The Changing Contractor Role: From Installer to Integrator

Difficult market conditions combine with advances in electronic climate controls to create a new business opportunity for contractors to integrate the various mechanical systems in the modern home.

By Albert R. Wallace

In every economic environment – but especially in a recession as deep and prolonged as this one – developing new sources of business becomes the lifeblood of any firm. The best and most profitable way to cultivate these revenue streams is to provide current customers with more services, and to offer new clients services that are difficult to find from any one contractor.

Fortunately, heating and air-conditioning contractors can grow their bottom lines today using lessons learned from the high technology computer industry. How? — by becoming “system integrators.”

Integrated systems are the combination of cutting-edge comfort technologies – radiant heating and cooling, solar hot water and geothermal heat pumps – that complement one another in ways that achieve greater energy efficiency than stand-alone systems can. The practice of integrating these systems within residential and commercial environments is more common in Europe, where energy efficiency practices and building codes are years ahead of U.S. practices.

In April 2010, I had the opportunity to share my vision of this growth opportunity for HVAC contractors at a two-day meeting hosted by Uponor, Inc. for its contractor customers in Las Vegas. In my workshop, we explored the evolution of heating, cooling and hot-water management in today’s living and working environments, as well as the greening of American homes and buildings. But our primary message was how enterprise interoperability using advanced controls makes it not only possible, but practical, for contractors to rethink their roles from system installers to system integrators, and how doing so can help their businesses and their customers.

What Is an Integrator?

An integrator understands how to give clients — consumers, builders or building owners — the comfort, energy efficiency and indoor air quality they want. To achieve the type of energy savings trade magazines like this one and trade professionals in general say are now possible, multiple contractors are currently needed…

one installer for the geothermal system;
another for the radiant floor heating;
a third for solar photovoltaic panels, etc., etc.…

…and the list can go on and on. While everyone wants the benefits of these new technologies, no one wants the migraine of multiple contractors and multiple points of contact when something doesn’t work.
For you, as an HVAC contractor, to become a sole-source system integrator, your thinking process needs to move beyond the usual trade boundaries: plumber does this, solar guy does that, and so forth. Why? System integration is what your customers will pay you to provide. This value for the consumer translates to higher profit margins and expanded market share to the integrator. It’s much like the evolution of the car: When energy prices were low, muscle cars with points, plugs or condensers were common; the value today is in the higher-priced, fully integrated computerized “package.” In our HVAC world, the value professionals like ourselves can provide encompasses sustainable design, energy efficiency and unprecedented comfort that our customers will enjoy for decades to come.

How do you achieve this? By looking at systems holistically and finding similarly minded folks in those trades to partner with, or by expanding your own staff to include these disciplines. At the 2010 Uponor seminar, I used as a case study my own experience with the Uponor Climate Control Network (CCN) as an enabling technology to provide systems integration.

School of Hard Knocks

Some of you may be asking: “Who is this guy Al Wallace, and what qualifies him to tell me how to grow my business?”

That’s a fair question. Like most critical lessons in life, I came to understand the importance of becoming a system integrator the hard way.

On Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2007, a fire engulfed and destroyed our home in Centennial, Colorado. I am a long-time proponent and practitioner of sustainable design, and this tragedy provided my family an opportunity to design and build an energy-efficient and environmentally friendly home, capable of achieving a Platinum LEED rating from the United States Green Building Council.

Built atop the old foundation and basement, the new 3,300-sq.-ft., two-story residence took over two years to complete. The integrated systems provide unparalleled comfort and indoor climate.

The combination of passive solar design, a high-quality building envelope, and advanced digital controls delivers net-zero energy for heating and cooling the structure; that is, our new home produces more energy than it consumes over time. By itself, the home is 80% more efficient than a similar structure of comparable size, using standard construction and conventional control systems.

Selecting the Components

Researching and designing an integrated renewable energy system that manages heating, cooling, hot-water production and ventilation takes time. When you also include radiant cooling, the task may be daunting. I looked to my experience with enterprise software companies for the answer. Inherently, systems integration requires sophisticated off-the-shelf technologies to maximize interoperability, performance and savings.

For example, the major components of our new home’s integrated system include ground source water-to-water and water-to-air heat pumps (GHPs). Although only the water-to-water unit is required for heating and cooling, we use the water-to-air unit for ventilation and to test the performance of hydronic systems over a ducted forced-air system.

The integrated system also includes four rooftop solar-thermal collector panels, a six-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array, and an energy recovery ventilator (ERV). In addition, space heating and cooling is furnished throughout most of the home with a high-mass radiant system in which PEX (crosslinked polyethylene) tubing has been installed in the floor and covered in concrete or gypcrete.

Beyond this conventional in-floor application, radiant technology is also used in several other areas of our home:

The garage, driveway and porches all have radiant in the concrete to provide snow and ice melting.

Hot water circulates behind the bathroom mirrors to add heat to the bathroom and to prevent condensation during showering.

Cold water from the ground loop circulates within the walls, creating a "cool pantry" and a wine cellar using passive cooling.

So what are the functions of all these components? The first GHP — a three-ton water-to-water two-stage compressor unit from Enertech — augments the rooftop solar collector panels to maintain a constant temperature in the hot-water tanks that supply the radiant system and provide all of our domestic hot water needs. Combining this technology with advanced controls enables the GHP to run at only 60% of peak-load consumption, thus increasing the heat pump’s coefficient of performance while reducing the overall energy consumption.

The second GHP — a three-ton, water-to-air unit from Water Furnace International operates with its own ECM2 (electronically commutated motor) fan blower that works in conjunction with an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV). The ERV helps maintain indoor air quality by refreshing the indoor air while minimizing energy loss to the exterior (heated indoor air in the winter, cooled indoor air in the summer). The ERV and GHP, precisely controlled by the CCN, provide whole-house ventilation, using less than 100 watts of power.

The photovoltaic array generates enough electricity to offset the power used by all of the above HVAC and water-heating systems, so that our home’s systems are carbon-neutral with no greenhouse gas emissions.

Orchestrating the Components

Your key to success as a systems integrator depends on how easy it is to design, implement, and maintain the controls to achieve peak comfort and efficiency. Ideally the controls should be plug-and-play, yet customizable for specific applications. In the end, the controls are king: They rule the systems and ensure the results you and your customer want.

We could not have achieved the functionality described in my home using traditional technology. There would be one control box for solar hot water, others for the heat pumps, mixing, snow melt, etc. All would be built by a different manufacturer, and all unable to talk to one another.

With two years’ experience in our home and at a handful of client sites, the best system I’ve found for managing all the components – even in the most complex systems – is the Climate Control Network from Uponor. A radiant controls workshop at Uponor’s Apple Valley, Minn., Factory Training Center in February 2009 introduced me to CCN. But the developments that Uponor has made to this control package takes it far beyond what was possible just a year ago. During my visit, Uponor product manager, Application Controls, Jeff Wiedemann and I discussed the need for a standard-based, enterprise-wide integrated control that could operate via Internet access. Having worked in the Silicon Valley high technology industry for 15 years, I needed the same open infrastructure that enterprise software provides complex computing environments. That is exactly where CCN is today.

This black box (literally) is an integrated computer hardware and software package that connects all of a building’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems to a single network control system. In most cases, the functionality for complex systems operation is complete, without the hassle of creating and testing customized code. The user interface is as simple as a thermostat or a portable software interface that can be displayed on most hardware devices, such as a laptop or desktop computer.

Using the CCN, I am able to monitor and control components in my home via thermostats, a touchpad interface or through my laptop when I am away. I can monitor or troubleshoot and make instant changes to any of the settings by looking at real-time data. The system can send me an email or text message when something is out of the parameters for alarms I’ve set.

The ability to automate intelligent, energy-efficient choices without intervention from home or building owners is possible today. It would be a nightmare, using conventional controls, to choose the heating source with the lowest operating cost from among a multiple-stage geothermal unit, solar collectors and a high-efficiency condensing boiler.

While it is possible to achieve this same objective using direct digital controls (DDC), that approach is costly and time-consuming for the contractor and the homeowner. For most residential clients, the DDC system’s up-front and maintenance costs are too expensive. Yet, without complex functionality, we would be limited in what we could deliver as a systems integrator.

With the CCN, we are able to outperform DDC capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf software modules provided by Uponor. Troubleshooting a complex system with DDC-controlled mechanical relays would be extremely difficult. Using the CCN controls, we are able to troubleshoot and isolate a component failure in several minutes.

For me, the clear choice is the new generation of HVAC controls like the CCN that can detect all the available heating devices in a home and automatically select the one with the lowest possible energy consumption.

Take the time to investigate your opportunities to learn a new way of doing business that will greatly enhance the value of your services to your customers.

Albert R. Wallace is president, Energy Environmental Corporation, Centennial, Colorado.