"Who Is You?" - Refrigerant Responsibility & EPA Rules with Les Rhynard & Adam Dykstra

Listen to this episode: Apple Podcasts · Spotify

Episode transcript from the Close It Now podcast with Sam Wakefield.

Well, all right, everybody. Welcome back to Close It Now. Sam Wakefield here. I am stoked to have these guests on today. We.

I don't do a multi person guests very often, but when we do, you know, it's going to be fire and it's going to be worth it. So today we are talking about a hot topic, so to speak, in the industry. You'll understand what that means here in just a minute. Date of recording is June 29, 2026. And so I'm excited to have these gentlemen on.

This is. And correct me if I make. Let's make sure I'm saying your names correctly. Les Reinhard and Adam Dykstra. That's right.

Was there anyone close enough not related to Lenny, are you? That rehearsal that paid off. No relation to Lenny. No baseball people in my family, we're the yay sport group over here. I get asked if I related to Tim Wakefield all the time for, you know, pitching for the Pirates.

Right. Knuckleball pitcher. So I get it. Nice. Well, welcome to the show, guys.

Happy to have y' all on. So let's get started. A little bit fun. What is the. I'm going to actually borrow a because I know you guys have been in the industry for a long time.

What is the. So I'm borrowing a reading off the page from my friend Everett that runs in this House podcast. So shout out to him and if you haven't been on his show, I'm going to recommend you get on his show as well because I think this is a topic that everyone should hear. But before we get to that, I would love to hear from each of you what is one of the craziest or wildest experiences that you have had? That story that just sticks in your brain and loads rent free from your time in the industry.

It can be a homeowner experience. Could be working with another contractor or just something absolutely off the wall that you've come across. Go for less. Me first. All right.

He's grinning like he's already got it loaded, ready to go. What direction we're going on. Crazy. I'm like. I'm not talking about that one.

I'm not talking about that one. I'm basically eliminating stuff as you're going. Towards, like, stay away from what's rating on this show. Right. Decide what to talk about.

Yeah, there's. There's some. Yeah, just. Let's not go there. But.

So long time ago, I was working with a contractor. I was in his shop. I was emptying his recovery tanks and, you know, handling his refrigerant and stuff, and he started complaining about this guy who owned a house, and he had called up and he had put a new system in, and he went through all this stuff about. And he called up and goes, hey, man, I have. It's not working because.

What do you mean it's not working? Like, the air is not. Not blowing. He's like, what do you mean it's not not blowing, or it's not blowing cold? No, it's not blowing.

So he goes over. Filters are just caked, right? So he goes, hey, you have to change these. Right. Otherwise it's going to affect.

You can't get air through. So about, I don't know, 10, 12 months later, the guy calls back. It's still. It's not blowing again. He goes, have you changed your filter?

He goes, oh, no, dude. They had to be changed so frequently that I just left him out. I got tired of changing them. And he's like, well, that's going to be a problem. Well, get out your.

Get out your wallet. And I. Yeah. And I just really. The contract.

He was so irritated. Right? Like, I told. Like, I don't. I don't even understand.

You have to change him so often. I just quit doing it. Yeah. So that's when it comes up. And I talk about every now and then just because it's always stuck with me.

Oh, my gosh. That's hilarious. I love it. Adam, you got a fun one to add to the pot here. Yeah, yeah.

We. Les and I, in our former lives, we. We ran a company called Rapid Recovery, which I'm guessing a good chunk of your audience has heard of. It's a, at this point, the world's largest refrigerant recovery company. And so we started that back in 2002.

And of course we started like any other entrepreneurial group. You're just out there hustling, doing the work, doing everything right, doing the paperwork at night, doing the recoveries. By day, you know, it's superhero status. And at one point I had gone over to Maryland and had to do a recovery on Skillman Village, which is an insane asylum in New Jersey. And so the weed, this place has been shut down for decades.

And it had, you know, what happens in a facility like that out in the middle of nowhere. All the horror movies after a place. Like, yeah, so I'm in there and there's no power. And so it's all boarded up and people have been breaking into it for years and doing weird cult things or who knows? But there's like, you know, everything you can imagine painted on the walls.

And I'm walking around in this place and it's creepy. The weeds outside are three feet tall and you know, there's ticks everywhere. So you're trying to not to walk where you don't want. You know, I'm walking down, down these hallways and, and I come around a corner and I'm headed into what it turns out was the morgue. And so there's a bloody handprint on the wall and it smears all the way down the wall.

And I'm in the basement of this pitch black building with my flashlight, my headlamp and I'm like, nope, not doing, not going in here. I don't know. Nope, turning around and going out. So, yeah, that was, was the scariest recovery I've ever done. Of course you get your own head because you're there from.

I was trying to get it done quick. So we were there. I was there from 6am to like 8pm one day and, and then had to go back and just finish up the next day. But I was, you know, it's 8 o' clock at night and I, that's like, nope, that's the end of today. I'm, I'm done.

I'm walking out right now. It's dark outside. I'm, I'm a pansy. I, I yield. Let's go back in the daylight with another person or two to make sure that change together.

This one, I will say demolition jobs were like you never knew, right? Like, I'll throw one more. You go through them and sometimes the local police departments are using them for training and stuff. So you're walking through this building, no power, empty. You're there by yourself.

It might be, you know, 2 million, 3 million square feet, but you're going through admin offices. All of a sudden you walk in and there's these bodies that like outlines of people where they use for training. Right. And you're like, you hit it with your flashlight and there's like this Bob target there. Right.

So demo man, you never knew what. You were going to walk the opening scene to. Was it the old Blade movie where the bodies hanging along in the meat locker? Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's hilarious.

Oh, I love it, guys. Well, let's. So you referenced Rapid Recovery. So let's talk about that. That's actually.

It's really fun. It's a service that one of the companies I was with over the years, we actually used your company years ago. So that's fun. So I have a little bit of firsthand experience there, but let's. Let's rewind a little bit.

So I would like to hear a little bit of the highlight reel. But how'd you guys come together and take us through that journey and then land the plane on where we are now and why? This is an important conversation for today. Sure. You want to go all the way back to talk about Rich with RMS and then transition.

I mean, that's where I met you. I was in high school at the time. That's right. I thought you were gonna go ahead. Yeah, we.

We met in the mid-90s and Les had come on board to a company my. My uncle had owned called Refrigerant Management Services. And it was a basically like a snap on tool truck that picked up refrigerant, recovered refrigerant, emptied cylinders, got rid of disposables, sold refrigerant back to the. To the contractors, sold other things too. But that was the gist of it.

It was basically like a mobile recovery slash reclaim truck. And so we both started working there. Les was in the route sales side and I was driving a recovery truck going out to landfills or chillers one day. One day you're out the landfill doing white goods, hoping they don't split open, leaving you with all their lovely interior of death. And the next day you're doing a chiller and on the top of a high rise or something.

So we met there and then that company was sold and purchased by a publicly traded company. That guy. They basically ended up doing a dot com thing and ended up going out of business. So Les and Rich and I, Rich was the founder of that company, started rapid recovery in 2002 and really focused on that service level of. This is a slow process for most people.

And it's not getting done all too often. And, you know, refrigerant's getting vented. And there's value here for these, particularly for larger systems, but even for cylinders and small systems. But like, there's value in the refrigerant and there's value in time savings. If you're going to sit there for three days trying to recover a bunch of units on a rooftop that have to be replaced, you can have subcontract that out and have it done in hours.

So that was the vision of that. We did that together for, oh, I don't know, till 2016. Sold that to a gas. I spent the next couple of years traveling the world, launching it globally, less stayed in the States and continue to, to work on expanding here in the, in the US stateside. And then we both left in 2019, 2020, and, and from there we said, hey, let's, let's focus on an aspect of this business that while we did a good job of at Rapid Recovery, our clients, that's only a piece of the pie.

Pie. And so, Les, why don't you go through that side of it? Yeah. So real quick in this, in this handover, I'm going to pop in here. Super great for everybody listening because we have a lot of people that listen in a whole bunch of different trades.

So this episode is going to revolve for everybody listening. It's going to revolve around what happens. And it's not strictly HVAC, because a lot of you that listen, you do appliance repair. A lot of you that listen, you do. There's a lot of auto and mechanics and things in this conversation as well that are going to be listening.

And for the rest of you, you might not directly handle refrigerant, but you do work alongside so many people that do. So I want you all to listen through a couple lenses. One is through the lens of, you know, how does this directly affect organizations? But the second lens I'd like everybody to listen to is one of the principles here at Close it now is how do we leave things better than we found it. That's one of the ways that I talk to everybody often, is how we actually.

Everybody says in sales, you have to show value. Well, this is how you show value. Nobody ever tells you how to do it, how to do it. It's leaving things better than you find them. And this is one of the biggest pieces that's being missed and has been missed for, well, decades really, if not years.

And so pay close attention because there's a big opportunity to improve the value that for everybody listening, the value you can bring to your clients through the understanding of what we're about to go through in this conversation. And then if you're not directly responsible, but you know someone who is, pass this episode forward to them because there's a huge opportunity for them to be able to improve the processes of your organization in a way that is cost effective. And also, you don't want to get in trouble with anybody with your regulation entities either. So with that little blurb, go ahead and pick it up where you were at last. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

com stuff. And also we sat down and said, okay, you know, where do we go from here? And we really saw that there's still this need. Right. We don't want to leave a vacuum.

Let's go, let's pick up, let's just start over and just get it, get it going. So rapid recovery was, as Adam says, a service based business. And through that service, by focusing on the service, we ended up handling the refrigerant. Right. Some people would have us leave it on site so they could put it back in after repair.

Some people, we hauled it away for contractors, found that they could go back to getting four compressor change outs a day instead of two. Right. Because we were just so efficient and fast and helped them in that category. But as we went through, we worked with maritime, department of defense, demolition, air conditioned contractors, building owners. And so we got a scrap yards.

And so while it's all one H. VACR industry, um, they all don't understand how the others operate. And we had a very nuanced look into the industry and where the gaps are and why documentation never worked. Yeah, it just didn't work. Siloed, right?

Yeah, they're all siloed. That's exactly right. So, and so we, by getting that view, after we sold, like Adam said, we sat down and said, okay, can we solve it? Yeah, we believe we can. And even as we started in, we're like, oh, in order to solve it, we're going to have to track cylinders.

We're going to be able to have cylinders in inventory and then know what text put in there and what text didn't write, what they, what came back out did they put it in and put it back in. Expand this a little bit. So when you say solve it, get a little clearer on what exactly it is we are solving. Because I feel like we brushed Past that fairly quickly here. Yeah.

So there's a requirement to record, document, and keep on recording refrigerant movements. Right. Any of them. So, I mean, just to give real clarity, this is true on the recovery side, and we kind of glossed over this too. But one of the, one of the market segments we were hitting back in the day was auto salvage yards.

So we would recover cars, like lots and lots of cars, along with the white goods at landfill. But the documentation side is, is a requirement from the time you purchase refrigerant, where did it go? So in which, which appliance, which rooftop unit, which chiller, which grocery rack, whatever it is you're putting the gas into, it has to be tracked. Then the leftover that's in the bottom of that can, the heel that's left over that, that pound that two pounds that you're. That's still in the bottom, that nobody wants to carry back up to the next unit, just to use that little bit, where did that go?

And then when you recover refrigerant and you take it out of a system and put it into a recovery cylinder, where did it go? And to be fair, to be frank, if you're not recovering it, that every system that you're working on that has refrigerant in it, that you do a compressor change out or condenser, you know, swap or whatever it might be, there's a regulatory burden to say what happened to the refrigerant in that system. And so by not doing it, you're effectively saying, I didn't do it. So, yeah, yeah, it's. It's a lot more detailed than I think people.

We've still made a choice. What's that like the, the Rush lyrics? I think it's Tom Sawyer. By not making a choice, we've still made a choice. That's right.

That's right. 100%. So I just wanted to jump in that, that's the, that's the solve it piece is all of those movements and making it really easy to, to. To do that part that nobody's, frankly, nobody's really doing right now. You know, we were all taught to do it in trade school with a, a paper log, and that was the last time we ever looked at a paper log.

So I can tell you from the, from the dozens and dozens of companies I've worked with across the country, I've never seen one. Right, that's right. That's right. And a lot of people focus on the recovery aspect of it. Right.

And we, if they were using Rapid recovery. We solved that piece for them, but it didn't solve the rest of the puzzle for them. I didn't have that. So. Yeah.

Where's it go? Can we pull it out? We're going to put it back in all the things. Right. And there's a dollar associated with all that.

If you're not doing a good job of tracking it and controlling your refrigerant, if you're throwing those disposables away with the heel in it, that's a lot of money that you didn't. Did you just toss in. 3. 3 Million a year, the EPA estimates is lost to disposable heel, the gas left in a can after somebody throws it in their cycle bin. 96.

So one pound per, on average. That means, I mean, when we used to recover these things all the time, you'd go, some of these things would have four, five, six pounds in them. So, you know, some of them have a lot. Some of them people do a really good job and get right down to just vapor and then, then hopefully they call somebody like rapid or they do it themselves or they recover it. So.

And there's more, more rules coming about that we've, we've done such a bad job as an industry. The EPA is making us write down more and more so that they can catch us when we're not doing it. Because right now they're, you know. Well, because they're regulators. All of the basic rules.

The only way they can regulate is giving more rules, which nobody wants, but it's our own fault. Yeah. They have one method of enforcement is the pen. Right. They just write more stuff in and then they pass that onto their enforcement division.

But the regulators, they have a pen, so. Okay, so where was I before I interrupted you? Thanks for the clarification on what it is we're actually solving. And honestly, being in a track for 20 years, I did not know. And I'm sure it was in my original EPA class forever ago, but I didn't know I was supposed to track the movement.

All I knew is, hey, this is, you know, the basics. And hey, I passed and now I can actually work. Let's make some money and. Well, that's it. Yeah, to be fair, Sam, I mean, the original rules were don't vent it, capture it, and.

And that means that's all of it. So don't vent it out of disposals has always been a rule. Just don't vent. Right. So literally everything how to turn somebody in if find somebody else fitting it so you can get your, like get your cash money for turning them in.

That's literally part. Huge part of the test. Yeah. Right. So, I mean, but that has changed.

So in the late. That was really all it was in the. Up until really the end of the 20, 20, 18, 2019. And they and the EPA cleaned up the rules a bunch to help bring clarity because there was a lot of finger pointing going on in the industry. Like, oh, it's my contractor's job to do it, not me as a technician.

And contractors would point at the technician and say, well, they're the certified product person. They have to do the documentation. That's not on me. And, and then all of them would point at the equipment owner and say, but the EPA says that they're the ones who are ultimately responsible. And that's not true either.

They're all, Every one of those people is individually responsible and can be held liable. So it's, they cleared that up. It was, they didn't really change. Change it as much as they said, yeah, we're not going to accept those excuses. So we're going to make it really clear.

Yeah. Yeah. Our saying is the. Who is you? Who is you?

Who is you? Welcome to Whoville. Who. Who is you? So explain what you mean by that.

If, if you are involved in refrigerant anyway. Touch it. You have refrigerated assets on your building. If any way, shape or form, you are responsible to make sure refrigerant is managed and documented on his moves. Got it.

So the EPA lays it out. There's person, entity, government, tribe. It just goes through a whole litany. And if you work in the industry, you have a responsibility to make sure refrigerant within your purview or your circle is documented and accounted for. I love this because here we're all about doing things the correct way.

If integrity is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. And that's what we're all about. So let's take this one step further because when someone. A different way to say that. Let's twist the knife a little bit.

What happens if we're not documenting and for some reason we get audited, then what? So let's talk about the potential consequences and the reason this is such a big deal and then we can pivot over more into how you're solving it. I, I think that's really important that we, that we discuss some of this because I mean, if it, if there's no teeth Then yeah, so what? Yeah, so I'll. Yeah, I wanna cover one thing, then we're gonna move that.

So a. I did a. I did a post today. Refrigerant's got no shelf life like it. It's good forever as long as you get back to reclaimer be reconstituted.

So it is the best of the best practices. It's just about good being of our resources. Right. And it is the lifeblood of refrigerated appliances. So no refrigerant, it doesn't work.

Right. My body, if I start bleeding, I can stop it. But if I leave a lot, my body will reproduce blood and get the. Get it back up our system. Refrigerated appliances systems, they don't do that.

So once it's gone, it's gone. And when system stuff's not coming back in, then it gets lost. So now to your audit question. Our friend Keely Whitman at Refrigerant Management Solutions, who does. Who started the Green Chill program with the epa.

She does a lot of consulting work. She says once you're in an audit, you already lost like you've already lost once you get that paper. So like we go back to like we look at a very recent. The most expensive refrigerant action arguably that we know of is Kroger. 5 Million.

Right. And that, that went back to over. When did they start that? In 14 to 23. Like it spanned that much of a time period, even though that's outside what we see the them saying is the required documentation period.

Yeah, the EPA says you that you have to retain records for three years. So apparently they had done spot audits from what I've gathered now back then. And so they were able to loop in the data they collected back then into a current enforcement action. I didn't know they could even do that. So they got smacked with fines for.

For issues they did back in 2013, 2014, all the way up. And yeah, it's. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. And so today we, we calculated with the.

They have a cost of an increase annually. Right. So it's around $69,000 of maybe 69, 114. I think Adam. Adam would probably know the number exactly.

But 59, 114, it's right at 69 14. Okay, right around 60,000. Right. But Keely did the math and I was just on a training with her the other day, and it's $124,000 per day per violation. 124,000 Plus per day per violation.

And she used that on Kroger's and what the DOJ put in there. So she goes, I don't know how they got that number, but they, that's what DOJ referenced. So that's the number. Could they do that with others? I guess because they did it to.

They did it with Kroger. Yeah. I mean it sounds like it set the precedent. Yeah, but even 60. Right.

Even 10. What if it's $10,000 a day per violation? Right. Yeah. That's such a big number.

Most companies. Yeah. And they have a provision, I mean like I'm going to go down a different road here in a second about this because I want to make it real to the technician and the contractor and not just talk about the big corporate. But the EP has a provision not to bankrupt companies in this regulation. That's a part of their kind of charter, part of their.

What they're commissioned to do by Congress when they set these rules in place. But what they do instead, if you're an equipment owner as an example, is they keep the fine small, even though they could completely destroy you with the fine. And instead they make you, if you're an equipment owner, they'll make you change equipment. They'll say, hey, you haven't been responsible with your, with your R22 systems, so we're going to make you retrofit all of them into something new, lower. Interesting.

Yep. And so that's part of what this, the cost that Kroger's facing is instead of making them pay huge fines, they said, in fact, the fine is really tiny for Kroger, it's two and a half million. The hundred million is what they have to spend upgrading equipment, replacing stuff, putting in a documentation system because they're not doing it today. And so, yeah, I mean, they're gonna spend a hundred million dollars to upgrade, which is good for them. I mean, in the long run, if you think about it over their roi,.

They're gonna save it with efficiency increases, et cetera. But so, so then you go to the technician. It's the same, same amount. If a technician's venting refrigerant, technically they could be hit with that same 59,000. Well, and I again, I Keely did in the DOJ's thing, they listed 124.

I don't know how they got to that number because this is codified stuff. But regardless, the way we see it, the way we've seen it up until this point was 59 grand. So a technician can be hit with that same Thing. And of course, they're not going to bankrupt a technician either. In fact, historically, their fines have been really relatively small to technicians.

We hear a lot. Well, I've never heard of them getting going after a technician. Not true. 7% Of all of the violations they've issued have been against individual technicians. That's not a huge percentage, but that's not zero.

Well, and scale it up a little bit. That's more than two. That's right. There's way more than 100 violations. And if you have more and more ring cameras and stuff and unhappy and people just go, can you prove that that hiss is a vacuum coming out or like, or refrigerant leak?

Right. Like, yeah. I mean, the super bowl commercial proved to us that not only can they find your dogs, they're looking at everything else now too. That's right. So the more and more people have access to just have.

You're on camera from someone's camera angle. Right. And so that makes it easier for disgruntled or whatever to just make submissions and have it on camera. So, so, so to that point, I mean, the technician carries a weight. Usually what happens is they, the first time they get a kind of a slap on the wrist, a small fine, and that's that, that's typically what we're seeing in the, in the historic record.

But if repeat offenders lose their license, you lose your cert. So then you're, then you're out like you've spent your. I mean, I keep going, you know, I'm 55 years old and this is all I've done all my life. And now I've lost the last 10 years of my, my working career and I have to go become a, a plumber or an electrician. Like, I've got skills still, but I lose the thing that I do and I kind of, kind of start over.

Right. That's a pretty late game thing to have to deal with. And so, so that's the big deal for the technician. The contractor is more like the equipment owner. They come after the contractor, they slap them with a fine, they force them to institute documentation systems.

And, and then they, and then they partner with you and your business for the next three years. They stand there and look over your shoulder and you become business partners with the government. Yeah, it sounds awesome. Right? And that's what happens.

Here's your desk. And they, they show up and they say, well, show me all the documentation for the last month. And, and they get into things like how many, how many compressor swaps did you do? Okay, cool. Now show us the recovery for every one of those.

Wow. So I got very granular with it. Wow. Like IRS level. That's.

That's the same accounting structure. So. Yep. It's interesting. I was on a panel last week, Thursday, and the owner of us Pretty Large Scrap Company was on the panel with me, and he said, like, I've been doing this for 30 years and I've never had a encounter until this year.

I've had. I thought I was being raided. And it was e. It was. It was epa, like, and they're asking, where'd these units come from?

They start going through, who sent this to you? Where'd this go? How'd it get scrapped? What's the recovery look like? He goes, but now, just looking at my stuff, they're wanting me to give them information upstream.

Right. So we'll flip you to get to the big. To the next offender who gives you the most of these. Where's your list of client base? Yeah.

So it was interesting because we're on a panel and part of me is like, wow, I can't believe you just said that. You know, it's out loud. Right. But it was shocking because everyone thinks it's not happening, but. And then people go, oh, well, it's not going to happen under Trump.

Well, he's never seen it. And it's happening, like, right now on a panel. He's making the announcement. Yeah. I mean, clearly.

I mean, there's. He worries about way more things than this. It's just if this was happening before him, it'll happen after him. It's just part of the. And when things change again, guess what?

The rules were the same. They didn't just go backwards. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's a wild deal.

I mean, we try not to get focused on this side of it as much because I think we kind of tease inside our company, FM Hero, we joke a little bit, like, we think there'd actually be more compliance in the United States if we weren't told we had to. And we just focused on the financial benefit because there's a real financial reward for doing proper recovery and documentation. Yeah. That's actually where I was hoping to go to next, because now that we've talked about the teeth a little bit. But it is important to know that there is that this does happen.

You know, audits do happen, people do get fined and all the things. But for the bigger part of it is, I mean, geez, think about that technician in the field that's running, you know, seven calls in a day and oh well, my jug is getting low, quote unquote. It's. I can't fill this new unit fast enough so I'm going to go ahead and swap to. And just like you were saying, there's 2, 3, 4 pounds left in there that, well, it ran slower so it gets pushed aside.

I need a new jug. What happened to the old one? I don't know. I've still got it. I'll keep it for who knows what.

Posterity. And so it ends up banging around in the van until it gets put out in the scrapyard. And that happens. Multiply it by thousands of times every single day. Now we're really running into some, you know, a massive amount of refrigerant that doesn't have a home and is not being tracked.

Yep. Or commercial rooftop. You're aging the cylinders by how sun faded they are, right? Exactly. Like there's 30 of them up there and you're like, oh, that one was.

Nobody wants to carry their trash back down. You're like, hey, that one still has a black handle on it. That's pre 1990, whatever it was six or whatever whenever they switched to the one way valve. Oh, even crazy. I was on one one time and we were started to track back by refrigerant types.

Not just the ages. It's like, okay, we're okay. How far back are we here now? There's still an R12 can up here. Yeah, yeah, A hundred percent.

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, let's talk about that for a second. Break it down for us. Say, you know, I'm a company, I've got, I don't know, let's take an average size company has, call it three to five technicians in the field. What, what kind of monetary difference could you actually be looking at if you paid attention here?

Yeah, it's. Yeah, that's fine. You'll go in there, I'll just high level it. It's significant, right, because if you look at the margin you make when you sell refrigerant and you leave £4 in a disposable, right, that, that adds up. You didn't sell that refrigerant, right?

It just went away and you didn't document it. So now you're setting yourself up for a fine on the back end. Um, same thing on recovered. If you let that refrigerant go in the atmosphere, people will pay you for it. So not only do you set yourself up to be in violation, you didn't monetize it like you Should.

To offset other costs. Right. And go, so there you're just giving up profitability. Right. And you can.

It doesn't take that long. I think one of the problems is people have never been taught how to properly recover. Right. Well, it takes them way longer than what should. And, you know, the Stewart brothers do a great job of going, hey, you want to make it go faster?

Here's how you do it. Like, forget that. Like, this is how you do it. And Jesse and Zane, they're big on that. Right.

And so teach them how to take that long. So Lesta, Jesse and Zane are with the, with navac, and they do a lot of training on just general training. It's not just about NAVAC products. They're great guys and they're shouting from the rooftops like, recovery is required. Do it.

And it's not hard and it doesn't take long. So it's one of the things they, they have a bunch of stuff. They, they do a great job. So any of your listeners who are looking for, you know, additional insights, they're fun to listen to, they're fun to talk to, but we'll make sure you. Get the link in the show notes too, for everybody that's listening and you want to.

To go check them out. Yeah. So that. That's who he's talking about. And they, they walk through how to do recovery quickly.

I've done a few podcasts from. Based on. Instead of on the Hero side, like, tell us how to recover faster. Because that was my background. So, like, sure.

So it's not that hard. So I love it. Well, let's talk about FM Hero, because I feel like this is such a cool product that is now that, now that we've really gone down the road of. We all know we should do this if we're anywhere in the industry at all, we can act like we don't or act like we hadn't heard it. But we know we should be recovering, we should be documenting.

We should be. Every time refrigerant moves in or out of an appliance, any type of appliance, we need to notate it, period. Now, the constraint has always been that paper, document, et cetera, you know, who's got it on the board, it just gets shredded. Nobody knows what to do anything with it. The office doesn't know what to do with it once if it is filled out.

So I feel like this is the biggest. It's not that the structure. I. From my experience of over 20 years in the industry, I feel like people would do it if there was an easier way, because the barrier of entry to actually document this is so big right now without an easy way to do it. So, FM hero, tell.

Tell us more about where this idea came from and the brainchild for this. And then what does it look like actually putting some, you know, fleshing it out and getting some feet to this thing. Sure, Adam. So HERO is designed right, to, at the end of the day, if you can, if you track your refrigerant and you control it, you can be more profitable. And when you do those things, you automatically solve the compliance side.

So what needs to happen, it. It can't be difficult. Right. You're already working in the heat, in the rain, in whatever conditions, environmental conditions you're in. Right.

And so putting on a piece of paper, writing all the stuff, tracking it, it doesn't work. It's been proven. Nothing we've done over the last 30 years has proven to get any motivation. So we knew it had to be easy. Scan feature.

Everyone carries their phone everywhere they go. So you pull it out, you scan the piece of equipment. The AI reads the make, model, serial number. We trust but verify. Yep.

Because that's the right unit, this is the right address. And you just start tapping buttons. No typing. Like everything else out there was like a glorified spreadsheet. You had to manually enter from on your phone.

That sucks too, right? No one does. And people trying to get it in the right cell. And so you expand it out and then you miss the cells and it ends up in bad data entry. And what happened is the people who did it for, they're like, what do we need to know?

And they go through this series of checkboxes. So you're answering questions that have nothing to do with what you're doing. They don't understand the workflow. We from being in the field, working with contractors, working with, we understood the workflow. So every.

There's. If you're fixing a leak, there's nothing. It's going to go through the series, it's going to go in order of what you need to do. And you're tapping buttons. We eliminated as much typing as possible.

Now you can make notes, you can put stuff in there, you can make adjustments, character adjustments if you miss it. But we knew it had to be easy. And you can literally do all of the information you need to do in about a minute. Right now, you're documented. Your contractor has the right stuff.

And the equipment owner can have the stuff. Same stuff. Because there's a single Source of truth. There's no getting back to office and someone typos it or that this one never gets entered. So now you have these gaps.

So Evan Hero allows a technician to be compliant in about a minute, a couple minutes on the job. Right. And everyone shares the same information. Everyone's in compliance. The contractor's more profitable, the equipment owner's more profitable, because they actually know what's going on as well.

Right. So it's a bunch of stuff when you get into like, leak loss rates, which is just changed down to 15 pounds, that's 1 5, not 5, 0 like the popo. It's 1 5. So, you know, it tracks all that. We're tracking leak loss rates on everything.

So that's the gist of it. How can we make this simple and actually make the workflows work so that it makes sense in the field? And look, I'm part of the guinea pig because our dev team would be like, oh, that is cool. I'm like, I would never do it. Like, why?

I would never do it. It doesn't matter why. I'm just telling you, right? There's one more step that won't get done. Yeah, exactly.

So I was kind of a barrier to entry. And to be fair, look, there's. I mean, we say this at rapid with recovery, so it's a very similar concept. Not recovering. Using a Sawzall is always going to be faster than recovering.

Doing the right thing is not the easy road. It takes a little bit of effort. If you do it well and it becomes a system for you. It doesn't take long. So documentation, if you're not documenting, that takes less time than documenting.

Like, it's just. That's a fact. But what we found is when. When people start getting into the. Getting into the platform, first off, it matches, like Les said, it matches the workflows of the technicians in the field.

So it's not hard for them to. To get it because it's like, okay, just do these three steps and, you know, scan the unit, pick the cylinder, type in how much. I took out £12. Good, done. That's it.

It just documented the unit. It documented the tank, it documented the refrigerant flow. Like, we took all the extra complexity and got three data points from you, and that's all we needed. And then the rest of it is, is record keeping, documentation, so on. And it's all handled by the app.

You shouldn't have to do any of that. That's all stuff that should be easy. And it provides that Same level of compliance, like Les said, to the equipment owner and to the contractor. So that everybody has that single source of truth. What we knew was ultimately it all comes down to the technician standing at the unit.

And if that technician isn't doing the documentation or isn't doing the recovery or isn't doing the thing, it doesn't help anybody. I mean, nobody can benefit from that and nobody else can create the documentation because they weren't there. So it does take time. But what we've also discovered is that it doesn't take very much refrigerant before people start going, wait a minute, I gave away 10%, 20% of my pallet of gas or my can of gas. Let's go back to that disposable.

Because it's really, really easy to get this in your head. We had a 454B shortage last year. I know this seems super simple. Define disposable versus not. Because realistically, as many places as I've been, this is the.

And I'm going to be real with everybody listening too. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone reference disposable as the. As a refrigerant tank as the vessel in this conversation. So no. No one I know calls it a disposable.

Yeah, we spent too long in the reclaim space. So we're tainted by our history. Yeah, yeah. Find that and then that'll help out. Basically three categories of cylinders that we interact with in the.

In whether you're auto or HVAC space. Right. If you're handling refrigerant, it comes in three packagings. One is a, you have a recovery cylinder. It's a refillable reusable cylinder with closable valves that can go refrigerant, go either direction, in and out.

It's gray and yellow. Sometimes it's gray and yellow with a red band. Because it's a 2L certified. They come in different pressure ratings. So that's a recovery cylinder.

We're all familiar. Then you have refillables. Most of our industry doesn't use a refillable refillable cylinder. Most of the rest of the world does. So our new refrigerant comes in a dispo.

Typically a disposable can we use it. It has a one way valve. You can only take gas out of it. You can't put gas back in it. And so.

And it. And I mean even guys who have figured out ways to do that, it's illegal, that it's been made illegal to do that. So it's a one way, one time use device. And when it's fully, the EPA requires you to evacuate it. So it's supposed to go into a vacuum before you render it useless, which is also in the rules.

You got to smack a hole in it, break the valve off, do something that makes it unusable, and then it can go. This is what we've typically known as our. The pink jug or the green jug or whatever we're using at the time. Color coded according to that. The ones you're leaving on the roof and throwing the dumpster, not taking the heel out of those are disposable.

Those are disposals. And they're trying to change the colors on us now because they're like, oh, there's too many different colors we shouldn't do with. That's the whole thing. But anyway, you gotta love it. We just keep changing every time it gets normal, it's not normal anymore.

Right, of course. So those are disposables. And so those things you buy. And then we had a 454B shortage, as everybody who's in the HVAC space knows last year. And you're getting now back with R22, you'd get £30 in a container in one disposable.

And then we went to 410 and we got £25. And now we're in 454B and R32 and we get 20. So if you left £2 in that compared to a 30 pounder, it's a better loss ratio. But the less they put in each cylinder. Now 2 pounds out of 20 is 10%.

So just by doing that alone, with no other leakage off the back of the truck, nobody taking, stealing gas, nobody doing side jobs with your gas as a contractor, none of that, you're automatically giving up about 10% of everything you buy. And that's just a lot. And it's usable gas. I know people, people don't like to. But when you're paying, I mean, what were we paying last summer?

60, 80 Bucks a pound sometimes for that stuff. It's wild, right? And so, I mean, you're talking about leaving 150 bucks or whatever inside of a cylinder when you, when you get rid of it. That's absolutely. Well, and I mean there's companies all over that, you know, they're reselling it.

You know, the price to the client is anywhere between 2 and 300 a pound, 325, 350 sometimes, depending on the market. So holy crap. If we're leaving 2 pounds, that's $800,. Potentially $800 in revenue and $150 in cost and you just throw it away. Yeah, that's crazy.

It doesn't take much. This is super top of mind for me because it's one of the things I do is help companies not only do sales training increase their revenue on that side. We're super deep into helping a company become efficient and get rid of a lot of this waste. And most people don't realize they literally. And 20%, whatever their number is, the size of their company, if you can take that gross margin line and multiply it by 15 to 20% and sitting in their company, that should have gone to the bottom line through things like this.

Yes. So two things I want to talk about on that. One is once you put a system in, we call it the heroverse, it's in there, like when you go back to that address, it's going to show up, it's already going to be on site. If it doesn't show up, you're going to add one that the one that wasn't added in, but it stays in there. So it's a one entry deal.

The next time someone goes out there, same, different company. That system lives in the heroverse. It's already in there and it'll pull up for you and you start working. Two is if to your point on the contractors, imagine you can sit at your office and see what Les has on his truck for inventory. Right.

Or how come Les has three empty recovery cylinders and he hasn't turned one in for four months. Those are red flags. Yeah. Les is costing us money and Les is putting in us putting us in a compliance violation at the same time. Right.

So when you can get sit there and scan everything in and see every transaction real time, not waiting for an upload. But as they're working in the field, you can say, do we have a training issue with less? We have a character issue with less. Is less need to do? We need to replace less?

So we need to. We think you can go, right? So depending what it is, maybe it's new gas being sold. How come, Wait a minute, that cylinder shows £10 still in there. How come you're turning it in with £1, trying to get another one?

Where'd the £9 go? Right. Where'd it go? Cause there's no transactions in your record showing where it went. Oh, right.

So you can start developing patterns and seeing that and you could go in and say, hey, we noticed on your inventory you might not be aware, but you need to come in and swap tanks tonight so you don't have to do it in the morning. Right. So I don't want you ended up. Your first call is two and a half hours from here. Don't get there with no refrigerant.

That's right. So to your point, as you're coaching, it gives them complete view of their team inventory and what's on individual's trucks. If I gave a cylinder to Adam, we swapped, it would transfer for everyone into his inventory and out of mine. Oh, interesting. A layer deeper than our conversation the other day about this.

Yeah. So there's a chain of custody. Think of it like this. It's a chain of custody every time someone touches it and it's self cleaning. Every time someone uses their answers data, it cleans itself.

And it's the most recent data available. If you play that out, every cylinder that's ever entered into the heroverse lives there. And so as it's used and transferred and moved around, you don't have to reenter the manufacturer and the recertification date and the other things that are stamped on the side of the cylinder. So that saves time because less well, and we don't require that the user does it. But some of us, like me, I'm super anal or attentive about that.

I'd get it and I'd be like, that's not right. I'd adjust it. Well, from then on, the next person who gets it gets the benefit of the fact that that's my personality. And so operations manager or somebody that's actually watching this would be doing the same thing. So, you know, Lassie is not going to enter all that.

He's going to enter the bare minimum, the serial number and the size of the cylinder and the type, disposable recovery or refillable mind blown. And so, you know, it's really easy. And then, and then TESS is what we were talking about with these transfers, right? They're a. It's like, it's like the Tinder app.

You swipe left and you can consolidate tanks. If you swipe right, you can, you can pick it up from less or pick it up from the shop or whatever. So you can transfer really easily. So it had to be easy because Les and I wouldn't use it if it wasn't. We're not programmers, I'm not a programmer, but I know when I pick up an app and I go, this app sucks.

Do it again. And our clients do the same thing, Les, because the Industry is kind of hard on each other. This feature sucks. Do better. It's like, okay, what exactly sucks?

Let's get on a call. And we hear it. It's like, all right, cool. And then two releases later, six weeks later, they're like, holy cow, they redid that whole thing. So we get this feedback loop where people are shock that we're actually listening and making it better and better.

So it's really good today because we've had tens of thousands of people use it, and we get feedback and it says, do better. And so we. You know, I tease my kids all the time, do better. Do better. You can do better.

You know, I love the theme here because it's. I mean, our whole industry is. Well, for a long time, it's been in that place of do better. You know, we have this opportunity to be. When the standard is set so low, it's not difficult to be exceptional.

And we have a responsibility, in my opinion, for all of us inside any vertical. If it's specifically HVAC, we're talking about today, but anything that touches just service. We're home service at the foundation, and we have to remember that. Or not necessarily home service, but plenty of the commercial sides of all the different aspects as well. But it's still service.

We're working for someone else to provide something that they need, and the missing piece is the humanized part of it. But also, our industry can do so much better. But we've just gotten away with being, for lack of a better word, lazy, mediocre and mediocre for so long. And so I'm really excited that you guys are doing this. There's Sam.

We're in the. We're in the service business, too. Right? Like our. Even though we give our app away free to technicians, we use a paid subscription for contractors who want to manage their 2, 3, 5, 200, whatever guys, techs, and, you know, so we have paid solutions.

That's how we continue to pay for the app. But it's free to technicians, and we still look at them as. That technician is my client. Whether he's paying me or not, I provide this tool and I accept. I'm expected to do a good job.

And so we have. Yeah, I don't get in. You don't get in. Like Google Maps. There's not a way to say, hey, your app needs to be fixed here, or do this better.

But that's right. Embedded in our app, so it's really easy to do it. Oh, I like it. Go ahead, Les. As I say, you go to your profile and there's a help and support button.

You click that, you submit. If you have an issue, it goes straight to our dev team within the. App and we respond. I'm actually for Everybody that's on YouTube, I'm actually looking at. I have the app.

I'm looking at it right now. So I love this. So a couple questions then. So you mentioned a couple things there, but I want to unpack it a little bit. First of all, for a company, when is the.

I have a feeling I know the answer here, but what's the right size for a company to bring this in and start training it into their team? When you open one, if you're a sole proprietor, you can do it for free, right? So you do that, right? If you have two techs, you want to do that too, right? You want to take control of that inventory refrigerant, you want to make sure you're being profitable.

And when you do that, you solve compliance. Well, when you do. This is a leading question. I wanted to get you guys into that. So walk us through that though, because you mentioned the individual tech.

So first of all, just to go way back for everybody listening, what we're talking about is an app that is available on, not just in the Apple Store, but also in the Google Play Store for Android, because I happen to have Google Pixels, so I know that. And so we're talking about an app that anyone can access and it's a free app to download. And so talk us through your, your tiers there. So because. And I'd love to hear your.

Your mindset around giving it away to the technicians. Let me do that one. I mean, I want. They didn't sign on to do this, right? That's not what they want to fix stuff.

Right. And now they're burdened with keeping all this documentation individually. And there's not a practical way for doing. Look, I talked to a guy from the epa, said that's there's not a practical way for them to do it. You're requiring to do something.

There's not a practical way. We're going to solve it and we're going to give it to them for free so that they can do it in a couple of minutes without a lot of effort and solve their problem. And they are. They're the ones that get to be the hero at the job site and fix the unit. And we need that refrigerant to come back in and whatever we can do to make it easier for them to do it and get Them to get it back in and stay in compliance and help their company make more money.

It's free for them. There's a paid version for people who want web access and stuff like that. But what you need to be in compliance is free. And that's our commitment to keep it free. Nice, because they didn't sign up to have to do all that regulatory stuff.

And I know this isn't going to answer your question yet, but I'll get there. This spring, we were at HVAC Excellence, which is ESCO's group of educators get together every year for a convention and talk about how we can do better. How do we educate the next generation, the current generation, with professional development, better and better. And so we're there and that's not a sales avenue for us. This is because we believe in the future of the industry and we want to support the educators and the entire industry, frankly, as new techs come in.

And so this year we rolled out, we started rolling out a free version to trade schools. So we provide for free our platform to trade school programs all over the country. And then every technician who goes through every lab that they do, they're using FM Hero as a part of the lab to document the work they're doing. So they learn how to do it practically side by side with the work they're doing. We do that with.

I mean, for example, all of Lennox training centers are, are a part of this. They're doing it. So they've got nine training centers in North America, a couple in Canada, I think north of Maryland and the US and they're using it at all of those. In fact, we just found out the other day from the guy who's running that program. We were on a podcast with him and he's like, oh, yeah.

And we give our final through the app. We're like, you what? So they're actually judging. That is the final. Is you go do these things, you document it and we read what you say you did in the app and that, well, and for them, they're getting a backend portal and all this stuff, but they're reading what you submitted through this work order platform and they see what you did.

So anyway, I just wanted to point out we're doing it because we, because we care about. About the people in the field, because that's where we started and it stinks to have this burden that. And then there's no way good way to do it. So, yeah, and there's a. With the new regulations, the amount the refrigerant recovery rate has to go up because of the change of regulation.

Certified reclaim responsibility, right? Yeah, we haven't even touched on that stuff. Haven't even touched it. There's a huge thing there before we go down that road and we'll see how Sam's going to curve us on time because apparently we can go forever here. But to answer your original question, we have a free version to technicians.

We have a paid version that technicians can get if they want extra stuff. And by the way, almost all the features are in the free version. Like Les mentioned. You can have a web, an online web portal which lets you put in things like a logo to use if you're a one man operator. That's probably the way to go.

If you have a couple of guys. On an annual subscription. Like this is not a, like it's 15 bucks a month on an annual subscription. Yeah, that's nothing. Yeah.

So. And then we have a paid subscription for contractors and we have contractors who have two people and we have contractors with, you know, the hundreds of people who are working inside the platform and they can work together. And so it's an integration between the technician, the contractor and the equipment owner. And so the last piece is we have an entire platform for people who own the equipment and have a, they have a regulatory burden too. So any of your listeners out there who are working in the commercial space and work on equipment with a circuit or circuits that have 15, 15 pounds or more, they need to know that their clients have an obligation they're unaware of.

So it's kind of incumbent on us in the industry to help educate our client about the thing they don't know anything about. So when you go on their roof and they've got a box car with two circuits and each one's got £30 in it, that unit, both circuits are, are considered regulated appliances by the epa. And there's a whole pile of stuff that they are, they have to know and they have to do and that you have to do for them. So there's a lot there. We have just, just throwing this out as a quick thing for those of you who are like this because we could get lost in that for an entire episode of this by itself.

com, they're free, you know, they're not gated. You don't have to give us your email address or anything. Go on there and get those. One is aimed at the contractor to help them Understand their rules and what is required of technicians and contractors. And then there's one oriented towards equipment owners, which if you're a contractor, you should read that one too, because that tells you what your customers should be requiring of you and what they have to do, which you can help them with.

So, man, this is a huge. So, I mean, my brain is always like, how do we use it, this type of information and how do we apply it? Well, how we apply that, everybody is. This is one of the easiest ways to completely differentiate yourself from everyone else, because we all know the likelihood of, say, they're getting bids and, you know, five guys, five gentlemen or ladies walking. In in a row and everyone's talking.

About this is none. It's just not going to happen. And so when you're the one who comes in and says, not only can we do this work, we're here to protect you, Mr. Building Owner, Mr. Equipment Owner, Mr.

Whatever. Ms. Building Owner. We're here to protect you and keep you in compliance as well as us. We're a partner here.

Let's have a real conversation of what this needs to look like long term. No one else speaking like that. And when you have a tool like this to ensure that it happens. Wow. My brain is going in about a thousand different directions of how this is such an awesome thing for the industry.

Go ahead. I was just going to talk to that contractor that came to. They're like, hey, can we buy our clients subscriptions? And we'll write in our service agreement with them. We'll pay for it, but that'll lock us in for service agreements because we're gonna do it.

And we're like, sure, right, Absolutely. And so they're using it as a way to secure work and keep the others out who don't know the rules and regs. They get to go in and say, hey, here's what. You aware that all the. Oh, no.

Are you getting. No, we'll pay for your subscription to manage your facility and we'll do all the work and you'll get real time notification as we're working of what's happening. Wow. That's all the leak rates on your system for sure. Yeah.

So it's a big deal that turns. Compliance from a cost center to a profit center as a contractor. And that's particularly valuable, obviously, in the commercial side. Right. So you're talking about people who have facilities and they're managing multiple pieces of equipment and need to.

And they have a regulatory burden. They could try to do it in a spreadsheet we have. If people say, I'm going to do it in a spreadsheet, it's like, okay, you can do your accounting in a spreadsheet too. But most of us have software to do it because it's better. The other day and it cracked me up.

I'm going to shout to my buddy Christian on this one. It was a meme that floated around. It's like, well, you can buy sushi at a gas station too, but I sure wouldn't advise it. That's right. So there's one area here.

So I mean, this is a profit center for people. When you're. We covered a bunch of this, but rewinding the tape a little bit, we're not only tracking for you, really easy for you, but we're tracking all of the asset itself, that piece of equipment, all of the movements, refrigerant in and out of that, all the cylinders, who has them, who had them, and all the refrigerant movements in and out by who? By whom. Whatever their proper grammar is there somebody can correct me on that.

So if I pass a cylinder to less and I use, you know, maybe it's a disposable or new term of the day, and I used, you know, a portion of it and I. And Les takes it from my truck or I hand it to him and we track, you know, swipe it in the app. So it's going to him and he. He starts using it. It's going to show that on this date at this time, I transferred it to Les.

He now has possession of it. It'll show that I used X number of pounds and ounces out of it. It'll show what Les used up. So we're tracking all of the refrigerant movements in and out of cylinders, in and out of equipment, all that. And I bring that up because ultimately this is about having the legal documentation we're required to and turning that into a profit center instead of a cost center.

And then there's a last piece that Les started to go into earlier that we can at least hit a high level. And that is. I know people have heard this before and this is going to sound like the sky is falling. And I've been in this since the 90s. And I'm going to tell you this is a different scenario.

We have a major supply shortage coming, like worse than anything you've seen before. Everything else was a wave in the wave pool. And this is tsunami. That's what we're talking about. I'm not trying to be Overly dramatic, but it's a big deal.

It's a way bigger deal than the risk of you getting fined. Yeah, it's the reality. So it's way more of a risk than getting fined. It's way more of a risk than losing a few pounds here and there that is bleeding, bleeding your company. That all, all of that should be enough.

But I'm going to warn you, in 2029, the amount of refrigerant that we currently have to use in systems that were installing yesterday and still sometimes today, not a lot, but there's still 410A systems being installed. Right. The technology transition rule just pushed some stuff around. And so people can be installing this equipment today, Those systems that we've installed yesterday, last year, the year before, five years ago, when they need refrigerant, we will have a massive shortage and they will need it. And so, and I say that because in 2029 though, the volume gets cut in half of what it is today.

And the only way to make up the supply shortage is through recovered refrigerant going back through reclaim. And if we're not recovering, the recovery rate in the United States is 3%. It's 3%. So, yeah, it's terrible. And so, you know, if you're like, yeah, I don't recover, I do bucket recovery and you think this is a joke, I'm just gonna flatly tell you a, it's illegal.

Don't, don't do it. It's dumb anyway. It's just dumb. Don't do it. It's dumb.

And you're cut. You're cutting off the branch you're sitting on because in three years you're gonna go to get refrigerant from the supplier. And if you're a 12 man shop, you have no negotiating authority with that supplier. You are not the big boy you've got. You get nothing.

And so you're not going to get it. I remember when R22 more than tripled in price overnight. I watched it happen in real time. And I can see it easily hitting thousand bucks a jug before it even hit, before it gets to the place of. And you can only buy one a week and oh, sorry, we're out.

Yep, yep. And that's what it's going to do. It's going to get straight up to you're out. Because there just isn't enough. And the people who have what's happening right now is the wholesalers and the reclaimers are working on programs with the big boys who are paying attention, who get it?

They have an inside track because they have time, honestly to think about it. Yeah. Because the rest of us are. It's not like tangible, micro like we deal with. Right?

Yeah. Today I'm just trying to put food on the table. And so these guys are thinking and planning ahead. And so they're building programs where any refrigerant they turn in, they'll be able to buy back later. And so they're kind of building a bank, so to speak, of future value that the people who aren't recovering and even in some of the people who are, and they're smaller just aren't thinking about.

So anyway, this is really important because if we don't recover, we have a major, major problem. And I'll put this into perspective one more in one other way. If you installed a system last year that is going to be under warranty still in three years when this problem happens and a compressor goes out and it's under warranty and you take, you go and you do whatever you're gonna do with the refrigerant, vent it or not, and you take the compressor out and you go get the new compressor and you go to put it in. But you can't buy the refrigerant. There are no snap approved replacement refrigerants for 410A.

There are zero. It is not legal to put something else in there. You can't put 454 in there. You can't put 32 in there. If you do, that's illegal and dangerous.

And what's gonna happen is somebody's house is gonna end up having a problem and they're gonna have a fire or something else. I'm not, I'm not the big doom and glimmer. This stuff isn't nearly as dangerous as everybody makes it out to me. But the reality is it's illegal. And guess who they're gonna come after?

It's just not gonna work right. Blame. Then it won't work right. So. So I just.

Just be careful, guys. We gotta get this stuff recovered. We gotta do a better job. And if we don't, we're kind of. Like I said, we're cutting off the branch we're sitting on right now.

We won't get the product. Just go punch yourself in the groin. Right. It'll feel better. You will feel better than that.

Because I mean, like I said, I remember when that happened. I mean the company I was at at the time, the owner, he had to go buy an extra 30 pack that day. Because the day before he was literally on the phone with the supply house to order for the old price for this R22. When the change happened, he was on the phone with the supply house to order a full pallet, got sidetracked, ended up, oh, I'll just call him tomorrow. The very next day when he called, it had gone up by.

It was just over double. And so our $7,000, $7,500 pallet of R22 was now 15, which was not budgeted for because why would it be? And so that's a small taste of what's coming. So you know. Yeah, and coming up to that is we were, that was back in our rapid days.

Right. So I was already going around talking to contractors, doing meetings, saying hey, look, and if you want price stability and availability, you need to start recovering more refrigerant and sending it in. We did that, we did that pitch for two years. Cause we knew it was coming. And that's nothing compared to what's coming.

And it's different because 22 had two advantages. One, there were a bunch of SNAP approved replacement gases. Yeah, that's a big deal. You're allowed to put. Yep.

At all these drop ins. And two, there were big systems that used 22 chillers, refrigeration systems and so on that were being actively retrofitted by the. Particularly in the grocery space they had big, you know, racks with 1200, 1500, £2,000 in them. And they were retrofitting those out. So they're sucking out the R22 and they were putting in 407 or what, whatever.

Right. They're putting in other gases. And so as the 22 came out, it was going back to reclaim and was made available. If 410A, that's. There aren't.

There aren't big 410A chillers out there. There aren't refrigeration racks that use 410A. So what it's the only source is those small units that you, that we all work on every day, those rooftop units, those home units. Like that's where it's coming from or it's not. I had a guy come me the other day, he's like, yeah, they told me about R11, that, about R11 too.

But I can still buy it today. I'm like, yeah, because someone recovered it and sent it to a reclaimer. That's the only reason. That's how it got by the end of our conversation. He's like, well, I think you're right.

There's going to be a problem. There might be a problem. Well, since you guys are so in have such a knowledge of the refrigerant space and I'm glad you do and thank you for being on the show. We got to land this plane here in a second but I'd love to take a quick little detour looking into the future because there are zero drop inside for, you know, for 410. And like looking ahead, what do you is.

I mean obviously somebody's going to develop something. So I remember two things happened because I want to talk about this and what the implications of this. Two things happened with the R22 when it went away and we turned to 410 and all of the shortages and the step down and all of that. One is I remember some of the. Because I'm in Texas, we have access.

I remember getting phone calls from companies that say hey, we've got a new 18 wheeler that just came up from Mexico. How many do you want? Part two to this conversation is all of the drop ins that became available. Even that didn't exist before. So I'm curious to know Yalls perspective and your take on two sides of this one is that level of availability.

This is a hard topic episode. This is something no one's talking about, we have to talk about. And this is also what people are thinking. It's like oh, I'll just buy it from off the back of the truck. One what do you think the likelihood one we think the likelihood of that is two is.

I mean we've got two and a half years. Some kid somewhere is eyeballing this sucker going what would it take to develop a drop in and do you think that the potential for that and what's the likelihood of that to happen between now and then as well? Les, you want to take the illegal imports because you got a great story about that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I do.

That's going back a while and I'll get there. But there's regularly. I see counterfeit refrigerant fines coming out pretty regularly. I mean they're watching it way closer than they're watching it back then. There's no quality control.

So you're likely have issues. You know who's selling. Right. Buy your steak from the guy in the supermarket parking lot instead of the supermarket. Right.

That's kind of. We're doing sushi at the gas station. Had a guy a long time ago call me up when 12 was really expensive and he said hey, this stuff's not working right. And you have a tester right? I said, yeah.

So I went over there and I drew a sample. I'm like, yeah, this is R22. But they were all white jugs. They had labels on them. Right.

He goes, where'd you buy it? He goes, guy in the station wagon. I had a good deal. Well, he went out of business. He didn't need it anymore.

He gave me a great deal. I'm like, yeah, I took one of those cans, I scraped it under the asphalt and it was green underneath. So someone just went out and bought a bunch of R22 for back when it was like a buck a pound back then. Right. I remember flats would fill our tires with it.

Yep. Printed labels and put it there. And R12's worth, you know, 12, $14 a pound. And this guy's getting a good deal. Cause he's paying 7.

Half the price. So we paid $7 a pound for R22. Right. So, you know, you can do what you want. You can make bad choices all day.

Bad choices is why we're here. And the people who are going to make bad choices are going to buy their refrigerant off the back of a truck. Who's got a great deal for you? Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I'm glad you told that.

And, you know, that's such a valuable lesson that, you know, I have a feeling that, you know, one of the companies I was at, we came across a little bit of that because we were having some issues. And it wasn't the prettiest for a little bit until we've made it through that amount of jugs that we got. Right. Because how do you think he figured out it wasn't working? Right.

He had put it in systems that weren't working and he had to go back out and fix them too. Like, oh, yeah, it was a horrible drainage. Yep, for sure. So. And for everybody listening, no, this is not an admission of guilt, but I'm telling stories from my past in the field.

I don't know. I won't share any of those. I know. These are recorded, right? This is the blueprint.

You're going to cover the snap approval. Yeah. No, I chopped it all up to when we didn't know it was one thing. But now that we know, we can do better, right? That's right.

On the other side of the question, you know, the slot covers imports. Les did mention there's a lot more oversight on every import. And people. There's stories out of a guy out of Georgia, I think it was, who was illegally importing refrigerant and new. And his employees said, hey, are we allowed to do this?

I thought there was a rule. And he said, I don't care, we're doing it anyway. It's a quarter of the price, whatever. And he ended up getting filed, signed and getting shut down. They actually just.

He's, he's out, he's off, he's done. He's his business. Pulled the license and everything. Yeah, Yep. So I mean, you know that.

So that's legit. On the other side, there are refrigerants currently in process for SNAP approval. So that will help if they get approved. There just aren't any yet. Some there.

We were talking with some of the folks over at Esco the other day and they were asking about one because they did a podcast and they, somebody, they made the comment, there are no SNAP approved refrigerants for this. And somebody said, no, there are. See here. And they sent them a website and on that company's website it says that they are SNAP approved. So we dug in.

Esco dug in. We cannot find that. So we've now got a petition or request. We. I say we.

Esco's asked the EPA to verify and if it's, if it's real, then where is it? Because we can't find it in the SNAP registry. So even that, just because somebody says it's legitimate, scrape it on the pavement and check because, you know, dig a little deeper, Dig a little deeper to find out if it's real. But we know of some legit real. I mean, I'm not saying that they're not legit.

That could be legitimate. But we also know some real legitimate companies that are in the process that have started their petition in 2000 or 2020. So they're six years in and it's not approved yet. Still not approved yet. And there's no reason.

It's not like it's bad gas or it's like a bad. It's like there's no reason. Like, I mean, these are legit guys who are good at what they do. They make good products and they've been. Waiting now made enough money to lobby the politicians yet.

That's right. That's a whole different conversation. Yeah. So the timeline. Right.

Just because people. Oh, it's coming out. It's coming out. Six years. Hasn't come out by people who know what they're doing and know the process and who knows what the delay is.

But it's not anyone that tells you that something's right around the corner. They're Just guessing. Yeah, got it. So you need to prepare for the. Long haul and that's really just a band aid to the bigger problem, which is do it right to start with, which is what we're talking about here today.

If refrigerant was coming back in, we wouldn't even have the conversation. Recovery rates are sitting at 35, 40%. We wouldn't be having this conversation if they'd been at that rate for the last 10 years. Japan runs a 44% recovery to reclaim rate. It's one of the highest in the world.

And so we're not looking like it's like a hundred percent because there's gases that like, I don't know, those little inhalers, medicine inhalers, they have refrigerant in them and so that's a one time use propellant. So the propellants account for this too. And so you know there, there, there is some amount of gas that won't come back. But the thing with those is they've changed them already so they're not using up the allotment for 410A. So, so the only solution for our problem is ourselves.

We have to do the recovery and it will help, it will make a difference. And of course we do need some SNAP approved replacements to help and we do need like it's going to take a lot of things, not just one, but the biggest one is recovery. It's the easiest one to do and fix. So I love guys, recovery and just being efficient. Stop wasting stuff.

That's right. Stop throwing it away. It is insanely valuable. People aren't tracking it, so love it guys. Well, thanks for being on for everybody.

It's been a pleasure, gentlemen, chopping it up with y'. All. Thanks for going a little long today. God, there's so much to cover in this topic though. When we really get under the hood it's like there's just so many and, and like you said, there's five different ways that we could go and take up another hour on each one because they are important, they are an integral part of anything that touches refrigerant.

So like I mentioned at the beginning, everything from automotive to appliance to H Vacr, all the refrigeration that happens, big commercial, all the residential, every bit of it. And so it touches our lives every single day no matter what component of that we're in. And we've got to do better. And so like you're saying do better and so that, that applies to all of us. It takes a village to really turn the ship around.

And you know, we're in one of those industries that it's such a big old slow moving vessel. It takes so long to turn and I'm, I, I'm, I'm really at the, well, there's a handful of topics that need addressed in our industry that, but I'm to the place where if we don't start moving faster, the regulations are going to hammer us so hard. No one's going to like it and we're running out of time so fast. And so thank you for being on the show today. Absolutely.

Thanks for having us. If I can get real quick, every ounce, every ounce counts, right? Get every ounce. It's not the 10 pounds, it's the ounces. Get it all back in.

That'll help. Thanks to Gail with FTL Finance for introducing Sam and I got a conversation going and then if you're out there, we at fmhero, we want to be a resource to you. We got free compliance guys, client or not. Yeah. Give them all the ways to get a hold of you, all the ways to get in contact, all the things.

Yeah, I just don't want any, don't think, oh, I don't use them so I can't call them. We're a resource for you. Reach out. We'll be happy to answer questions for you. Okay, give everybody all the contact information.

Again, again. com and for everybody listening, FM Hero, that is stands for facilities. Facilities Management Hero. Facilities Management Hero. There is no space.

FM Hero. Yeah, you can see the Hero name. That's right. And I recommend everybody just go in your app store and just go grab the app and just download it. It's free.

Play with it, check it out, look at it, get it in your hands and see how smooth and easy it is to use. I'm really excited because the next time that I do an on site training I plan to incorporate it into my ride alongs and start using it directly. That way I can have the experience with it, then I can train it forward into the companies I'm training because it's such an important thing. Well, thanks for being on FM Hero everybody. Go get your app and also the links that we talked about, those are going to be in the show notes.

So for everybody listening, you're in your drive time university. Don't run off the road, just open up the show notes, check out the link from there. And thanks to Les and Adam with FM Hero. You guys are true heroes of the industry right now and making a difference so appreciate you being on. You've been listening to the Close it now podcast.

Our passion is to dive headfirst into the transformative movement that's reached reshaping the very foundation of HVAC and home improvement and at the same time covering fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all. We hope you've enjoyed the show. If you did, make sure to like, rate and review. net find us on Instagram at the real Close it now and on Facebook at Close It Now. See you next time.