Residential buildings in the U.S. pour out millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. Air conditioners are inefficient energy-guzzlers, and burning fossil fuels for heating and cooking can worsen indoor air quality, leading to asthma and other health problems. Buildings that let off greenhouse gases also contribute to climate change, and fossil fuel air pollution may be responsible for as many as 1 in 5 deaths worldwide, according to a study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The Inflation Reduction Act put billions of dollars toward modernizing American buildings, with tax rebates for clean-energy manufacturing, as well as home energy efficiency upgrades and electrification. But real people will need to be hired to tear out oil boilers and gas furnaces, and replace them with electric heat pumps. Currently, many contractors are skeptical of how the industry is being overhauled.

The Prospect spoke with Nate Adams, a home performance expert who consults on insulation and air sealing for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) technicians. Based in West Virginia, Adams is a passionate promoter of heat pumps for comfort and air quality. He runs a Facebook group called Electrify Everything, and produces meme-filled slideshows on winning over skeptics. He is increasingly worried about how political polarization could stall electrification.

The Prospect reached Adams in Chief Logan State Park, where he spent July 4th camping with his family. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The American Prospect: How did you get into home performance and electrification?

Nate Adams: My parents had two manufacturing companies. One made high-precision steel sleeves to fix steering gears in early-’80s GM cars. My dad helped figure out how to fix a significant manufacturing defect. He also had a company that made creepers—what you lie on when you work under a car—with plastic injection molding.

I grew up as a cross between white- and blue-collar. I saw a lot of machinery get sold and shipped to China for pennies on the dollar in the early 2000s, which was personally painful to watch. In 2005, I found myself selling insulation to contractors for new homes. That disappeared with the housing crisis in early ’09.

Then I started an insulation contracting company, and ended up doing consulting, what I call being a "House Whisperer." My sales process helps figure out what mix of insulation, air sealing, and HVAC equipment solves clients’ needs. We approach homes much like a doctor—or really, much more like a nurse, because doctors have crappy process. Nurses have very good process, in general.

When you ask clients what they want to fix in their homes, what stuff bothers them—are rooms too hot, are floors too cold for bare feet—they tend to buy better stuff. But many HVAC contractors don’t ask those questions. Most are former HVAC technicians. They’re good at looking at a piece of equipment and figuring out what’s wrong with it, getting the right part changed. They’re mechanics, not engineers. Which is fine—that’s most of the job. I am actually a mediocre mechanic and an OK engineer. But they overlook the shell of the house.

So you focus on the air flow, the insulation, the more holistic analysis?

Yes. In the classic HVAC business model, that’s overlooked. That problem is getting worse, since private equity is getting into HVAC. They’re just looking at the equipment and maximizing topline sales, leading to a lot of shoddy installs.

How has home performance and HVAC changed in recent years?

Until about a decade ago, we were in "Back to the Future" territory. You could have pulled an AC technician out of 1955, stuck him in a DeLorean time machine to 2010, and the equipment wouldn’t have changed much. He’d have to work through some culture shock and learn circuit boards, but he wouldn’t have a hard time figuring out single-stage equipment, which is still most of what is sold.

But inverter-based equipment gives us all sorts of new tools. That’s what has opened the door to electrification across the country. The U.S. is split into eight zones. Climate zones 1 through 4—the Southeast—are not very cold. The Southeast has had heat pumps for years. With newer inverter-based heat pumps, we can push into zones 5 and 6, which lets us tackle the majority of the U.S. population.

That’s equipment. What about air quality and efficiency?

Building science has been revolutionized in the last few decades. But home performance has been stagnant. It’s led by too many nerds and academics, and there has been low project volume.

We learned building science the hard way, during the oil crisis of the late 1970s. We had never cared much about energy efficiency, but suddenly, we had to care about saving energy in order to keep the lights on. We started making homes more airtight, to preserve energy, and suddenly we found that people couldn’t breathe. Moisture couldn’t get in and out, and outdoor air couldn’t get in. We created "sick building syndrome."

Over the 1980s and 1990s, we figured out how to build more efficiently while letting buildings breathe, letting moisture in and out of a building. Joseph Lstiburek’s work at the Building Science Corporation was important here. He was very experimental. He went out and saw what actually worked.

The other key innovation came with affordable measurement tools. In 2016, the first generation of consumer-grade air quality monitors came out. Now you didn’t have to be a national lab with $50,000 worth of equipment to be able to understand the air quality inside a house.

We dug into that with our insulation practice, and learned a lot. But I was frustrated that I saw all this knowledge not being applied, because of the narrow focus on HVAC.

Read the full story at prospect.org