For the first six or seven years, by Javier Santiago’s count, most of HVAC Zone’s work came from other HVAC companies. He served residential contractors as a consultant and a subcontractor, and much of what he offered them was explanation.
He started the company in 2018. Before that, he worked as an employee on commercial and institutional jobs. “I used to work on a lot of schools,” he says, along with hospitals. On those jobs he saw newer technology that he expected to be scaled down for houses. When he went out on his own, he noticed that many residential contractors did not yet understand it.
Inverter systems were the main example. “Inverter was a big deal, and it was very complicated for the residential aspect,” he says. He had a head start. He studied electronics engineering technology in college for a while. “I understood electricity, electronics and semiconductors, which really gave me a bit of an edge when it came to inverter systems,” he says.
So he walked contractors through how the new equipment worked. That work has thinned out as the technology has spread. “Now it’s becoming more common, so people don’t really come to me as much as they used to for it,” he says.
HVAC Zone now installs its own systems for homeowners, and Santiago brought the teaching with him. He calls the homeowner version HVAC 102: a smaller version of the lessons he used to give contractors, delivered straight to the person who owns the house. “Working with an educated customer is one of my favorite things,” he says.
Much of that homeowner work involves moving people off gas furnaces and onto heat pumps, going fossil-free “sometimes, if it’s feasible,” as he puts it. The conversation takes some explaining. He walks customers through the differences among older heat pumps, newer ones and cold-climate models. Some units claim to heat down to 10 degrees, he says, but they don’t keep their capacity there. The gap shows up in the up-front cost, in the return on the investment and in how much heat the system can actually produce. He also wants to spread the word about tankless water heaters and other high-efficiency equipment as efficiency standards keep tightening.
Santiago says he prefers residential work now because it puts him one on one with homeowners more often. HVAC Zone is a licensed New Jersey master HVACR contractor. It works most of North and Central Jersey, a range he puts at roughly 30 miles but draws by county, and it doesn’t try to go into New York City. Even when he is tied up installing a system as far away as New Brunswick, he says, he does his best to reach a service call the same day.
The company is Santiago and two other men, and he is on every install. He is heavily involved in the work itself, along with sourcing parts and choosing and sizing the equipment. “The advantage that we offer is that the best guys are on the job,” he says.
Inside the crew, the work goes by skill. “My guys work with me, not for me,” Santiago says. He spends much of his time on estimating, compliance and permits, so one of the other men, who has worked purely as a technician, is now more technically sound than he is on certain systems. The other is better at ductwork. “I might design it, I might choose the size and the CFM that should flow this way, but actually putting the hammer to the tin, he’s better than me,” he says.