Until now, the High-Performance HVAC Industry hasn’t had its own recognition award for project excellence. We’ve decided to remedy this with our new High-Performance HVAC Project Award competition. This new award recognizes contractors who test, measure, diagnose, and resolve residential customer comfort and efficiency issues using the Performance-Based Contracting’ tenets as taught by National Comfort Institute (NCI).

One of our goals is to recognize the importance and value of the air delivery system as a key component of a well-designed, well-built HVAC system. The idea here is to showcase projects that result in safe, healthy, comfortable, and energy-efficient homes that meet all the homeowners’ requirements. We feel that winning projects will set the standard for excellence in the HVAC Performance-Based Contracting? Industry.

So who is eligible to enter? We are looking for entries from NCI-trained HVAC contracting firms. Said companies should have personnel trained and certified in at least two of the following disciplines:

  • Residential System Performance & Air Balancing
  • Duct System Optimization
  • Combustion Performance and CO Safety.

Why is this important? In order to deliver high-performance to customers, contractors must know and use proper testing, measuring, and diagnostic techniques ‘ things taught by NCI.

What are the contest criteria? There are a number of key components to this contest that you should address on your entries. For example, we want to understand what the homeowners’ problems were and how you went about discovering solutions.

Did they have hot and cold rooms? What about outrageously high utility costs? Did they have family members suffering from allergies or other ‘illnesses?’ How did you approach their problems and how did your team approach solutions?

What Did the Numbers Say?

If you don’t measure, you’re just guessing, right? So we are interested in your BEFORE and AFTER measurements of the system you renovate or replace. Furthermore, we’d like you to share how you helped your customers understand those measurements and what they now say about the operation of their systems.

Numbers are great, but if you don’t know how to interpret them and communicate them to your customers, you may not be able to close the sale. So we’d like you to explain how you interpreted those measurements and what conclusions you drew from them. Then after you complete all the work, share how you commissioned the new or renovated HVAC and air delivery system (tested, adjusted, and balanced).

In addition, we want to hear the homeowners’ perspectives and opinions of how well their projects work. We’d love to hear how, from their perspective, you resolved their issues.

How do you enter? We’ve tried to make entering this contest as easy as possible. In fact, it is all online. The first step is to click the button below and fill out some preliminary information that lets us know you are interested. We will then follow up with a link to our online entry form.

Or you can go to directly to our online entry form at ncilink.com/awardsubmission and it will walk you through everything.

What do you get if you win? Winners and runners up will be recognized during NCI’s Annual Summit event. Plus the winning stories will be featured on the pages of this magazine. Those are some serious bragging rights!

The deadline to enter is March 16, 2020. We look forward to seeing your entries!

Good luck to all of you who enter.