PIGEON FORGE, Tennessee — At National Comfort Institute’s (NCI) annual Summit, building science, home performance, implementation, and company culture emerged as key themes for HVAC contractors looking to deliver higher-performance solutions. NCI President and CEO Dominick Guarino said more contractors attending Summit are recognizing the importance of understanding how the building itself affects HVAC performance.
Guarino described the house as “the load side of the HVAC system,” emphasizing that HVAC contractors can’t always solve comfort and performance problems through equipment changes alone. While some contractors are expanding into insulation, air sealing, and other home-performance services, he said many others are instead building relationships with specialized home-performance contractors and referring or subcontracting that work.
Guarino said these partnerships are becoming increasingly common because many HVAC technicians are not interested in performing insulation and air-sealing work themselves. Other contractors, he noted, are choosing to create dedicated home-performance divisions within their companies.
He encouraged contractors to “step into it” one piece at a time and connect with other contractors who have already gone through the process. Those relationships can help contractors avoid costly mistakes, including investing in equipment that doesn't deliver the expected results.
“You're not going to shut your company down and say we're going to reinvent ourselves overnight.”
A panel discussion session during the event emphasized that HVAC contractors increasingly need to look beyond the mechanical equipment and understand how the entire home operates. As building codes and energy standards evolve and building envelopes become tighter, ventilation, pressure relationships, air leakage, and load matching are becoming increasingly important to HVAC system performance.
Jonathan Esquivel, owner of Austin Star Services LLC in Austin, Texas, said contractors need to pay closer attention to the “V” in HVAC and understand how ventilation interacts with the home. “A lot of us forget the V in HVAC,” he said. “And when you forget the V in HVAC, what does that make you?”
Esquivel said tighter building envelopes require contractors to understand how pressures affect a home and how ventilation systems operate within it. Keeping up with those changes requires ongoing education, he said, including learning from professionals outside the traditional HVAC industry. “Sometimes you have to go outside of our HVAC world and get some of the education from the other trades, especially when you're not getting it in your market.”
Terry McWilliams, owner and founder of Texcellent A/C Service, shared how his experience with the Weatherization Assistance Program broadened his understanding of building science. Initially, he focused on achieving the specified insulation depth, but eventually realized that insulation alone was not addressing air leakage through interstitial spaces. The experience reinforced the importance of stepping outside the traditional HVAC comfort zone and learning from other trades.
McWilliams encouraged contractors and technicians to “think outside the box” when diagnosing comfort and performance problems. Technicians should not limit their assessment to the mechanical equipment, he said, because a properly functioning HVAC system can still struggle when building-related issues are present.
“Even technicians who do not perform formal home-performance testing should be able to recognize problems that are connected to the building” McWilliams added. “If we're not digging after that continuing education in those areas and seeing how those things intertwine, I think we'd really be shooting ourselves in the foot. If you don't change with the times, the industry's going to pass you on by.”
Tim De Stasio of Comfort Science Solutions also looked ahead to how HVAC technology could change the relationship between equipment and the building. He predicted that AI, variable-speed, and inverter-driven equipment will play larger roles over the next decade, making load matching increasingly important.
“Load matching is going to be much more important,” De Stasio said. As equipment becomes more capable of varying its output, contractors will need to determine whether systems are actually matching the home's load rather than focusing solely on equipment size.
“How do we know whether we're load matching?” De Stasio asked. “You got to test out. You got to measure it, and you got to understand run times.”
De Stasio said contractors may eventually spend less time debating individual equipment and duct-size selections and more time evaluating how effectively the complete system serves the building. “Let's concentrate on the load matching part, what actually makes people comfortable,” he said.
