Streamlining the difficult work of whole-home retrofits

Today, coordinating a whole-home retrofit — or even just getting a heat pump — involves confusing research, a parade of contractors, and wildly varying quotes. It’s a broken system that practically pushes people to just buy another gas furnace. In this episode, I’m joined by Zero Homes CEO Grant Gunnison to discuss ways to improve this system for both customers and contractors. 📌 Instructions to add paid episodes to your preferred podcast app via mobile / desktop (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts Hello, everyone. Greetings. This is Volts for May 6, 2026: “Streamlining the difficult work of whole home retrofits.” I am your host, David Roberts. If you listen to Volts, own a home, and (like nearly 60 percent of Americans) heat your home with fossil fuels, you’re probably thinking that you should do something about that. And you’re probably dreading the gauntlet you keep hearing about: dozens of hours of research, a parade of contractors, quotes that vary wildly and that you have no way to evaluate or compare, weeks of scheduling, and an eye-popping bill at the end of it. Lots of people, especially the kind of unlucky saps who don’t listen to Volts, just give up and replace their gas furnace with another gas furnace. It’s the path of least resistance. We have something like 80 million single-family homes in this country, most of them running on fossil fuels, and we need to transition basically all of them to clean electricity (or thermal energy networks). It’s not going very well! The pace is glacial. Grant Gunnison is the founder and CEO of Zero Homes, a Denver-based company that’s trying to fix this — not just for homeowners but for the contractors who do this work and are dealing with their own version of the same broken process. His bet is that smartphones and software can take most of the friction out. We’re going to talk all about that. Grant Gunnison, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Grant Gunnison David, great to see you. David Roberts You come from a family of contractors, you’ve seen this from that side of things. Most of the people I talk to are coming into this from the homeowner perspective, this is good. What I want to do is walk through the process as it exists now with all its difficulties, then we’ll pivot to what you’re bringing to your solution. I know you are coming at this from the contractor angle, but let’s start with the homeowners and then we’ll talk about it from the contractor’s perspective. We’ll talk about the dismal results of the current process and then we’ll talk about what you’re doing. Walk us through the typical homeowner experience when they’re trying to do something like this. I think you did some research at DOE about the customer experience in this, or am I — Grant Gunnison That’s right. I’ve been very fortunate to both work on this problem academically as well as be in the middle of it myself — David Roberts Which is to say your knowledge of the customer experience is not merely through working in the industry. There has been more formal looking at it. Grant Gunnison That’s right, for sure. Both through the industry group lens, through work with the DOE and some implementers, well before I jumped into building the business I’m working on today. That perspective is helpful and maybe required in order to solve a number of problems, to really raise the customer experience bar. We’ll talk about this later. The contractor experience and many of the other stakeholders involved in delivering these projects. David Roberts Starting from the homeowner, then. What is the typical homeowner experience? Grant Gunnison The most common circumstance is one of their pieces of equipment breaks. For sake of argument, let’s call it their air conditioning system. They’re going to go, “Oh, no, it’s hot outside. I want this fixed. I’m going to be uncomfortable quickly. I need to get a human to my house to look at this as fast as possible.” If they have owned their home for a while and had to do a few projects, they probably have some friends that might be able to refer someone. Or they’re going to go to one of the search engines — Google, Yelp, Angie’s, and so forth — trying to find someone that can get to their house. Often they’re going to have one person come by, that person’s going to quickly tell them one of two things: “Hey, great, I can fix it and it costs X amount of money,” or, “This needs to be replaced and it’s going to cost probably 10 to 20 times what it would cost to just fix it.” If a homeowner’s in the latter category, they’re going to go, “Ooh, okay, I need to hit the brakes here because now we’re talking about a $10,000 or $20,000 expense and I need to feel confident that that’s the right path to take.” That generally starts with, “Let me have two or three more folks come by to give me a second or third opinion,” much like you would if you’re meeting a doctor and you have to make a really consequential decision. You want to get a few opinions, and that’s where we start. That’s the high urgency and high complexity situation they find themselves in. David Roberts It’s almost every contractor who’s dealing with a homeowner is dealing with a homeowner who is facing a huge project and uncomfortable at the lack of their appliance — so universally irritated customers. One of the things you found was that quotes, even on the same job in the same area from local contractors, can vary 30% quote to quote. Grant Gunnison That’s right. David Roberts I’m a homeowner. What do I know about a contractor who says 20% more than another one? Do I just go with the cheap one? Do I have any way of comparison? I don’t. As a homeowner, you feel helpless, and then if you pick one, it can take a while to make it all happen. Grant Gunnison Part of the challenge is homeowners are choosing between three things. We often call this the iron triangle of decision making — speed, quality, and cost. If you want the fastest solution, you’re going to give up on quality, and you’re probably going to give up on price a lot. Often people care about quality. They want to feel like they’re making a high-value decision. They’re probably most willing to give up on speed and cost because you’re making a decision that’s going to impact the comfort and cost of your home for a decade or maybe two decades. That’s not everybody. It depends on what the homeowner’s appetite across those three dimensions is, in addition to what their home needs. David Roberts Or even if you want quality. As a homeowner, I can’t directly assess the quality of different heat pumps or whatever. I’m using these proxies, these terrible heuristics — “Do I like the contractor’s vibe?” or “How close is this price to another price?” Just these terrible heuristics. I feel I’m wallowing around in a mire of uncertainty. Grant Gunnison The quality advice around which products and how to solve the problem that a homeowner is articulating, which can be one of many things — my home’s uncomfortable, my utility bills are high, I have a broken piece of equipment, on and on. Depending on who comes to your house, it’s the opinion of solution that you’re going to get. That becomes very challenging for a homeowner if they don’t have any experience. They’re trying to come up an experience curve, and it’s very challenging to get good information. You have to have multiple experts come by, that costs a lot of money and a lot of time. That makes a lot of folks feel very uncomfortable about going through one of these processes. David Roberts It really strikes me as weirdly parallel to trying to access healthcare in the United States. Very similarly, you’re going to experts, you have no knowledge of your own, no basis to decide between them. You’re struggling to work with vibes. I know they have perverse incentives. It’s very similar. Grant Gunnison Healthcare is even worse, because you are gated by your insurer to who you can see. We don’t need to run down that rabbit hole. It’s chal…