The Heat Pump Podcast – Détails, épisodes et analyse

We (Eric and Ed) started the Heat Pump Podcast on a whim. After two years immersed in HVAC, heat pumps, and home electrification, we had a realization: there’s a lot of great HVAC content out there, but heat pump-focused conversations? Surprisingly scarce.

This didn’t sit right with us.

• Aren’t heat pumps the best HVAC equipment on the market today?
• Aren’t their COPs practically magic?
• Aren’t heat pumps the future of HVAC?

So why was the discussion around them so… occasional?

To see if we could change that, we launched the Heat Pump Podcast as an experiment. What’s happened since has blown us away.

What We’ve Learned

After 7 months, 15 episodes, a rapid rise in listeners, and great feedback from heat pump-focused entrepreneurs, we took a moment to reflect. In this latest episode, we compare notes and share the biggest lessons we’ve learned along the way. Such as: 

1. We love it. Turns out, we’d do this even if no one listened. Every episode has been an incredible learning experience.

2. There are way more heat pump-focused entrepreneurs than we imagined!

3. Designing for heat pump systems is way harder than conventional equipment

4. You can't make up for bad design

5. Focusing on heat pumps creates a winning business

6. Heat pumps. Are. More. Comfortable. Period. 

Tune in to the episode for our top 10 lessons from the Heat Pump Podcast Season 1!

A Heartfelt Thanks

To our incredible guests: thank you for taking a chance on two heat-pump-obsessed entrepreneurs with a niche podcast idea. Your time and insights have made every episode richer.

What’s Next?

We’re just getting started. With more episodes planned for 2025, we’re excited to keep growing the conversation around heat pumps, HVAC innovation, and building science.

🎧 Tune in to this special reflection episode and join us on the journey!

What if you could do to construction what Amazon did to retail? Or what Uber did to taxis? 

Mark Kasdorf has an ambitious vision to do just that, and his journey starts with heat pumps.

Mark is the founder and CEO of Forge, a venture-backed, mission-driven startup tackling one of America’s biggest challenges: the skilled labor shortage in the trades. Forge’s secret? Recruiting great talent, training them quickly, and empowering them to lead their own crews fast. Really fast.

In just 18 months, Forge went from installing its first heat pump to running over 10 crews across New England—all through organic growth, no acquisitions That’s a pace unheard of in the HVAC space, where reaching 10+ crews can take years.

Mark describes HVAC as the “goldilocks trade”—challenging enough to require specialized training, but more scalable than electrical or plumbing, which require more licensing. Within HVAC, Forge is laser-focused on heat pumps, a decision that reflects the size of the market, profitability, and growth prospects.

In this podcast episode, Mark shares fascinating insights into:

• Forge’s rapid journey from one crew to many.

• His roadmap for scaling to $10M, $100M, and beyond.

• Why the trades can't be “gigified” and what that means for the construction industry.

• Lessons learned from other startups’ failures to disrupt the trades.

• What makes Forge both similar to and different from a traditional heat pump company.

Whether you’re curious about how venture capitalists see the HVAC industry, or you want a fresh perspective on heat pumps, this episode is a must-listen.

Listen now to hear why Mark believes HVAC is the ultimate trade and why heat pumps are at the center of it all.

Show notes:

• Mark's LinkedIn
• ForgeCo

Kevin Brenner started his career as Dr. Brenner, destined to take over the family podiatry business. But he loved to swing a hammer more than he liked being in an office, so he jumped ship and landed in carpentry. His first company, Brenner Builders, started with a $627 job fixing deck stairs. It ended as Westchester County's premier high-end home builder, with an average value of $11M per project and doing $50M a year in revenue. 

Kevin's journey did not end there. He had a passion for high-efficiency homes, so he started Healthy Home on the side, a company focused on whole-home performance contracting with pricing accessible to everyone. In 2017, he closed the doors on Brenner Builders and now focuses entirely on Healthy Home. 

Healthy Home is a mission-driven organization. Kevin has grown his business steadily, adding services, hiring and training his staff, and leaving a wake of happy customers and healthy homes behind him. 

Join us for Kevin's insights into:  

• How building envelope work impacts heat pump design
• His mother's reaction when she learned he was leaving medicine
• What good heat pump installs look like
• Why he does NOT sell to customers who want a heat pump to lower their monthly bills
• What the media gets wrong in their heat pump coverage
• The importance of reading the manual (RTFM)
• Why he has started, stopped, and restarted his HVAC division multiple times 
• How culture and mission are the cornerstone of Healthy Home's hiring and training
• ... and more

Show notes:

• Healthy Home
• The smoking hot Chevy HHR
• The Energy Conservatory's True Flow Grid
• The Building Performance Institute
• National Comfort Institute
• HVAC School
• Ty Branaman
• Craig Migliaccio and AC Service Tech Channel

This episode is a fun experiment for us. At Amply, we LOVE doing ride alongs with our customers. It gives us insight. It gives us energy. It's how our customers turn into our friends. So we tried to capture that experience in a podcast. Ed jumps in the car with Aleisha Stenson, co-founder and co-owner of My Diamond Comfort. 

Before getting into HVAC, Aleisha was in law enforcement and social work. She loved working with kids, but the intensity of working for the Department of Children and Families was exhausting. While out on medical leave for a few weeks, her father brought home a set of CDs from a Weldon Long seminar. She listened to the entire set over the course of several days. Coming out the other side, she knew ductless was the future, and she had a vision for a ductless-only HVAC business. 

That's how My Diamond Comfort -- an exceptional heat pump installer in rural Western Massachusetts -- was born. 

Join us for Aleisha's insights into:  

• Her passion for sales + ductless
• The benefits of a ductless-only business
• What it's like to run a family business
• How to see past what customers say they want and listen to what they need
• Her primary pain points day-to-day and what would make her life easier
• What makes a great distributor and a great manufacturer...

... and more

Hal Smith followed his passion and ignored his teachers' advice by going to trade school. He founded Halco 40 years ago. By listening to his customers and helping them "fix their old homes" in upstate New York, he gradually added new service offerings. From plumbing and HVAC he added electrical. Then insulation and air sealing. Then Solar and geothermal. Windows and doors. Now basement waterproofing and finishing. 

Through trial and error, hard-earned business savvy, and a relentless focus on doing right by his customers, Hal now runs a $40M end-to-end whole-home performance contracting business with 180+ employees, 100+ trucks, and 10,000 annual service agreements. 

Hal does a lot of heat pumps, which is why we're delighted to have him on the Heat Pump Podcast. But he focuses on the home as a system. That gives him insight into what is required to make heat pumps perform well, even in frigid upstate New York. 

Join us for Hal's technical insight on home performance, his business insight on operating a profitable company, and his entrepreneurial insight into how to come from nothing and build a $40M contracting business with wildly happy customers. 

In this episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, Laura and Joe Wood tell the story of how they went from one person in 2008 to over a hundred 14 years later and a successful exit to private equity. When they finished, they had not one but two premier HVAC brands in the competitive Boston market.

They founded Boston Standard in 2007-2008 to be a standard-setting plumbing + HVAC + electrical brand, and they achieved that. Then, while traveling abroad, they realized that the rest of the world uses heat pumps to provide both heating and cooling. To capitalize on that untapped heat pump opportunity, they founded New England Ductless as a completely separate entity. It was a remarkable experiment that paid off. 

Laura and Joe have unique insights from their experience, having personally managed a traditional HVAC business side-by-side with a heat pump-focused business. Their lessons about the differences between these two companies are essential to anyone building a heat pump business and to anyone looking to grow and scale to 100+ employees. 

In this episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, Ed interviews Mike Cappuccio, founder and former CEO of N.E.T.R., one of New England's largest heat pump HVAC contractors, and owner of Dominate Ductless, a training and advisory business focused on educating the next generation of heat pump contractors to build profitable businesses. 

Mike describes his journey from employee to entrepreneur, as well as his journey form commercial trucking refrigeration into residential HVAC. In making that transition, Mike went from profitable to unprofitable. That caused him to look long and hard at his business to figure out what had changed and what was wrong. 

While squinting at his business, he found ductless heat pumps while at a Mitsubishi seminar, saw the beauty and profitability of a heat pump-focused operation, and set about revamping his entire business model. The success of that model is what led Mike to found Dominate Ductless -- so he could share those valuable learnings with other heat pump entrepreneurs. Mike shares some of his most important insights from his Dominate Ductless seminars, which are valuable to anyone trying to build a heat pump-focused business. 

In this first episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, Eric Fitz and Ed Smith interview Matt Scott, one of the co-owners of Dave's World. Dave's World is the largest heat pump installer in Maine, which has more cold weather heat pumps installed per capita than any other state in the US. 

Matt tells the remarkable story of how he first stumbled upon the magic of heat pumps, against the odds and against the advice of a distributor. From there, he describes the entrepreneurial journey he and his partners, Dan and Bob, went on to transform Dave's World from a small appliance store in Dover-Foxcroft to one of the largest heat pump-focused businesses in the country.

Matt discusses the challenges they faced, how they overcame them, and some of the special sauce that makes Dave's World a magical place for both their customers and employees. 

Show notes

• Dave's World website
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The Upside of Fear and The Power of Consistency by Weldon Long

Adam Mufich is a multi-generation HVAC entrepreneur and now trainer for the National Comfort Institute. What does Adam like to do in his free time? Talk about HVAC.

Adam first caught our attention with his HVAC School article Good COP - Bad COP. He impressed us again with his presentation at the NCI Summit "How to Properly Design with Today's Heat Pumps." We highly recommend both.

On this podcast, Adam dives into his educational journey, sharing how he finally stopped delaying his learning and dove in feet first. He started down the rabbit hole with a Manual J class by Alex Meaney and reading Nate Adams' book. As he went deeper and deeper, one of his first big realizations was: properly done load calculations can be nerve-wracking (at first) when you see how much smaller they are than expected.

What makes this episode particularly fun is Adam’s story of applying his newfound knowledge to his own home. He installed a Daikin SkyAir heat pump and then tackled infiltration by meticulously hand caulking his roof, leak by leak. As a result of his efforts, he significantly reduced his home’s load. Taking it a step further, and with advice from Roman Baugh, Adam reprogrammed his Daikin SkyAir to function as a 1.5-ton heat pump instead of its original 3-ton capacity.

The results? Even at half capacity, the system performed beautifully.

This podcast episode strikes a perfect balance between theory and practice, offering invaluable insights for contractors looking to improve heat pump performance. Whether you’re just starting your HVAC learning journey or looking for actionable tips, this episode is packed with inspiration and expertise.

Show notes

• Adam's LinkedIn
• National Comfort Institute
• Good COP - Bad COP
• Daikin SkyAir
• Alex Meaney
• Nate Adams' book

Steve Rogers, head of The Energy Conservatory (TEC), leads one of the most influential companies in HVAC. TEC’s True Flow Grid has transformed how many Amply customers approach home analysis and system design—and in this episode, Steve explains why airflow and duct analysis are crucial for building efficient, high-performance heat pump systems.

Steve is an engineer’s engineer, the kind of person who creates detailed spreadsheets—just for fun—to balance every tradeoff in heat pump selection, from comfort to cost and efficiency. In this episode, he brings that same rigor to topics every HVAC pro needs to know, including:

• Air flow and heat pumps
• Duct placement and why leakage can double the load
• Envelope vs. duct leakage and their impact on performance
• Ducted vs. ductless systems and when each is optimal
• Best-case vs. worst-case scenarios for heat pump installs (and how to avoid costly mistakes)

Listening to Steve is like taking a masterclass from a professor who makes complex concepts easy to understand. If you’re ready to elevate your expertise in heat pump design, this episode is for you. Don’t miss it!

Show notes

• Steve's LinkedIn
• The Energy Conservatory
• The TrueFlow Grid on TruTech Tools
• The National Comfort Institute
• measureQuick
• Bryan Orr's HVAC School
• Kristof Irwin's Building Science Podcast