The repair manual should ship with the heat pump

I hold a position that is still unusual among heating and cooling manufacturers: anyone legally qualified to work on our equipment should be able to diagnose it and repair it with information and parts we make available to them, without joining a programme, paying a fee or knowing the right person at a distributor. I hold it partly because I spent five years telling the industry the opposite. In 2018, as head of residential product management at Ambersley, I restricted the service app for our new communicating control to certified dealers. In 2023 I reversed that decision, and this essay explains why I think other manufacturers should do the same before a statute decides the terms for them.

The argument is not that manufacturers owe the public their engineering secrets, or that every repair should be possible for a homeowner with a screwdriver. A heat pump contains refrigerant under pressure, high-voltage electronics and, increasingly, a mildly flammable gas. Federal law already decides who may handle the refrigerant, through EPA Section 608 certification, and I think that is the right place to draw the line. My argument is narrower: once a person holds that credential, the manufacturer should not add a commercial barrier of its own.

What the certified-dealer lock was protecting

My father ran a two-van heating repair business in Sedalia, Missouri, and kept the fault codes for the furnaces he saw most often on a card clipped to his sun visor. He copied them by hand because distributors would not lend manuals to a business his size. When a code was missing he replaced parts in order of price until the burner lit, and the family paid for each guess. I did not think about that card when I designed our 2018 access rules. I thought about the dealers who had paid for training and wanted a reason to keep paying.

Within four years the evidence was hard to ignore. About 2,600 of the roughly 11,000 firms installing our equipment were certified. The rest could see that a communicating system had stopped but could not read why. Of the control boards returned to us under warranty in 2022, 29% had nothing wrong with them; they had been replaced because a technician without our app had run out of other ideas. Homeowners whose certified dealer had retired, sold the business or stopped answering the telephone wrote to us asking who could fix their system. In some rural counties the honest answer was nobody within an hour's drive.

The lock was not protecting safety. Certified and uncertified technicians held the same refrigerant credential and were equally entitled to open the cabinet. It was not protecting quality, because the uncertified technician still did the repair, only more slowly and with more parts. It was protecting the value of a programme, and the people paying for that protection were homeowners who had never heard of it.

Diagnostics for anyone holding a refrigerant licence

From April 2023 we published our service manuals, wiring diagrams and fault-code tables on a public page with no login. We opened the app's diagnostic and commissioning functions to any technician who registers with a valid Section 608 certification number, which we check. We told every distributor that repair parts could be sold to any contractor. And we published a short list of what remains restricted, with a reason beside each item. The most important is factory calibration of the variable-speed compressor drive, which can destroy a compressor if done wrongly and which we perform only through our own technical support line.

The cost was real. We gave up about US$3.1 million a year of programme fees connected to tool access. Our general counsel spent several months on liability: what happens when a technician we have never trained follows our published procedure and a system fails? Our answer was that the risk existed before, when the same technician worked without the procedure, and that a written method reduces it. Federal warranty law already restricts a manufacturer from making its warranty depend on using its own service network, so the commercial logic of the lock was weaker than our dealer programme assumed.

We measured the results against the problems that had prompted the change. First-visit repairs on communicating systems rose from 71% to 84%. Boards returned with no fault found fell from 29% to 18%. Homeowner complaints about being unable to find service fell by 62%. By the middle of 2026, 7,900 contracting firms were using the app. None of those figures would satisfy a statistician that the policy alone caused the change, since we also improved the app and the manuals over the same period. All of them moved in the direction the argument predicted.

What the dealer network kept

The strongest objection came from our own dealers. Lyle Bellweather, who chairs our dealer advisory council and runs a contracting firm in Kansas, told me that I was taking away the one thing certified dealers had that others did not. He also told me, correctly, that I had brought the council a finished decision rather than a question. Certified dealer numbers fell from 2,600 to 2,350 in the first year.

They recovered to 2,540 by 2026, and the reason matters for any manufacturer weighing the same choice. We rebuilt the programme around things a good contractor values and an access restriction cannot supply: advanced training, extended warranty registration on the homes they install, co-operative marketing money and a priority line to our senior technical staff. A certified dealer now competes on workmanship and service rather than on holding a key. The dealers who left were mostly those whose business depended on the key.

Most of the state right-to-repair laws I have read concern consumer electronics, agricultural machinery or powered wheelchairs, and none required what we did for heating equipment. I expect that to change. Heat pumps are becoming more electronic and more connected, and a household that cannot get its heating repaired in January is a sympathetic case for any legislature. A manufacturer that waits will have its access rules written by people who have never sat in a contractor's van. I would rather the industry wrote sensible ones first: open information and parts for licensed technicians, restricted functions listed publicly with reasons, and certification programmes that earn their fees.

I would not ask another manufacturer to copy our list. I would ask its product leaders to do one thing: give a planted fault and their published service information to a licensed technician who has never seen the product, and time the diagnosis. If the answer depends on whether that technician belongs to the right programme, the product is not finished.