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The 5 Best Heat Pump Sizing Software Options for Independent Contractors (2026)

Last updated October 2026 · By Ed Smith and Eric Fitz, co-founders of Amply Energy

EVIEW NOTES FOR ERIC AND MATT — Edits are accepted. [Editor: Yellow notes] are open items to verify or decide before publishing. Delete them all before this goes live.
Before publishing: (1) Keep a dated evidence file (screenshots, screen recordings, help-doc links) for every factual claim about a competitor. The notes below flag each one. (2) Have counsel review the Conduit section. (3) Publish the comparison table as an HTML table, not an image. (4) Add FAQPage and Article schema, with Ed and Eric as authors and a dateModified. (5) Link to the standalone “Amply vs. Conduit” page once it's live (placeholder in the Conduit section and the FAQ).

The short answer

Amply, Conduit Tech, Cool Calc, and Wrightsoft all offer ACCA-approved Manual J software. EDS does not. Amply is the only tool on this list that runs the whole on-site workflow on one iPad, with or without an internet connection: LiDAR scan, room-by-room Manual J, AR equipment design, and a homeowner design report. Conduit, now owned by ServiceTitan, is built for large ServiceTitan shops and adds 2D floor plans and wall-segment editing but needs a connection. Cool Calc and Wrightsoft cover the full Manual J, S, and D suite.

We make Amply, so read this with that in mind. We've tried to be fair, and we list where we fall short.

Who we wrote this for

This isn't a roundup for everybody. It's written for a specific kind of contractor. Our kind of contractor.

  • Independently owned. You're not answering to a private equity board about EBITDA targets.
  • You believe in doing things the right way. Load calcs aren't a box you check for a rebate. They're how you keep a homeowner comfortable 24/7/365.
  • You want an education-based conversation with the homeowner. Not a kitchen table close for a box swap. You want your customer to understand what you're recommending and why.
  • You believe heat pumps are the future of HVAC. You're building a business around that, not hedging.

If that's you, keep reading. If you're competing on lowest bid and fastest turnaround, most of what follows won't matter much to you, and that's fine.

Who wrote this

We did. We're Eric and Ed, co-founders of Amply Energy. We make the first tool on the list, and we think it's the best one for the contractor described above. We're not going to pretend this is a Wirecutter article.

But we will be straight about what each tool does well, where each one falls short, and where we fall short. Our competitors have made good products, but we've each made unique design choices. When our competitors do something better than we do, we'll say so.

Competitor details reflect our own testing and publicly available information as of October 2026. If something here is out of date or wrong, email us at hello@amply.energy and we'll correct it.

What we compared on

Seven things that actually change how a job goes:

  1. ACCA Manual J approval. ACCA approval is what makes your load calculation count for permits and rebate programs. Without it, you're doing math not everyone will accept. 
  2. Running the load calc on site, on one device, without manual measurements. This is the big one. Can you walk into a home, capture it, run the calculation, and design the system — start to finish, on the device in your hand, without a tape measure and without a second trip to the office? Or does the workflow break somewhere in the middle?
  3. Visual design tools and augmented reality. Can you show the homeowner where the equipment goes, in their actual living room? A load calc is a number. Easy-to-understand images are a conversation.
  4. Simple and easy to use. Your whole team has to use this, not just your best tech. If the interface fights people, they'll skip steps, and inconsistent inputs make the approval meaningless.
  5. Offline functionality. Basements and rural properties don't have signal. If losing connection costs you the scan, you'll lose the scan.
  6. The design document you leave behind. It should explain the why behind your recommendations, not just list equipment model numbers. This is the piece that keeps working after you drive away.
  7. What else it covers. Manual J is the foundation, but Manual S (equipment selection) and Manual D (duct design) matter depending on the work you do.

Quick guide

Tool Best for
Amply Energy Independent, heat-pump-focused contractors who want to do the work right and have a real conversation with the homeowner — on site, on one device, with or without an internet connection.
Conduit Tech (a ServiceTitan company) Large HVAC companies that run on ServiceTitan and want a design tool that integrates directly with it.
Cool Calc Contractors who want the full ACCA design suite and pay-as-you-go pricing, and don't mind moving from a mobile device to a laptop, with an internet connection, to finish the job.
EDS Contractors who want to enter an address and get a load immediately, and don't need ACCA approval.
Wrightsoft Right-J Engineers focused on new construction who need the full ACCA design suite and don't mind a desktop interface from another era.

1. Amply Energy

Best for independent, heat-pump-focused contractors who want to do things the right way.

Amply runs the whole on-site workflow on a single iPad Pro. You walk the home, capture it with LiDAR, run an ACCA-approved Manual J, design the system in augmented reality in front of the homeowner, and leave behind a design document that explains your reasoning. 15–30 minutes, one visit, no tape measure, no return trip, no evening spent building documentation.

A few things that make a practical difference in the field:

Scan room by room. Redo any room, anytime. You scan one room at a time and Amply stitches them into a whole-home 3D model. If a room needs redoing — bad lighting, a cluttered mechanical closet, a window you missed — you rescan that room. Whenever you want, including after you've moved on to other rooms. You can take notes and photos at any point, too. The other scanning tools on this list work floor-at-a-time: once the floor's scans are complete, you can't go back and redo a single room. Changing one thing means redoing the whole floor. Conduit works floor-at-a-time: once a floor's scans are complete, you can't go back and redo a single room, so changing one thing means redoing the whole floor. Cool Calc makes you scan every room and assemble them into a model before you can run the load calc.

Flexible workflow. Want to scan a room, take pictures, take notes, change construction materials, then keep scanning the rest of the floor? No problem. Unlike any other tool on this list, Amply does not require you to scan everything first. Amply is designed to be flexible because you need to be flexible. Every homeowner and home is different. We let you decide the best way to document each job.

Angled walls. Amply captures the actual geometry. The other scanning tools on this list square off walls into rectangles, which means the surface areas feeding your load calculation aren't the surface areas of the house. For cathedral and vaulted ceilings, you scan the room and mark the ceiling as cathedral — Amply handles the adjustment.

Room-by-room loads, for any system. Amply is ACCA-approved for full residential load calculations, not just block loads. You get room-by-room heating and cooling loads and CFM per room, for heat pumps, furnaces, boilers, or AC.

Fully offline. Scanning and load calculations run with no internet and no cell service at all. Projects sync when you're back online.

Support from the people who built it. Eric Fitz and Ed Smith are Amply's two co-founders, and they still lead sales and customer success themselves. When you need expertise, you get an engineer who has designed heat pump systems — not a ticket queue.

Manual J review. We're happy to review the first few Manual Js you run with Amply. We are deeply committed to educating our customers on building science and HVAC design best practices. Check out our podcast to learn more.

Independently owned, same as you. We own Amply – full stop. We run the business with deep respect for our customers, and we don't have to check with investors to make a decision. 

Flexible, published pricing. No annual contract required, and no annual price increase built into your contract. Our prices are on our pricing page, so you'll know the number before you talk to us.

Two reports, two audiences. Every job produces a technical Manual J report for permits and rebate submissions, and a design document written for the homeowner and your install team. The design document includes pictures and annotations to bring the design to life.

Where we fall short

  • No full Manual D. We provide CFM per room, which is the basis for a good duct assessment and duct design. You can also use the 3D model to sketch a duct layout in Amply. But if you want a full Manual D (which is overwhelmingly for new construction), we don't do that today, but we plan to in the future. The good news is that it's easy to bring an Amply Manual J into another tool to complete a Manual D on the rare occasion you need that.
  • Manual S is a spreadsheet, not a feature. It's free, it works with your Amply load data, and it handles ducted and ductless with cold-climate heat pump performance in mind. But it lives outside the app. We'll build it in.
  • No 2D floor plans — yet. It's coming.
  • You can't edit wall segments — yet. It's coming. You can edit windows, doors, and other openings.
  • No direct FSM integrations. No API connection to ServiceTitan or the others today. Amply generates clean PDFs and uploading them takes seconds, but it's an upload, not an integration.
  • Requires a recent iPad Pro with LiDAR. Any iPad Pro made on or after 2022 will run Amply.

2. Conduit Tech (a ServiceTitan company)

Best for large HVAC companies that run on ServiceTitan and want a design tool that integrates directly with it.

Conduit Tech is genuinely nice software. It's mobile-first, it uses LiDAR, it generates 2D floor plans, it does AR equipment visualization, and the homeowner-facing documents look great. Credit where it's due.

It's also owned by ServiceTitan, which announced the acquisition in September 2025, and that shapes the experience. Pricing isn't published, contracts require an annual commitment, and contractors who have shared their Conduit contracts with us have seen annual price escalators of 6–8% on renewal. 

Strengths: ServiceTitan ownership and integration, 2D floor plans, AR equipment visualization, strong homeowner-facing documents, wall segment editing. 

Where it struggles:

  • Floor-at-a-time scanning. You capture a full floor in one session. You can rescan a room while you're still on that floor, but once the floor is complete, you can't go back and redo a single room.
  • No notes or photos while scanning. You have to finish the scan before you can document anything. 
  • A steeper learning curve. Contractors who've switched from Conduit to Amply tell us it was harder to get their whole team using it consistently. 
  • Angled walls get squared off into rectangles. If you're on a top floor with knee walls, angled ceilings, or anything that is not perfectly rectangular, you're stuck entering a bunch of manual measurements to accurately capture the features. That is time consuming.
  • Needs an internet connection. Lose signal and your scanning workflow gets interrupted. You can't edit the project until you reconnect. In a basement or rural area, that's not hypothetical.
  • Support from ServiceTitan.
  • No Manual S equipment selection.
  • Pricing you can't see until you're in a sales process.

For a deeper head-to-head, see Amply vs. Conduit. 

3. Cool Calc

The new Wrightsoft. Best for contractors who want the full Manual J, S, and D suite with pay-as-you-go pricing.

In summer 2026, Cool Calc released a new version that covers Manual J, S, and D, and it's quite good. We like it, especially if you're used to Wrightsoft and want the full Manual J-S-D suite. So if you're looking for an alternative to Wrightsoft, check out Cool Calc.

They also have a LiDAR scanning functionality, but it's separate from the work you need to do on a laptop.

One of the best things about Cool Calc is the flexible pricing option. If you only need to do one Manual J for a specific situation, use Cool Calc's pay-as-you-go option.

Where it struggles:

  • The workflow breaks in the middle. You can scan the home, but you then have to move into the web app to complete the Manual J. It's a clunky handoff, and it means this isn't a seamless workflow.
  • No equipment visualization. There's no way to show a homeowner where anything goes. This is a calculation tool, not a sales and education tool.
  • Scan everything first, you have to scan every room and assemble them into a model before you can run the loads. You have the same angled-wall problem — walls get squared off into rectangles, so the surface areas are questionable. 
  • No live customer support. Support is only available by submitting tickets on the website. 
  • No wall segment editing.
  • Web-based, so connectivity is a must.

4. EDS

Best for contractors who don't need ACCA approval and want to enter an address, get a load calc, and run.

EDS is exactly that.

You can tailor and tweak things, but it's not easy or obvious how to do that.

Where it struggles:

  • Not ACCA approved. EDS says approval is coming, but today its loads may not be accepted where an ACCA-approved Manual J is required.
  • Not easy to edit / modify loads. So it's tough for you to own them.
  • No LiDAR scanning.
  • Requires internet connection.

5. Wrightsoft Right-J

Best for engineers focused on new construction who need the full ACCA suite.

Wrightsoft is the most comprehensive Manual J, S, and D solution available. If you need all three in depth, with granular control over construction assemblies, infiltration, and internal loads, nothing else here matches it.

It skews heavily toward new construction, and it's built for engineers.

Where it struggles:

  • No scanning at all. You're measuring and tracing the house by hand. Every time.
  • The interface feels like it was built in the 1990s.
  • Deeply technical, not a sales tool. No equipment visualization, nothing homeowner-facing.
  • Desktop workflow. Everything happens on one machine, but that machine is a desktop back at the office — which means the design conversation happens on a second visit, if it happens at all. (Wrightsoft's Right-J Mobile app is ACCA-approved for block loads only.)

Comparison table

Amply Energy logo
Amply
conduit tech two
Conduit Tech
Cool Calc logo
 
Cool Calc
eds-logo-grey
EDS
wrightsoft logo
Wrightsoft
ACCA-approved Manual J
 Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Independently owned
 Yes No No Yes No
Published pricing
 Yes No Yes

Yes

 Yes
Support directly from the founders
 Yes No No No No
Full workflow on one device
 Yes Yes No Yes (browser, no scanning) Yes (desktop, no scanning)
LiDAR scanning
 Yes Yes Yes No No
Notes and photos mid-scan
 Yes No No N/A N/A
Rescan a single room anytime
 Yes No No N/A N/A
Captures angled walls
 Yes No No N/A Manual entry
AR equipment visualization
 Yes Yes No No No
Works fully offline
 Yes No No No No
Edit windows / doors
 Yes Yes Manual entry Manual entry Manual entry
Edit wall segments
 Coming Yes No Manual entry Manual entry
2D floor plans
 Coming Yes Yes No Yes
Manual S
 Spreadsheet No Yes No Yes
Manual D
 Duct sketch No Yes No Yes
Free Manual J review of your first jobs
 Yes No No No No

What should independent contractors actually look for?

If you're winning work on trust rather than price, the load calculation is only half of what you need from this software. The other half is whether it helps the homeowner understand what you're doing.

When someone watches you scan their house, sees the model appear, and walks through the results with you, the conversation changes. You're explaining a system instead of defending a price. That's the whole game for an independent competing against a company that can outspend you on advertising and undercut you on the bid.

The second thing to weigh is what happens when the job doesn't go smoothly. Bad signal in the basement. A room that needs redoing. A knee wall. A homeowner asking a question you didn't expect. The difference between tools shows up in the realities of your day-to-day on site, not the demos.

Why accurate sizing matters more with heat pumps

Oversizing has always caused problems — short cycling, poor dehumidification, temperature swings. With heat pumps, the margin for error is narrower. Capacity varies with outdoor temperature, and the equipment selection depends on a load calculation that reflects the actual house, not a rule of thumb or a like-for-like swap of what was there before.

This is why the geometry question isn't academic. If your scanning tool squares off every angled wall into a rectangle, the surface areas going into the calculation aren't the surface areas of the home. You get an ACCA-approved Manual J built on measurements that don't match the building.

Why we think Amply is the right choice for contractors like you

We built Amply for the contractor who's already doing the work right and needs a tool that keeps up.

Everything happens in one visit, on one device, while the homeowner is standing next to you and paying attention. The scan captures the house as it actually is. The load calc is ACCA-approved. The AR design lets you place equipment in their living room. The design document explains your reasoning in language they can follow — so when the next contractor hands them a one-page quote, the comparison makes itself.

And when something goes sideways, you talk to a co-founder who has designed these systems himself.

We don't do a full Manual D. We don't do 2D floor plans yet. If those are dealbreakers, one of the other tools on this list is the better call, and we'd rather you know that now.

If they're not — book a demo and we'll show you the whole workflow, or see our pricing.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Amply compare to Conduit Tech?

Both are ACCA-approved for full residential Manual J load calculations and both use iPad LiDAR with AR equipment visualization. Amply works fully offline, lets you rescan any single room at any time, and captures angled walls as they are. Conduit, now part of ServiceTitan, offers 2D floor plans, wall-segment editing, and ServiceTitan ownership, but needs an internet connection and scans a floor at a time. Read our full Amply vs. Conduit comparison.

Does Amply calculate room-by-room loads, or block loads only?

Room-by-room. Amply is ACCA-approved for full residential load calculations and gives you heating and cooling loads and CFM for every room, plus the whole-house totals.

What is Manual J and why does it matter for heat pump installations?

Manual J is the ACCA-approved methodology for calculating residential heating and cooling loads. It accounts for insulation, windows, orientation, air leakage, and climate data to determine how much capacity a home actually needs. For heat pumps, where capacity shifts with outdoor temperature, an accurate load is the foundation of a correct equipment selection — and it's what rebate programs and permitting authorities require.

Can I run a load calculation on site during a sales visit?

With some tools, yes. Amply is built for exactly this: walk the home, scan it, run the Manual J, design the system in AR, and leave a design document behind — 15–30 minutes, one visit, one device. Conduit also runs on site but needs a connection. Cool Calc requires a handoff into the web app to finish the Manual J, and Wrightsoft is a desktop tool that expects office-based data entry.

Will my city or utility program accept these load calculations?

Amply is ACCA-approved for full residential Manual J load calculations. We went through a rigorous nine-month review with ACCA to confirm our product follows the Manual J procedure. Our output is accepted by major rebate programs including Mass Save and NYS Clean Heat, and contractors use Amply reports for utility and municipal submissions every day. The practical answer: if your program accepts a Manual J, Amply works. If you have a specific program in mind, ask us — chances are one of our customers already submits to it. 

What equipment do I need for LiDAR-based sizing software?

Any iPad Pro made on or after 2022 will run Amply. Newer models perform best. Older iPad Pro models from 2021 will still work, just with somewhat slower processing.

You can choose to get an iPad Pro with cellular connect but it is not necessary — Amply runs offline.

Current list: Apple iPad Pros that work with Amply | Amply Energy Help Center

Have an iPad and unsure if it is compatible with Amply?

  • Download Amply from the App Store
  • Open Amply. If Amply is not compatible, you will see a message indicating the current iPad is not Amply compatible.
What happens if a room doesn't scan well?

With Amply, you rescan that room — at any point, including after you've moved on. Conduit does not let you add scanned rooms to a floor once you've closed the floor scan. Cool Calc allows you to scan one room at a time.

Does Amply handle knee walls, vaulted ceilings, or other irregular geometry?

Yes. For vaulted and cathedral ceilings, scan the room as best you can and mark the ceiling as “cathedral” — Amply handles the adjustment. Knee-wall attic spaces and other odd geometries are exactly why we recommend newer iPad Pros; the newer LiDAR handles irregular shapes, even curved walls, noticeably better.

Does Amply do Manual S and Manual D?

Manual S, yes — a free Excel spreadsheet that works with your Amply load data and handles both ducted and ductless with cold-climate heat pump performance in mind. It isn't built into the software yet, but it will be.

Manual D, no. Plenty of our customers pair Amply with their existing duct design workflow — the room-by-room loads give you exactly what you need to complete a Manual D in another tool, and you can use the 3D model to sketch a layout. For a full Manual D with static pressure and specific duct sizing, the answer is not today, and honestly not for a while.

Can Amply be used for more than just heat pumps?

Yes. A Manual J load calculation is about the home — it has nothing to do with the equipment. You can run a load calculation on any home regardless of the existing system or what you're proposing, including furnaces, boilers, and traditional AC. We see the industry moving toward heat pumps, so that's where we're building the extras, but the core load calculation works for any home and all HVAC equipment.

How much does Amply cost?

Our pricing is published on our pricing page. There's no annual contract required and no built-in annual price increase.