By Energy Efficiency Stories - July 2023
TruTech Tools, LTD is a fast-growing “one-stop-shop” online business that supplies tools and test instruments internationally for the energy efficiency industry. TruTech’s chief customers represent the building performance and Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) industries.
President, CEO and Co-Owner Bill Spohn Sr. leads the company from his home office near Pittsburgh, PA. Not just a thriving business itself, TruTech Tools is also a catalyst for energy efficiency contractor companies to expand and grow while meeting the rising community and market demands for energy efficiency among business and residential sectors.
TruTech Tools is a 16-year-old, family-operated business. It’s an innovative e-commerce platform that’s served over 98,000 customers throughout the United States and Canada over the past thirteen years. TruTech fulfilled over 53,000 orders last year, making it one of the largest online stores in the specialized market of tools and test instruments for HVAC/R Technicians and other professionals who perform energy audits and assess building performance.
TruTech is known industry-wide for stocking the latest and most advanced tools in its niche. Its 7,000 products (produced by over 100 manufacturers) include blower doors, duct leakage testers, thermal imagers, moisture and humidity meters, AC/R smart probes, and many others. President, CEO & Co-Owner Bill Spohn Sr. explains why TruTech sees such high demand for quality evaluation tools: “While these products may sound obscure to the average consumer, they help techs perform at a higher level in creating comfortable, healthy, and energy-efficient indoor environments. If a technician is not testing, they are likely guessing.”
TruTech Customers in Pennsylvania & Beyond
Positive testimonials show that TruTech’s customers appreciate the company’s product support, quality products, and generous offering of how-to guidance. About 6,035 of those customers are in Pennsylvania—chiefly heating and air conditioning and home, weatherization and building performance contractors. These contractors—many of them small business owners—use TruTech tools to achieve better project outcomes for their own customers. Many of TruTech’s customers are firms with employees themselves, and Bill Spohn estimates over 30,000 employees work for his 6035 customers in Pennsylvania.
According to Bill, a typical Pennsylvania customer is an independently owned HVAC service contractor, with two to ten employees working out of two to four service vans on the road. Quite often they are a second, third, or fourth generation family-run businesses. One might see them in vans with markings such as “XYZ Plumbing, Heating, Air-Conditioning, and Electrical Service”. When you need a broken AC or a leaky pipe fixed, they’re often the one who show up to do the job—and they bring their TruTech tools with them.
They are out and about performing residential and light commercial installation, maintenance and service work on homes, restaurants, businesses, churches, schools, and workplaces. According to Bill, quite often the owners are technicians themselves who continue to ply the trade in which they grew up. They put in long hours and take calls in the middle of the night or on weekends in order to keep their customers comfortable and safe. They carry a wide array of tools to help them with complex and time-sensitive jobs—often tasks related to installing and maintaining heating and air conditioning equipment running at peak performance.
Hard-working technicians often navigate poorly lit and dank basements and crawlspaces, or dark and extremely hot or cold attics, at times having to contort their bodies to get inside and around equipment as they work. They tax their bodies and apply their minds to satisfy customers, whose buildings may be operating thousands of different makes and models of equipment.
While these family-sustaining jobs can be demanding, contractors still find them rewarding and fulfilling, finding satisfaction in solving tricky problems, learning new techniques and technologies, and offering improved comfort and energy savings to building users.
Bill is proud of TruTech’s contributions to the energy efficiency industry. From helping customers keep up with rapid change by offering the latest technology and training, to cultivating collaboration across industries, TruTech is focused on the multifold payoffs of consuming less energy. “Energy efficiency especially delivers oversized cost and quality of life savings to persons and families that reside and work in old, inefficient buildings.,” Bill says. “Furthermore, there are profound intrinsic benefits to persons of lower income where better building performance bestows greater comfort, health, and safety. These enhancers to social and economic equity can be precursors to one’s civility-ability to contribute to family, community, and work to one’s productive potential.”
EE Workforce Development Responding to Industry Demand
TruTech Tools grows the energy efficiency industry, first and foremost, by providing the necessary tools and advanced technology to help other businesses and consumers deliver on the multiple benefits of reduced energy consumption, like a healthier, more comfortable, and more affordable home. But TruTech’s services go beyond products. TruTech’s business success also revolves around helping other businesses succeed. This begins with training on techniques and solutions and then providing the right tool for the energy efficiency job.
According to Jim Bergmann, one of TruTech’s founders, training is key to the company’s success so far. “A sign of a true technician is the quality of their tools and their ability to use them,” said Mr. Bergmann. “Beyond owning the best test equipment, we want our customers to know how, when and where to use it. We believe a trained user makes a better customer and a trained employee is more confident and valuable to the employer.”
Bergmann continued, “Our brand promise is serving needs for the best testing equipment available for Contractors and Technicians working in HVAC/R, Building and Home Performance, Facilities and Industrial, or Energy Auditing and Home Inspectors, so they can easily work at a higher level with confidence.”
The energy efficiency industry requires a high degree of technical acumen across its wide range of both white- and blue-collar roles. The TruTech team stays in close contact with its diverse customers by attending and presenting at trade shows nation-wide, all while regularly providing free technical training targeted to the broad spectrum of skilled workers in their target industries. Training attendees hold a range of specialized job titles, such as weatherization technician, home energy rater, HVAC/R technician, home inspector, and facilities technician. Their training covers not just how TruTech products work, but the proper way to do a test or perform a job, as well as the impact on their customers.
The training payoffs are many. Trained contractors are better prepared to solve the myriad of problems they routinely encounter in the field. Once they gain a reputation as expert problem solvers, some technicians can dispense with paid advertising as word of mouth alone propels their business growth.
TruTech’s proactive instructional programming is contributing to the increasing numbers of traditional HVAC-only companies that are now expanding their practice to include home performance tools (such as blower doors, thermal imagers, and duct leakage testers). This growth amongst technicians embracing energy efficiency is a market response to clients of all economic levels who are prioritizing energy efficiency innovations. Over the past four years, TruTech Tools has seen a doubling in the purchase of home performance tools by HVAC contractors and more recently, builders. Regulations also drive demand: the Pennsylvania Energy Code is requiring “tighter homes”, and builders are responding by buying home performance tools, like blower doors, to evaluate their work before the official inspection date arrives.
Bill notes, “We stay current with our customers by constantly evolving the content of our website to enrich the customer experience.” Through webinars and podcasts, TruTech trains approximately 3,000 technicians a year. “Major program managers send their trade allies to TruTech to get tools to participate in various utilities’ demand side reduction programs, often though AC system, furnace and building performance home tune ups. These programs in aggregate save billions of dollars for consumers and avoid millions of tons of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere,” Bill adds.
Fast Growth Company
Growth of the energy efficiency industry is both accelerated by and illustrated in TruTech’s own growth. The heat map below illuminates where TruTech’s business is expanding and where customers practice within the U.S.
Found routinely on the Inc 5000 list, TruTech attributes its growth to the fast-rising demand for applied energy efficiency in the nation’s buildings and homes. Additionally, the growth of the company stems from its very strong reputation for in-depth product knowledge and unrivaled technical support on products related to the energy efficiency markets. Advanced ecommerce strategies are also a competitive advantage.
As illustrated in the chart below, TruTech has grown 250 percent over the past five years. While energy efficiency—like most industries—was dealt a slowing hand by the COVID-19 pandemic, the trade’s rebound is robust. COVID-19 relegated many to work-from-home jobs, and one of many effects of being cooped-up was to pay more attention to home comfort, indoor air quality, and energy costs. The average consumer’s increasing appreciation of the multifold benefits of a “healthy home” is reflected in TruTech’s business gains. Another wind in the sails for TruTech is industry-wide anticipation of coming revisions of the Residential Provisions of the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code, which will mandate better-built and more energy-efficient homes when and where adopted.
A mindset shift among trade leaders themselves is also accelerating growth in the energy efficiency industry. The art and science of building performance is now an essential point of focus in the nation’s leading HVAC training organizations and largest trade expos. Building performance trade associations’ evolving interests both reflect market response to rising demand for energy efficiency and honor the strong tradition of invention and innovation, long a signature of manufacturers of building performance test equipment who are making higher performance devices more intuitive, connected, and affordable.
Resilience in Response to Rising Energy Efficiency Demands
TruTech’s business model contributes to its resiliency, even during these disruptive economic times. “We were very fortunate in two ways during 2020,” Bill reflected in an interview. “First, the main trade we service, HVACR, was considered an essential business during the pandemic and responded to the increased need for healthy air filtration and the continuing need for basic comfort, especially as more people worked from home and there were more repairs and renovations to household systems.
"Second, due to closures and restrictions at our bricks and mortar competitors, many new customers found TruTech due to our deliberate online presence, excellent word of mouth referrals and great reviews that have grown over the last 15 years.”
Reflecting on the fast-changing pace of the energy efficiency field, Bill also points out that TruTech’s close customer relationships lead to new, industry-wide innovations. As needs are identified in the field, Bill and his team communicate these new product and business opportunities to TruTech’s suppliers. In response, vendors manufacture new products and design smarter systems. “At any one time, TruTech has one or two non-disclosure agreements going with its vendors related to new product development,” says Bill. For example, The Energy Conservatory (a manufacturer of precision building performance equipment) developed two new digital airflow diagnostic tools that were revealed to TruTech many months before being released to the public in order for TruTech to provide feedback, comment and refinement.
TruTech’s role as a product supplier with a large customer base affords the company a high-level view of industry trends and needs. Increasingly, TruTech is able to ascertain moments where new technologies are being brought to market but missing opportunities for delivering even more positive impact. To optimize system integration, TruTech is moving into solution product development among its suppliers by bringing them together to sync their detection/monitoring/sensing equipment with others’ systems that control devices.
TruTech Products
When technicians turn to TruTech for specialty tools and instruments, they expect—and receive—next-generation, technologically advanced products. These connected, “smart system” products help contractors execute faster and more effective projects. In the last 12 months, TruTech sold over 1,300 of a specific BlueTooth-connected psychrometer probe. These probes contain a capacitive humidity sensor coupled with a temperature sensor that can be placed in air streams and AC system ducts. The probes respond quickly and accurately to temperature and humidity levels, collects the sensor data, and transmits it up to 300 feet to a smart phone or tablet running diagnostic software. Technicians use mobile apps to quickly view probe data and run calculations, helping them ascertain HVAC system performance and conduct diagnostic tests. In combination with other probes and tech input, instruments like these provide live-streaming data for techs to use in field diagnostics that’s comparable to laboratory-quality results. Bill Spohn says, “I have personally witnessed these types of probes tested in the NIST labs (in Gaithersburg, MD) and seen them provide data comparable to the equipment in a multimillion-dollar government test facility.”
