Max Rohr, education and industry engagement manager for an Italy-based manufacturer of brass hydronic components, traces his path from a master plumber's son into hydronics training and explains why a given volume of water moves 3,400 times more energy than air. He also covers the coming wave of plumber retirements, the shift to decarbonized mechanical rooms, and using the water heater as a daytime 'water battery' to flatten the duck curve.
00:00:06:08 - 00:00:27:13
Max Rohr: My dad is a master plumber, so I used to go to work with him when I was as young as a toddler. I think if that's called daycare in the skilled trades family with a small business. So I had tagged along with him all the way through high school, went to college, decided that I wanted to be a dentist was interesting, but it just wasn't really something that I was passionate about.
00:00:27:14 - 00:00:59:01
Max Rohr: So after I graduated from college, I went back to the skilled trades and started working for a manufacturer and have been in a bunch of different roles in the industry since then, but really love moving energy with water. Well, that's something that has been kind of a consistent thing for me. My whole career in the trades is that designing systems that are really energy efficient plumbing systems, renewable incorporated systems, those are the things that I really like working on.
00:00:59:04 - 00:01:31:06
Max Rohr: My title right now is Education and Industry Engagement Manager, which is a title that I love as a millennial. That's really appropriate for us, for our demographic, I think. But I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do we as manufacturer, the company I work for is called We Make Brass Components based in Italy. How do we make components that are going to better enable our customers to design and install and troubleshoot the energy efficient systems of tomorrow and today?
00:01:31:09 - 00:01:57:02
Max Rohr: The biggest obstacle probably for training in the trade right now is how do we get people excited about something that is hidden behind the wall? So people are excited about granite countertops. They're excited about the Tesla that they drive around. How do we get people excited about the dusty furnace or boiler or water heater that's behind the moth in the basement that we purposefully have hidden?
00:01:57:03 - 00:02:12:02
Max Rohr: As a culture, we get it as far away from us as possible. How do we get people excited about looking at that, evaluating that, upgrading it, and making their home much more energy efficient?
00:02:12:04 - 00:02:40:08
Max Rohr: One of the statistics that I found through the Energy Information Administration is that if you look at just the space heating and water heating in your house, that's about 25% of the energy we use as a country. So that's the same number as transportation. And that's a huge number. And we can do that so much better. The the baseline is pretty low for energy efficiency with water heaters and forced air and furnaces and things like that.
00:02:40:09 - 00:02:55:16
Max Rohr: There's just a much better way to do that without sacrificing comfort, which is something that I think is a great part of the industry that we work in, is that we don't have to compromise, so we can do both at the same time, which is something that I think is exciting.
00:02:55:18 - 00:03:14:06
Max Rohr: So I think I'm most proud of being part of some sort of transition for the skilled trades in a training role. So we are in a big shift where a lot of plumbers and heating texts are retiring or will in the next 5 to 10 years. So there's a big gap in the skilled labor to be able to install these systems.
00:03:14:06 - 00:03:33:11
Max Rohr: At the same time, we're kind of transitioning to a different style of system in a lot of markets. So going to more of a decarbonized electrification mechanical room is something that would be new, even if we were keeping all of the same chess pieces on the board. We're also changing all of the people involved over the next two years.
00:03:33:11 - 00:03:51:09
Max Rohr: So it's a big challenge, and I'm excited to be able to talk to those people that are stepping into these roles because they're great jobs. I mean, you don't need to go to college. Maybe you do for some of the jobs in different parts of the supply chain, but you really don't need to to be an expert in the field, which is great.
00:03:51:09 - 00:04:19:21
Max Rohr: And they're high paying jobs that are going to be in demand and are deemed essential as of Covid. So that was kind of nice to hear, to get people to come into the trades where they may have been laid off in different positions, where it was, you know, all hands on deck for plumbing and heating all the way through the pandemic, which I think is a nice vote of confidence that this is an important trade and people need to fill these jobs and are going to be able to have really nice lifestyles doing that.
00:04:19:28 - 00:04:50:24
Max Rohr: And one of the things that I like to talk about specifically with what we do at is moving energy with water. So water is 3400 times more efficient at moving more moving energy than air. So a given volume of water can move 3400 times more energy than the same volume of air. So with hydronic systems, which could be fin to baseboard, existing radiators and old buildings, radiant floor heat, we're moving energy around with water.
00:04:50:24 - 00:04:57:24
Max Rohr: It's just a really beautiful way to do that, to save energy and to make people comfortable.
00:04:57:27 - 00:05:18:21
Max Rohr: One of the things that you can apply as far as these general concepts to your home, especially for people my age, I think is a is a good thing to look at. How do we control our heating system? The the easiest upgrade that I see all the time is a smart thermostat that you can log in and say, okay, I'm on vacation or I'm going to be at work for this amount of time.
00:05:18:24 - 00:05:53:19
Max Rohr: That is great. So it's great to have a better control, better visibility of what your heating system is doing. As we get a little bit further along into the transition to more renewable energies at the grid level, one of the things that we need to do is also figure out a way to do that with water heating, because we still have this enormous spike in the the duck curve that they call it, that even if we have a lot of solar during the day, if everybody comes home and takes the shower right as the sun goes down and we don't have renewable energy to supplement their, we can't get away from fossil fuels as quickly.
00:05:53:19 - 00:06:12:06
Max Rohr: So figuring out a way to schedule a water heater is going to be the next kind of technology challenge that we are absolutely capable of doing. We just have to figure out how do we kind of load up the the water battery in our basement during the day while the sun's out? So when we get home, we don't need to turn that on.
00:06:12:06 - 00:06:30:29
Max Rohr: It's already pre warmed basically. And that's going to be a key thing at the utility level, but also something that homeowners can start to get their head around now is how do we not have that spike of energy use for the water heater in the morning. And right when you get home, if we can avoid that, that really opens up a lot of utility opportunities.
00:06:30:29 - 00:06:38:24
Max Rohr: And it's something that's a behavioral fix to a problem, would allow us to better utilize renewable energy. That may be just during the day.