The product questions a heating manufacturer cannot delegate

I plan our residential line by climate and by the house rather than by efficiency tier alone. A heat pump replacing an air conditioner in Georgia needs to be quiet, affordable and good at dehumidification; one replacing a propane furnace in northern Minnesota needs capacity at 5°F and a sensible plan for the coldest week. Our line therefore runs from a two-stage southern model through a variable-speed mixed-climate unit to a cold-climate model rated at low ambient temperatures, with dual-fuel controls for homes that keep a furnace. I work with engineering on the compressor and inverter choices behind each, and with our test laboratories on the ratings under the SEER2 and HSPF2 procedures that took effect in 2023. I also decide what we stop developing. Since 2021 we have maintained our existing furnaces and their parts but have not designed a new furnace platform.

Under the federal phasedown of high-warming refrigerants, new residential systems moved from 2025 to lower-warming refrigerants, most of them mildly flammable. I led our transition to R-454B: compressor and coil redesign, new brazing and leak-test procedures in two plants, contractor training and the commercial plan for distributors holding older stock. I treat the applicable product-safety standard as a floor. Where our engineering reading did not require a refrigerant detection sensor, for smaller charges in some configurations, we fitted one anyway, because attics, closets and crawl spaces are not laboratories. I also own our product-safety process: field-incident review, the decision to report to the Consumer Product Safety Commission when the law requires it, and recall design. My test of a recall is how many affected units are actually remedied, not how quickly it is announced.

I believe any technician licensed to handle refrigerant should be able to diagnose and repair our equipment using only what we publish. Since 2023 our wiring diagrams, service manuals and fault-code tables have been available without a login, and our service app's diagnostic and commissioning functions are open to any technician holding EPA Section 608 certification. Repair parts are sold through every distributor, not reserved for certified dealers. A small number of functions remain restricted, such as factory calibration of the variable-speed compressor drive, and we publish that list with the reason for each item. Before launch, every product has to pass a fifteen-minute diagnosis test by a technician who has never seen it. I measure the results through first-visit repair rates on communicating systems, parts returned with no fault found and the number of homeowners who tell us they could not get service.

About 640,000 of our systems now report operating data through our communicating control. I hold that the household, not the installing contractor and not Ambersley, decides who can see data about its home. Contractor access is granted by the homeowner for a job or for a named ongoing service relationship, and it ends when the homeowner says so or the house changes hands. We use fleet data for engineering, warranty analysis and safety monitoring under a published list of purposes, and we do not sell data about individual homes. Utility demand-response programmes reach our customers only through the homeowner's own enrolment, with limits the homeowner can see and override. These choices have cost us revenue that data buyers offered and leads that dealers valued. I think they are the only basis on which a homeowner should accept a connected heating system.

Our products reach homes through two independent businesses: 62 distributors and about 11,000 contracting firms. Neither is ours, and both decide every day whether to recommend us. I spent five years on a distributor's warranty desk, and I design launches around what a branch counter and a service van need: parts stocked before the equipment arrives, model numbers a counter clerk can decode, training before the first installation rather than after the first failure. I work with our sales organisation on the certified dealer programme, which now rests on training, extended warranty registration and co-operative marketing rather than exclusive access to tools. I also chair our product transition reviews with distributors, where we agree how much old inventory they will carry into a regulatory change and what we will do if our forecast is wrong. Most product failures I have seen in this industry began as channel failures.

Federal tax credits, state-administered rebates and utility programmes have shaped American heat pump demand for several years, and they change faster than a product can be redesigned. I price our line against the replacement a household would otherwise buy, usually a furnace and air conditioner, and I treat incentives as a bonus to the customer rather than an assumption in the plan. When the federal homeowner credit ended after 2025, our 2026 pricing therefore needed adjustment in one tier rather than across the line. I still want our products to qualify for programmes where they deserve to, so our laboratories certify matched-system ratings carefully and we help contractors with the paperwork. What I resist is drawing a product tier around an incentive threshold, because the engineering money then follows the form instead of the house.