Dan Rettig, senior product manager for heat pumps and sustainability at Lochinvar, sat down with ES Magazine for a podcast interview discussing mechanical room decarbonization and retrofits. Here is a transcribed and edited excerpt of the conversation.

What are some of the top mechanical room changes for meeting decarbonization goals?

When we start to move from a gas product, to maybe more of an electrical product, whether it's a heat pump, or straight, resistive electric boiler, water heater, those are going to require higher electrical capacity. So now you may have to bring in more electrical to that mechanical room, do you have to lay out new panels? And have space for new panels to bring in if existing panels aren't large enough? That's going to be something different as far as what that mechanical room looks like. A lot of times your current products are powered off 115 volts, you know, 15-20 amp circuits. So that's all going to change here in the future. Anybody that's been involved with installations and trying to navigate around gas appliances knows venting is their number one obstacle, how do you move that vent around, get it through the mechanical space? It's always difficult. As we move to electrical products, that problem's gone, which I think is kind of good for a lot of us. That's going to be a positive, but we will have other issues, like mechanical rooms running smaller in size, bringing in new electrical infrastructure to the building.

How is the transition to more heat pumps affecting this?

As we transition to heat pumps, if we don't do an electrical resistive product, which most likely would have to be inside, a lot of these heat pumps are going to be outside. That's just where they live. So now you kind of shift some of that mechanical space, maybe even outside. So is there space outside? Is it a mechanical yard? If you think about your current HVAC equipment, it's up on the rooftop. So is that where all this is going to go back up on the top of the building? So we'll have to see how the architects and the design engineers lay all that out. We said earlier, we’re going to need some more space for storage. Well, maybe that all equals out, because maybe now some of the equipment goes outside. If you think about the boiler tech, he went into the mechanical room. And all these things were there. Well, now it may be a mix between some stuff in the mechanical room, and now he's got like a heat pump, boiler, up on the rooftop, so he’s going to have to navigate up there. Previous to my time at Lochinvar I was a HVAC service technician, so I spent a lot of time up on a roof, trying to climb up that ladder. A lot of the boiler technicians today, that's not the life they live, but that may change for them as we transition to heat pumps.