’s minus 15 degrees outside. So I’ve gone way past the 14 degrees, 5 degrees, 0 degrees, -5. I can take a 12,000 BTU unit and get more than 12,000 BTUs out of it when it’s minus 15 and I have no backup resistant electric in my product at all. So it’s just straight heat pump. That’s pretty exciting stuff.

KM: It is exciting, yeah. I didn’t know that actually. I thought the rule of thumb was still to keep your old system, so in case when it got very cold…

DS: I will tell you what happens a lot. With a traditional heat pump you would. What happens a lot is we have people that bring our systems in and say, I’m going to use it primarily for air conditioning. That’s my attractiveness to it. But then I’m gonna use you in the shoulder months. So I’m gonna use you in the spring and the fall, because I don’t want to turn on my boiler and heat up all that thermal mass when I really just want to chase the chill in the morning, cause by noon the sun will come up and I won’t need that. I’ll be opening the windows. So that’s the mindset. Then what we really find is that September turns into October and October turns into November and November, it turns into March and they realize that they’ve never turned their boiler on all season. Their electric bills are very accommodating and they haven’t bought oil or gas since last year. So what normally starts as somebody comes in using us as a shoulder season product and ending up using us year round.

KM: So these are the ductless through the wall systems. Is that what you’re talking about? And is your company the only one that makes it?

DS: No, there’s plenty of competitors in the marketplace now. So to back up a little bit, we make three styles of indoor units, the most popular one, and the most economically viable one is the one that mounts on the wall. We call that a high wall Mount and it’s rectangular in shape, it might be 30 inches wide and sticks out about 12 inches from the wall. That’s what you’re very used to seeing. That just goes right through the outside wall, down to the outside unit. Then we also make a ceiling cassette, and these are about 2×2. You could look at it and say, well, that’s a commercial product. It is, or it can be used that way, but we also use it a lot residentially. So we just drop them in our ceilings and service them from the attics, so they work out really well. And then we also make a floor console, and a floor console is about the size of a typical radiator. And in Philadelphia, when we pull them off the wall and we got the unpainted spot on the wall and the hole in the floor, it works really good to cover the unpainted spot and run the line sets down through the hole in the floor and we can go on about our business. And it’s the same footprint as what was there before. And we also get into ducted units as well. So now I have ducted units that are relatively small and compact and they range from 7,000 BTUs up to 24,000 BTUs based on what that unit is. So what that means is that if I’m a property owner and I say, you know what, I appreciate the fact that that thing hangs on the wall, but I’d rather not hang on the wall in my house. I would rather have it be more like grills and registers and diffusers and things that I’m used to. Or if I’m doing an addition, I want the addition to look a lot like the house, and that has grills and registers and diffusers. So we have these mini air handlers, if you will, and you can do one room with them, or you can do a couple of rooms with them. But you’re basically doing them at the point of the condition need is what you’re doing. So you’re still getting the zoning out of that.

KM: So the ducted units, those you could put let’s say in a third floor space or a second floor space, and then it could take care of the rooms below it.

DS: Yeah. So what’s really not uncommon is that in a four-bedroom house, what you would do is you would put one in the master bedroom, because that’s the person paying the mortgage and likely going to be there, and likely the biggest room in the house, so you put one in there. And then maybe you do one in a small bedroom in the hall bath, and then maybe you do one in the other two bedrooms so that you could have two or three zones upstairs. Maybe it’s the master bedroom and all the other rooms upstairs, or maybe it’s the master bedroom and then you split the other rooms based on their size and capacity and really how you want to control it. Do you want the bedroom and a bathroom on the same one? Do you want all the bedrooms on the same one? So you have that option.

KM: You were talking about the floor console, I haven’t really heard about this kind before. So this would be, let’s say you’re taking out all the forced hot water in the house. I guess you’d be taking that out because you’re replacing all of-

DS: You could, you could abandon it in place, you could continue to use it. What happens a lot of times is that people say, my boiler’s not that old, I’m not ready to give it up. I just bought that boiler a couple years ago. I’m happy with that. That’s how I make my hot water. I’ve got an indirect fired water heater, so I really don’t want to do air conditioning and water heater and remove my boiler all at one time. I’m not made of money. I don’t want to do all that at one time. So there’s no reason why it can’t work in conjunction with that.

KM: Okay. So then the floor consoles, they go through the wall, but at a lower level than up on the wall, mounted on the wall. Is that basically the difference they’re just located lower on the wall?

DS: Correct. So whereas a high wall product is rectangular in shape—and we’ve seen these for those of us to watch HGTV, we always see these when they’re showing the islands and all that—but then the floor console is more square if you will. And it’s a couple of inches up off the floor, so you can run the vacuum underneath it and not beat the front of it up. Basically 30 inches by 30 inches is what it is.

KM: Hmm. So my neighbor right outside my window here, I see that she has this pipe painted the same color as her house that she installed last year I think. So it goes, it’s like a T on the outside. Is that, and then it goes down to a…

DS: Yeah. So I would expect that what she has is a multi zone system. You can get these in single zone where it’s one indoor unit to one outdoor unit, and then you can also get them in multi zone systems where you have one outdoor unit and then up to five indoor units, and each indoor unit runs a home run to the outdoor unit. So to get into the mechanics of it a little bit, how it works is you have an outdoor unit and that’s your condenser, your typical condenser, ours are rectangular in shape. Not round or square. So we’re a horizontal draw through. So we look more like a suitcase for the lack of a better term. We look more like a suitcase as opposed to a rectangular cylinder that would be outside. From that we run a line set, two copper lines insulated and they run to the indoor unit and the indoor unit from the outdoor unit to the indoor units, a three inch hole. So we run the line sets and the control wires. We run all the power to the outdoor unit and the outdoor unit powers the indoor unit. So from an electrical standpoint, it’s also very easy. So the ease of install with our product is, you really couldn’t get a whole lot easier in terms of being intrusive in a property and during installation time, it’s really pretty easy. That shouldn’t be the only reason why somebody selects a piece of equipment, because you live there for a long time installation is one day, but it is nice to know that you don’t have a lot of other cosmetic work to be able to do as well.

KM: Right. I mean, I know in the past, it might’ve been maybe 15, 20 years ago, when people were trying to install air conditioning in their house, they were using a high velocity system in the existing studwalls on the inside. But it was really tricky. Especially in historic houses, they were trying not to add ductwork to their rooms and things, but it was a little bit tricky because you had to have everything balanced just right or there’d be this whistling. I haven’t been seeing that recently and I assume that’s because it’s all being replaced by these systems that you’re talking about.

DS: Yeah. There’s a time and place for everything, there is no doubt about that. So when you’re looking at this, if you currently have a unitary system in your house, meaning the central air conditioning system in your house, and your ductwork’s sound, there is some argument in saying, do I look at another central air system as opposed to zoning each room? There’s a cost difference. And you’ve got some investment in the infrastructure, so maybe you go that way. When you look at a property that doesn’t have anything in it, or an addition to it, then you’re not abandoning anything that’s already there and you kind of got a wider open palette to be able to look at it. And you can say, well, I could go with a ductwork pipe system. I could go with a ducted system or I could go with a high velocity system. And each one of those has benefits and pros and cons. We like to think that we have more pros than cons. We’re a little biased, but we think a little more pros than cons. I think the reality, when you look at the efficiency that we bring to market, you look at the zoning capability and the competitiveness of the product coming in, overall I think we offer great value.

KM: One of the things that people have complained about to me and not wanting is a wall mounted unit in each of the rooms. Obviously you have other choices, but is that something that you need? Are they in each room, or…?

DS: Well I apologize for the non answer. The answer is going to be it depends. The reality of it is, is that where it is, is where it’s going to be conditioning. So if I have three bedrooms upstairs and all three bedrooms, you’re going to have closed doors, then yeah, I need to do something in each one of those rooms. If I am downstairs where I have it open-concept and I’m going from kitchen to dining room to family room, the reality is that I could probably do that with one system. See, that’s why I like the fact that we have four different styles of indoor units so that if I am upstairs in a house and I’ve got all those bedrooms, I really don’t want a unit in each one of those bedrooms. It’s okay if bedroom three and bedroom four are on the same thermostat, that’s okay to me. So now I can use a ducted unit. Then mine are skinny, so I can fit in a wall, maybe in the closet, take care of both bedrooms, or I can go in the attic and drop down into it. So the fact that I have ducted units to take up more than one room, a ceiling cassette to drop in the master bedroom, maybe a wall mount or a floor console for downstairs to take care of that. So the flexibility with different style heads is really kind of where you want to live.

KM: Hmm. So if somebody is interested in looking into getting a new system in their house, who do they actually call? Do they need to call a contractor who would then call the HVAC subcontractor?

DS: So you can do it a couple of different ways. At the end of the day it’s going to be installed by an HVAC contractor. So whether you are working directly with them or you’re working through some type of construction manager for a bigger project, it will be installed by an HVAC contractor. And you want it to be, it’s not terribly difficult but it is different. And there’s no sense in throwing good money after bad, so you want the right people to be able to do it. And then frankly Katherine, whenever you touch refrigerant you need to be EPA certified, so it is not a DIY product. So you want it being done professionally. How you can find one of our contractors- you want to find somebody that’s had a little bit of time in the saddle. Somebody that’s been trained on the product, it’s not their first time installing one. And the way to do that is to go to a manufacturer’s website. Ours is fujitsugeneral.com and we have a contractor locator on there and you can enter your zip code, or if you do nothing, we figure out where you are. It’s a little creepy, but we do eventually figure out where you are. And then we recommend contractors in your area. We even have a chat service through a schedule engine that comes in and helps navigate that. If that’s something you want to use, great service. We also classify our contractors a couple of different ways. So we have what’s called an elite contractor. An elite contractor is somebody that has committed to ongoing education and has done enough installations to earn the status of elite contractor. Then when you use an elite contractor, residentially, your warranty out of the box is seven and five. If it’s registered in 60 days, it goes to 10 and 10. If you use an elite contractor, it’s a 12 year warranty on compressor and 12 year warranty on parts. So there’s an advantage for consumers to find a contractor that has put quite a few in, and in New England you are not going to be challenged finding an elite contractor.

KM: Right. So that works all over the US I would guess. And then, I don’t know if it’s fair of me to ask about price, but can you give kind of an idea of the- I mean, I know that totally depends. So it might be hard.

DS: Yeah, it does but it doesn’t. What you’re really asking is how does it compare to other options out in the marketplace. So what you take a look at is HVAC system is measured in times 12,000 BTUs. So really, what would happen is a contractor would take a heat loss or heat gain in a property and then size the equipment appropriately. I’m going to be competitive. With somebody taking a central air system of a typical sear rating—and typical sear would be 13 in the North, 14 in the South—and having to install the duct work to be able to do that. If somebody already has ductwork and you’re coming in to use me, I’m going to be a little more expensive, I think worth it, but a little more expensive. If somebody is coming in and doing a hydronic boiler and doing baseboard as a heating source, I’m going to be more competitive than that. If somebody is coming in and doing a geothermal system and they are adding into an existing ductwork system, then I’m going to be the same or less than that. If somebody is doing a geothermal system and also has to do all of the duct work to do with that, I’m going to be more competitive than that. So really like we had the conversation earlier, there are some great options for people to do their home comfort system, and that could be a central system that could be a hydronic system, that could be a geothermal system, that can be a ductless system. And there are times when one of those options is going to be a much stronger option than the other. I think that I offer some good universal appeal across all those. And I think I offer great value, especially when I talk about the efficiency and the zoning side, because at the end of the day, if you want to be comfortable and not pay through the nose if you will, then I think I offer that great solution to be able to do that.

KM: I mean, I would think most people want to be comfortable and also don’t want to pay through the nose. So there you go, it’s a win-win. I would imagine there’s a lot of information on your website if people wanted to get more into the details of what the options are.

DS: Yes, yes, absolutely.

KM: And can you tell me what that is again?

DS: Our website is fujitsugeneral.com. And when you go into our website, there are just some great resources on there. So again, you can go in and you can look at all of our products, so you can look at single zones and multi zones and you can look at commercial products and residential products. And then you can look at all of our ductless options and our products that work to five degrees and minus five and minus 15. So based on where you are in the country, you can get yourself down that, you can look at all the different styles of indoor units and take a look at it. You can get into our section of, it’s called eco rebates. And from in there, you can enter your zip code, or if you wait long enough, we again, figure out where you are, and then we return all the units that come back and qualify for a rebate on where you’re sitting right now. So I really liked that portion of our website, because it tells you exactly what my utility company offers in rebates for a specific piece of equipment. So if I want to put a three ton piece of equipment in my house, it’ll tell me that my Pennsylvania power and light law for me, $1,500 if I put that in my house, and here’s the forms and here’s what I need to do to do it. So as a consumer, you can do all your research from that one site and know exactly what you qualify for.

KM: Oh, that’s great. That’s very convenient.

DS: Yeah. We also have our return on investment calculator in there and energy calculator. It’s a good resource, but it’s not as detailed as probably what it could be, but it’s a good resource for in terms of return on investment from one sear over top of another. So that’s a good resource as well.

KM: I don’t know, to me it’s always been a difficult subject to really get my mind around. I don’t know why. It just seems too much, I can’t…

DS: HVAC systems or heat pumps in general?

KM: Everything, HVAC systems, heat pumps. And then some people say one thing and other people say another thing and it just ends up being pretty confusing. And also the technology seems to be changing pretty quickly, so it’s hard to keep up.

DS: Yeah. The technology in the HVHC market was stagnant. I’ve been at it for a little while, it was stagnant for a long time. And then we’ve been taking quantum leaps year over year. It reminds me of way back when, when I got out of college and I went to buy a laptop and by the time I got to the parking lot, the newest and greatest thing was out there. We’re not quite that speed, but we’ve probably made more changes in the last 10 years than we’ve made the last 40 years.

KM: Hmm. Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of talk about heat pumps lately because they are pretty efficient and they can be run without any fossil fuels. So you don’t have to use your, any more in your house. Well, anyway, I appreciate you coming on to share your information and I hope everybody goes and checks your website out. And now that I know that you have the floor consoles, I might actually get it priced out for my own house.

DS: Absolutely. Let me know how we can help you with that.

KM: Thanks Dennis.

DS: Thank you. Thank you very much for having us.

KM: Yeah, it’s nice talking to you.

After Dennis and I signed off, I asked him about the movement to go all electric in our houses, and how heat pumps and his products tied into that. And I went back to recording again, because I thought what he had to say made sense for people to hear.

DS: So to talk a little bit about strategic electrification, it’s really been going on since the early eighties, when we started seeing the oil embargoes and it started coming along as getting away from a dependence on foreign fuel. And through that, through various presidents over time, we’ve come out with different energy policies. And what that’s really moving us down the avenue to is becoming dependent on our own resources to be able to generate our own electricity. And by moving to strategic electrification, what we’re doing is taking the fossil fuels out of the homes and putting them in the electric plants and then driving the homes through electricity. Now you can say, but aren’t we still burning fossil fuels? I’m not coming down on one side or the other. What I’m saying is it’s a lot easier to monitor the CO and the exhaust coming out of a single stack or 500 stacks than it is out of 4 million homes. So that’s the idea, is that strategic electricity is taking the generation of electricity into a power plant, keeping that exhaust where it wants to be, and then moving the fossil fuels out of the individual homes. So it’s a lot easier to distribute electricity, and it is also a very efficient way of creating home comfort. So when you look at burning oil, good fuel, but burning oil, burning natural gas, burning propane, burning wood, electricity is still a strong contender in that marketplace. And then you add in some renewables, whether it’s a windmill or hydroelectric or nuclear or whatever it may be. Now electricity starts making more and more sense. Again, I’m not coming down on one side or the other. The reality is that we have a tremendous amount of incentives and rebates to drive us towards putting heat pumps in our homes. Because of that, heat pump technology has dramatically increased to where it can easily be the sole source of home comfort.

Thank you Dennis for sharing your knowledge with us. And thanks to you for listening to this whole episode. I hope you got something out of it. It’s a lot to think about. As I mentioned for me, it’s a hard subject for me for some reason. But I wanted to say that I have heard from somebody about the landscaping episode and she wrote: I don’t agree that landscaping designers should be relegated to perennial borders. More often than not I design patios and sets of patio steps for my clients and deal with some sloping land. So she is a landscape designer and she goes on to point out: a friend went through the Harvard graduate school of design landscape architecture program, got pregnant during her first two year job and never finished qualifying to become a registered landscape architect. So she’s also a “landscape designer”. There’s just lots of variation in experience in that job title, which is very, very true. And thank you, Susan, for writing about that. She went on to suggest someone else that I could interview eventually for landscape. So you know, maybe I will.

I really do appreciate hearing from people though, so if you have any comments or suggestions or anything, you can write to me thehousemaven@talkinghomerenovations.com. You can also get in touch with me on Facebook (which I don’t think really works), or Instagram where I actually am trying to be active. It’s talkinghomerenovations both places, and at Tik Tok I am thehousemaven. I was doing lives on Tik Tok and Instagram, but I don’t think I’ll be doing those regularly, maybe occasionally or on request. But if you like this podcast, You should definitely subscribe. It’s free and you’ll just get it every week. You could also get my newsletter about this, which I have episode enhancements on all of these episodes, we’re working on those. And basically those enhancements are kind of, well they’re photos that go along with the episode, but also just an essay on something that was sparked by the episode. So check those out. Hopefully soon my website will be ready. Of course, that’s talkinghomerenovations.com, but in the meantime, sign up for my newsletter. That way we can just be in touch every week directly. So share this podcast with your friends and if you like it, leave a rating and a review. Apparently that’s going to help me get more discovered. This podcast is a member of the design network. You can discover exclusive architecture and design podcasts at designnetwork.org. And for now, this episode is produced by my architecture firm Demios Architects, where we believe architects are for everyone. Until next time, take care.