On March 11, 2026, the OpenADR Alliance hosted a webinar — with Codibly on the panel — on AHRI 1380, the demand response standard for residential and small commercial HVAC equipment. The discussion focused on what the standard actually requires, how the compliance timeline unfolds across 2026 and 2027, and the concrete steps OEMs should take now to stay on the right side of it.

Rolf Bienert, Technical Director at the OpenADR Alliance, was joined by Spencer Borison, US President at Codibly; Eric Olson, Senior Product Manager for Grid-Flexible Technology at the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA); and Jim Zuber of QualityLogic.

Webinar highlights

1. 2026 is a self-compliance window; 2027 raises the bar
This year OEMs can self-certify against AHRI 1380 through their own due-diligence testing. From 2027, third-party lab certification becomes the expectation — making early movers’ head start meaningful.

2. The protocol stack is widening
Today the standard recognizes OpenADR 2.0b and CTA-2045; the proposed next revision adds CTA-2045-B, OpenADR 3.1, and the Home Connectivity Alliance, giving manufacturers more implementation flexibility.

3. Compliance testing is not the same as protocol certification
Conformance to a protocol is necessary but not sufficient: AHRI 1380 testing requires holding a live DR session while measuring real load reduction across multiple curtailment scenarios.

4. Tooling is catching up
New test tooling now covers the required DR signaling scenarios, lowering the barrier for OEMs to validate their own equipment before formal certification.

5. Certification is the ticket, not the destination
Passing AHRI 1380 gets a product to the starting line; participating in utility programs still requires integration with aggregator platforms such as EnergyHub, Uplight, Leap, or Virtual Peaker.

6. Strong cross-industry interest
Registrations spanned major HVAC OEMs across multiple regions, underlining how quickly AHRI 1380 has moved from an optional consideration to a market-access requirement.

The OpenADR Alliance hosted and recorded this session. You can watch the full webinar and review the slides on the OpenADR Alliance webinar series page.

Looking ahead

The next revision of the standard — already in active drafting — points toward broader protocol support and a wider set of in-scope appliances. OEMs designing equipment today should build for extensibility now, so that meeting tomorrow’s lab-certification requirements is a configuration step rather than a redesign.

For a deeper written walkthrough of the standard and its timeline, see our companion article, AHRI 1380 in 2026: What HVAC OEMs Need to Know About Demand Response Compliance.