The Human Diagnostic

Looking for honest stories about people, not product reviews? You're in the right place. The Human Diagnostic isn't a how-to HVAC podcast. It's what a 45-year Master Technician notices about people after 90,000 service calls across gas plants, oil rigs, hospital preservation systems, high-rises, feedlots, walk-in freezers, and residential homes all over Central Oklahoma. Hosted by Dave Hartzell, each episode tells a real story from a real service call. Sometimes he's driving to the job and predicting what he's about to walk into. Sometimes he just left and he's still working through what he saw. Either way, the story turns out to be about more than HVAC. Topics you'll hear across the season: ✅ The customer nobody wanted to take, and what changed when someone finally did ✅ Why the person researching their broken AC at midnight isn't being difficult, they're scared ✅ What 45 years of walk-ins, weddings, funerals, and broken water heaters teaches you a

The Human Diagnostic is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 189 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts The Human Diagnostic, a business show with 189 episodes published.

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  The Human Diagnostic

  The Woman Who Couldn't Believe the Repair Held

  Sep 10, 202622 min

  By the time I pulled out of the shop she had called three times, and nothing about her job had changed since the first one. First full week of July, heat index sitting around 105 by early afternoon. Two story house in one of the newer additions, built maybe twenty years ago, the kind where the upstairs runs eight degrees warmer than the downstairs no matter what anybody does about it. She works from home and she is on the phone most of the day. Blower running fine, air coming out of the vents at room temperature. She called at 7:40 in the morning. I put her on for that afternoon, a window from three to six, which in the first real heat of July is a good answer and she knew it. Then she called at 9:15. Then at 11:30. Then at ten till two. Nothing had changed in between. She had nothing new to tell me and I had nothing new to tell her. Every time she got the same true sentence back: you are on the schedule, Dave is coming this afternoon, the window stands. For a lot of years I read calls like that one way, and the way I read them was wrong. I figured she either did not believe the answer or she was working the phone trying to get bumped ahead of somebody quieter. I have been short with people over it. Not rude, but clipped, the voice you use when you want a conversation to be over. What she was doing was neither of those things. There is a paper from 1987 by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver called Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. What they actually did is not what you picture when somebody says study. Core line: "It teaches her that calling is the thing that moved the truck, so next time it is five calls, and it takes the afternoon away from somebody who waited quiet since Monday." Give Us A Shout Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort. We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up. ️ Book Online: https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true www.hartzellsheatair.com (405) 375-4822 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite ️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs: YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003 X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

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  The Human Diagnostic

  The Ninety Dollars She Saved That Cost Her A Furnace

  Sep 9, 202618 min

  She had saved ninety dollars a year for six years, and it cost her forty two hundred. I want to be careful with this one, because there is a version of it that is a sales pitch and I am not interested in telling that story. The story I am interested in is why a smart person makes the same small decision six times in a row and only sees the shape of it on the seventh. Composite call, and I will say that up front. This is three or four houses stacked into one, because the pattern is the point and I am not going to put a real customer in it. Kitchen table, west side of Kingfisher, early October. The good kind of October morning where you can finally leave the back door open. She had the checkbook out before I sat down, which is its own kind of tell. Retired schoolteacher, sharp, the type who reads the whole invoice and asks about line items, which I like. The furnace had a cracked heat exchanger. Twenty two years old. Not repairable, not safely, and I told her so. She asked me the question everybody asks, which is whether I was sure, and I walked her out to it and showed her, and she was quiet for a second and then she said the thing that stuck with me. She said, I skipped the tune up again last fall. Then she said, I skip it every fall. And she started counting on her fingers, out loud, going backward. Six years. Now. I want to say clearly that a tune up would not have made a cracked heat exchanger uncracked. Twenty two years is twenty two years, and metal that has been heating and cooling since the nineties is going to fail eventually no matter who looks at it. That is not the lesson and I did not let her believe it was. Here is the actual lesson, and it is not about furnaces. Core line: "What I have learned to do, and I only figured this out in the last ten years or so, is stop arguing about the ninety dollars." Give Us A Shout Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort. We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up. ️ Book Online: https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true www.hartzellsheatair.com (405) 375-4822 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite ️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs: YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003 X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

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  The Human Diagnostic

  The AC Repair He Diagnosed Himself And Got Wrong

  Sep 9, 202619 min

  The man knew exactly what was wrong with his air conditioner until I asked him to show me. It was a Thursday in the first week of August, out past the co-op on the north edge of town. Ninety-nine degrees and the kind of still air where the flag on the pole by the mailbox just hangs there. He met me in the driveway before I had the truck in park. Retired, seventies, khaki shorts, a shop rag folded over his belt like he had been working on something and wanted me to know it. He started talking before I got the door open. Said his unit was low on Freon. Said it every way you can say it. Low on Freon, needs a charge, been leaking since spring, his brother-in-law told him so. I asked him how he knew. He said the air was not as cold as it used to be. That is a real symptom. It is also the symptom for about eleven other things. But that is not the part I want to talk about. I asked him a second question, and I asked it the way I ask it to everybody, which is not as a test. I asked him where the refrigerant goes when it leaves the outdoor unit. He opened his mouth and stopped. Then he did something I have watched people do for forty-seven years. He pointed at the condenser and moved his hand in a circle and said, well, it goes around. It goes through there and comes back. Then he stopped again, and he laughed, and he said, huh. That huh is the whole episode. There is a piece of research on this. Two cognitive scientists at Yale, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, published a paper in 2002 called The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science. They called what they found the illusion of explanatory depth. They asked people to rate how well they understood ordinary things. A zipper. A flush toilet. A helicopter. People rated themselves pretty high. Then the researchers asked them to actually write out, step by step, how the thing worked. Core line: "If I had taken his diagnosis at face value I would have put gauges on a correctly charged system, found nothing, and started looking for a leak that was not there." Give Us A Shout Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort. We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up. ️ Book Online: https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true www.hartzellsheatair.com (405) 375-4822 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite ️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs: YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003 X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

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  The Human Diagnostic

  Fixing the AC and cooling tempers

  Aug 11, 20269 min

  The house was eighty-four degrees when I walked in. That number matters. Not because eighty-four is the hottest house I have ever walked into. It is not. I have walked into houses that felt like attics. I have walked into homes where the thermostat had quit trying to explain itself and the customer had quit trying to be polite. But eighty-four was the number in this house, and everybody inside had been living with it for two days. The husband met me at the door and said the system had been running nonstop. The wife was in the kitchen with a glass of ice water, standing still like movement would cost too much. Two kids were on the couch, red-faced and quiet, which is not usually how kids sound when a stranger walks into the house with tools. The husband wanted the diagnosis fast. The wife wanted to know whether they needed a new system. The kids wanted the house cold again. The dog wanted to lie on the tile and be left alone. Everybody wanted something reasonable. Everybody sounded a little unreasonable. That is what heat does. I want to talk about that today. Not just the AC problem. The human problem inside the AC problem. When a house gets hot in July, people do not only lose comfort. They lose margin. Sleep gets lighter. Patience gets shorter. Small noises sound louder. Money decisions feel more threatening. A normal conversation about a capacitor or a compressor can turn into a family argument because the room itself is pressing on everybody's nervous system. This is not an excuse for bad behavior. It is an explanation for why good people get sharp when the air stops working. Core line: "I told them to set it to a number the system could reach, let the house recover, keep the filter clean, and call me if it started losing ground again." Give Us A Shout Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort. We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up. ️ Book Online: https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true www.hartzellsheatair.com (405) 375-4822 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite ️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs: YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003 X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

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  The Human Diagnostic

  The AC He Fixed Himself and Loved Beyond Its Worth

  Aug 11, 202620 min

  I am driving out to a call right now where I already know the hardest part of the job will not be the equipment. It will be the man. Not because he is difficult. Because he built the thing himself, and a man cannot see clearly the thing his own hands made. The notes say he put in his own ductwork and rigged up his own setup years ago, and now something is not right and he finally called somebody. I have done a hundred of these. I know roughly what I am driving toward. A system he is proud of, that he poured weekends into, that he will defend a little, because to him it is not just ductwork. It is his ductwork. And I want to talk about that on the way there, because what is about to happen in that house is one of the most human things there is. In 2012, three researchers named Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely published a study they called The IKEA Effect, after the furniture you have to build yourself. What they found is that when people build something with their own hands, they value it far more than the same thing made by somebody else. In their experiments, people who assembled a plain IKEA box, or folded an origami frog, or built a Lego set, were willing to pay more for their own clumsy creation than other people would pay for it, and sometimes more than they would pay for an expert's version. The labor itself created the value. Not the quality of the result. The sweat that went into it. They titled the paper When Labor Leads to Love, and that is exactly it. The work you put into a thing makes you love it, whether or not the thing is any good. Core line: "When a man built it himself, he cannot see it plainly, because his own labor is folded into how he sees it, and that is not vanity, that is just how people are wired." Give Us A Shout Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort. We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up. ️ Book Online: https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true www.hartzellsheatair.com (405) 375-4822 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite ️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs: YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003 X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

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