Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners

I've seen other construction related businesses try to go direct and it is extremely difficult. By going direct to the homeowner you are targeting the venn diagram union of "people who are willing & able to do the work themselves" and "people who will pay more"

How are you going to build your service network? You say you will "connect them with a contractor to do the actual install." But contractors make their money on equipment sales, not on labor. I bought my residential HVAC system direct from a friend and it took me 3 weeks calling around to find a contractor that would do the install and THAT was only because of the same friend connection.

Who are the decision makers in your target market exactly? Wil Joe Homeowner be deciding? Will you pursue developers who install and build? Are you pursuing multi-family complexes and engineers will be specifying the equipment? Each of these will require you to provide value above and beyond what they are receiving now and it's not clear what your value proposition is.

>> "contractors struggle with installs because of the difficulty of properly sizing the system, and understanding if your duct work is compatible with a heat pump"

What? How could duct work possibly be incompatible with a heat pump? Any forced air system is already ready for hot or cold air. Additionally if you are banking on contractor unfamiliarity or incompetence as part of your business plan, you are in for a rude surprise.

One other headwind is that you're VC funded. No one wants to buy a HVAC unit from a company with a 5-7yr liquidation event timeline. If you do go into any other channel than direct to home owner, no one wants to SELL a unit that may not exist in 7 years. How will support work? What about parts? A well built machine could be in working for 15 years (or longer) and the question everyone has is: will you?

> By going direct to the homeowner you are targeting the venn diagram union of "people who are willing & able to do the work themselves"

This is meant to be installed by a professional contractor, not the homeowner.

> How are you going to build your service network?

Compensate the contractors fairly and act as lead gen.

> Who are the decision makers in your target market exactly?

Homeowners. Not targeting multiunit residential or new builds, they care less about efficiency because they don't bear the cost of ownership.

> What? How could duct work possibly be incompatible with a heat pump?

A natural gas furnace requires ~150cfm airflow per 10kbtu heat produced, while a heat pump requires 330cfm per 10kbtu. This large mismatch in required airflow means that if you replace a natural gas furnace with a like sized heat pump, you've likely exceeded the ability of the air handler blower. Luckily most natural gas furnaces are grossly oversized for homes. The way you find the right size unit is with our software.

> This is meant to be installed by a professional contractor, not the homeowner.

This quote was obviously to emphasize that HVAC contractors make money from margin on equipment sales and not labor, which (according to OP) means you end up targeting people who either can do it themselves or purchase this before finding out how hard it is to find a certified technician willing to basically waste their time on installing a HVAC system for little profit.

The only way I can see this working is if perhaps Electric Air pays a hefty commission to their HVAC techs as a way to ensure they still profit from their time, which is what I assume OP was trying to find out.

> This is meant to be installed by a professional contractor, not the homeowner.

But I would want to install that myself. I do everything in my house myself. Could I order a device from you and at the same time save the compensation that otherwise gets the installer?

> This is meant to be installed by a professional contractor, not the homeowner.

And where are you going to get the contractors? Nobody is going to want to contract with you. HVAC companies go with 1, maybe 2 companies. How are you going to pull them away from Carrier, Lenox, etc who can offer volume discounts or just dump their products into the market and bleed you dry without even noticing the effect on their balance sheet?

How are you going to get the plumbing/heating distributors to supply companies to stock your units and parts? You're going to distribute them yourselves? That's going to be very expensive, slow, and unreliable.

How are you going to guarantee you'll still be around for the lifespan of the unit, to provide parts and technicians who know how to service the units?

Puts envelope with your business plan to forehead

You're going to:

-lock down the protocol between the components so nobody can use standard thermostats

-lock down access to the controller for diagnostics, forcing people to go with you for service

-charge a fee for remote "smart" thermostat features

-justify all this with some hand-wavy nonsense about using ML/AI to maximize energy efficiency or predict when the unit needs service

How close am I?

> Not targeting multiunit residential or new builds, they care less about efficiency because they don't bear the cost of ownership.

So it is clear there is nothing in your mission about actually saving energy, just about seeking rent in the economics of the upper-middle class.

Color me unimpressed.

I love startups, but the value proposition is not here. I just had a heat pump installed and it was a much better price and higher efficiency. What is the benefit of direct to consumers is you are going to charge more? What makes your heat pumps better? Hepa filtering? Smart controls? They all have that.

Is the market niche esthetics? They do look nice - maybe this company is trying to be the Apple of heat pumps? Charge more because of looks?

This is a serious question - where is the innovation?

> What is the benefit of direct to consumers is you are going to charge more?

I'm going to guess there's a very specific target market for this, 'lazy' people with a lot of money who don't really do a lot of research before they buy stuff. They are aware of climate change and the need to reduce emissions and have heard of heat pumps as a solution. They've already installed solar panels through a similar service that made the process seamless. They don't want to spend hours calling contractors, getting estimates and selecting someone who is trustworthy. They've bought the same brand car from the same dealership for the last 40 years or so because it's familiar and has worked every time.

There's a massive group of people in the 50-70 age range who are like this. But there are also plenty young people who are like this. Heck, I almost paid quite a lot more for my bathroom than necessary, because of the convenience of the store also installing the bathroom. This meant no need to find a decent contractor (there are many awful ones over here).

> But there are also plenty young people who are like this.

I think there's a subcategory of people who would go for this one specifically because it's a SF company, "one of us" kinda thinking. And unawareness of the market and competition where heat pumps are normalized, routine, and don't need the sleek marketing page / YC funding.

Mind sharing some details of your install - equipment model/size, controls, and cost of install?

I installed a MrCool mini split a few years ago and it's still running great in both summer and winter.

Installing one of these is a pretty advanced project for a typical home owner though. You have one chance to get those pre-charged linesets connected perfectly, and if you screw it up, good luck finding an HVAC contractor that will come and help you recover your botched installation of an off-brand heat pump.

That said, there are certainly homeowners who are experienced enough to pull it off, and I'm glad these DIY products exist. I could see potential for further innovation from ElectricAir to make this sort of thing accessible to more people (at a higher cost, obviously, to pay for that sweet sweet design)

That really isn't the same product, as I understand this is an HRV combined with heat pump system where they are software integrated to PID controls that optimize the level of fresh air and weather aware energy utilization, with a system like this and a startup I'm sure optimizations like this https://youtu.be/0f9GpMWdvWI?t=432 should be possible - this is like Dropbox, can't expect people to roll their own - and you need a fully integrated system to really make this work well without comfort, even simpler if cooling/heating is more efficient via bringing in fresh air this system could choose to do that vs running the heat pump at all!

The size ratings are confusing. This is really a ~19kbtu unit at 5F. Most homeowners do not want a DIY solution, they want it professionally installed. And this system lacks air quality features (HEPA, fresh air intake, humidifier) and the thermostat.

Often you can get EPA certification and all the tools for less. But that system does get good reviews.

Is there a straightforward way to estimate whether a small (24 kbtu), medium (36 kbtu), or large (48 kbtu) unit would be most appropriate for a given home?

For reference for international users, 24 kbtu is 7kW, 36 is 10kW and 48 is 14kW

I'm not a heatpump export, but if that's continuous output, with an SCOP of say 3.8 (what I had quoted in the UK for an airsource -> water -- UK heating is typically hot water run from a boiler through radiators in each room rather than pumping hot (or cool) air direct to the romm via ducted which seems common in the US, perhaps because of the historical desire/need for aircon)

That would require 1.8/2.6/3.7kW of electricity to run. In the UK at 35p/kWh that would mean 91p to generate 10kWh of heat. For reference my oil boiler at 95% efficency and current prices is about 6p/kWh, but we have had insanely high electricity charges this year. Back in September my oil heating approached 10p/kWh -- about £1 a litre.

I think the proper method used by HVAC companies is called the manual J method. I found a simplified version below but the real thing involved a whole book.

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/manu...

This page does the full Manual J, but it is challenging to do and understand. I used it to confirm the estimates that my installer did without a full J workup, and it was helpful.

https://loadcalc.net/

If you have a Nest thermostat, some of the newer models give a usage display of how many minutes per hour they are running. This will tell you how much of your furnace's capacity is running at. For example, if I have a 40kbtu furnace, and I see a maximum of 15 minutes per hour usage on the furnace during a heating season, that means my usage maxes out at roughly 10kbtu. I might choose my heat pump based on that capacity; if I got a 10kbtu heat pump, I would expect it to be running continuously during the maximum usage time.

Not at the moment, working on a tool like this for the preorder site! There are btu/sq.ft. rules of thumbs that are not appropriate for heat pumps (you can easily oversize by 100%).

IIRC: heat pumps aren’t even available for sale in many markets, because distributors don’t see enough interest to stock them.

See also: water beds.

I tried like hell to install an air-to-water heat pump instead of a replacement gas boiler and it didn't make anything close to economic sense to do so.

What do I want from a heat-pump:

I want it to work with a contact-closure (TT/XX) input to call for heat/cooling. Sure, if you have a fancy thermostat that works better, I'm going to read the brochure, but I'm not buying it if I find out it won't work with just a dry contact input.

I want it to use parts that are in stock at my local HVAC supply house. I don't want to be without heat for 3+ days while some obscure custom part is shipped in from someplace across the country.

I want it to have an open interface to extract data (similar to the open interface of a dry-contact closure) about run-time, performance, etc. (I will, however, buy it without this.)

I want it to be sold/serviced by multiple competing suppliers in my area. (This is what ultimately undid the chance to install an A2W heat pump: only one company was in the business of supplying them and they priced it accordingly.)

For a mini-split system, I want to be able to run the refrigerant and condensate lines inside the building so I don't have hideous lineset covers festooning my house.

I'm happy to chat more as a homeowner interested in the space (but with a 6 month old Bosch boiler on the wall and possibly interested in the minisplit for shoulder season heating and summer cooling).

Nobody will build a heat-pump system with an on/off control system like that because the performance will be awful. Certainly not an air-to-water system.

It already exists. Check out Mr. Cool Universal and Gree Flexx. Heat pumps that work with a normal thermostat exist.

Most of the info about this stuff online is trash because HVAC is the most toxic online community compared to any other contracting profession. One of the reasons highly efficient mini splits haven’t took off in the USA- the self proclaimed experts want to charge $2000 to drill a hole and charge a line set, so most people DIY.

I've often wondered why this is. My best guess is that the EPA cert (not actually hard to get) has been turned into some sort of weird quasi-guild-membership thing.

I can walk right in to a "to the trade" electrical or plumbing supply and they'll deal with me, no problem, no questions asked. With HVAC.. they won't even talk to you without an EPA number, even if you're not buying refrigerant.

DTC for whole house systems, if they can make the regulatory side work and provide a good customer experience, is the most important part of this.

I'm a potential customer for DTC/DIY installation, but I think that's a pretty small slice of the market. Many of my friends are entirely willing to drop $4-5K for a single zone mini-split install (that's $1-1.5K of equipment and 2 hours of labor) and wouldn't dream of drilling a hole in the side of their house to save $3K.

I recently got quoted $17k for 2 zone mini split. I bought the tools, instructions, and watched youtube and spent $4500 total. At that savings, I don't need a warranty. I can just buy and install another system if it fails.

Can you explain a little more what you did? Just a little bit, like what brand, did you replace an existing home system. Who did the electrical, did you need duct work? I already have a forced gas system, you can just connect it up? If I only had say 4-5 rooms on one story it would be a lot easier.

Lots of good YouTube videos and good DIY HVAC content on garagejournal.com (the latter will have good discussion on brands as well as DIY installs).

For a case where you have a ducted gas furnace, you are probably better off with a traditional A coil evaporator, especially if you want invisible in the living area of the house. Those are not as DIY-friendly (but anything is DIY-able if you're skilled and bold enough, willing to learn, and willing [or eager] to buy some tools :) ).

when dealing with HVAC you either have to have a friend on the inside who has a license for mechanical or you have to buy everything on eBay... because you're right most of the supply houses won't talk to you unless you have an HVAC license of some sort, That's why most of the stuff I get is on eBay.... things like capacitors, blower motors, heat strips, R410A refrigerant etc either eBay or Facebook marketplace is the best place for it.... and then being in the house rental business I'm constantly buying this equipment and then just having people install it because it's just cheaper that way.... I save about 5 to $7,000 on average per install doing it that way

Here in Japan, every home store and electronics/appliance store sells mini-split HVAC systems directly to consumers. It's no different than buying a washing machine.

Yup, and a vanilla install will cost say 150$. Non vanilla installs still exist on the price list.

Mini splits transform HVAC into Lego, and a competitive market for install is the future.

This is different problem though: contractors just don't want to do small jobs since it doesn't make economic sense to them. Try to hire someone to paint single room or install single outlet, etc. and you'll see it is nearly impossible.

Thus the bill for the small job is outrageously high.

$50 says their units are the same units that the Mr. Cool and Gree Flexx units come out of, just with a fancy panel.

As a backup option, the incumbents already make this. Carrier Infinity is a good example. Proprietary protocol (RS-485 based, so it can run over existing thermostat wiring) between the smart thermostat and the furnace, and between the furnace and outside condenser unit. Even with all these smarts, there is still a fallback mode provided with a regular old dry-contacts control wires that can hook to any standard thermostat. Yeah, the system won't operate at peak performance, but it will operate, and that's very important when every HVAC tech carries a standard thermostat with them, or even uses basic jumper wires, in an emergency until they can return with correct parts.

My Carrier wall unit has a button for manual operation:

> MANUAL CONTROL is intended for testing purposes and emergency operation only.

>but I'm not buying it if I find out it won't work with a dry contact input.

But... why?

Because it's from a new entrant to the market and I don't know that their complex interface will be available, supported, and serviceable 12 years into the 20 year lifetime of the equipment. I do know that I will always be able to provide a dry contact closure in the event they go belly-up and the thermostat goes unsupported.

I have my current gas boiler working via an outdoor reset mechanism that provides flow water at 116°F to 135°F via a dry contact closure from the zone relay box. There's no reason for me to believe that Bosch (and others) can create a modulating boiler that works efficiently from just a dry contact closure input from the house (plus a flow temp sensor, a return temp sensor, an outdoor temp sensor, and a programmed reset curve in the heating unit), but that a heat pump would be unable to do the same.

The boiler can modulate up and down based on the delta-T between return and supply and the target supply temp from the outdoor reset. A heat pump could do exactly the same thing (with an inverter drive, it can do it with even more granularity than a multi-stage gas valve affords).

Ah, clarification: you're OK with using a proprietary (and intelligently proportional) thermostat, as long as there's a backup dry contact option if the factory thermostat fails and is irreplaceable.

Yes, that’s true; I’m ok to use a proprietary thermostat if I think it will save me money in 2 years max. (I’m using Sensi wifi thermostats that will become non-programmable if they stop supporting their phone app. It’s ok, as they were around $40 each after incentives and I’ll save most of that just this heating season. Its interface to the boiler is just power, common, and call-for-heat.)

At least in a hydronic (air-to-water or gas-fired) application, an intelligent stat is not mandatory to get decent efficiency (from variable control). You still have building heat transfer rate and outdoor temp sensing available inside the unit even with just a contact closure.

I guess I'm wondering what this offers over calling an HVAC company and having them install a heat pump system. The system seems expensive at $14,000 for a 48k BTU 18 SEER system. It looks like I can get that for $4,000. Is the sleek software and design of your units worth the extra $10,000, especially when I'm not really going to see my air handler frequently?

I do like that it monitors CO2 and offers humidification, but presumably that means that it needs a hookup to a water line for humidification (not that easy since my air handler is in my attic) and a source of fresh air (so presumably a hole in the roof or something to accommodate that).

I'm also curious if the mini-split system on your site would also handle fresh air and humidification. Wouldn't that require each air handler to have access to fresh air and water?

I'm also curious why 18 SEER? Are there diminishing returns above that? I'm in a pretty cold climate so I've been thinking it would be better to get a 20 SEER unit.

My suggestion for your company: Add stoves and hot water heaters to your offering. I'm not going to switch to a heat pump and continue to have natural gas for my stove and hot water heater. If I'm going to put in a heat pump, I'd want to get natural gas out of my place. I don't want to have to get a heat pump from you, then call someone else to deal with my water heater and another person to deal with my stove.

I'm certainly not an expert on this so maybe you'll just say that you're using more reliable equipment than the stuff I've seen, but it seems like something I'm more inclined to go with a local HVAC company than a startup.

Same thought as well. I recently self installed an 18k BTU unit. The lines came pre-charged, but I wanted it to be run exactly to length. For someone to come and do just that part (cut, flare and vacuum/charge the lines) cost me just $150. I got the unit (a pioneer) for under $900. The rest of the world has heat pumps figured out, no need for a tesla-ish version charging a premium. Cost will be the biggest factor for adoption for ElectricAir, imo.

If anything, a sweaty startup offering just the install for a nominal fee would do really well here.

I agree, in fact a couple things in the pitch don't add up.

> ... where the 80M single family homes in the US replace their furnaces with heat pumps.

Where did they get this statistic? I already have a heat pump and know many that do too. Are we included in this 80M estimate? What about those in the northern half of the US that also need back-up heat for when it is very cold? They aren't going to replace their furnaces with a heat pump. They might add one to their setup but replace, no.

> In addition the process of getting a heat pump is painful, including finding a trustworthy contractor, sorting out financing, and wading through rebates. And finally contractors struggle with installs because of the difficulty of properly sizing the system, and understanding if your duct work is compatible with a heat pump

I don't know the contractors they are talking about, but I literally had to say the words "heat pump" to my local Carrier installer and they did all the rest.

> What about those in the northern half of the US that also need back-up heat for when it is very cold?

This heat pump is supposed to work to -15F and includes back-up resistive heat. Theoretically it can replace a heater and air conditioner anywhere. I know people north of Chicago that use a similar heat pump and resistive backup system and it's been fine to -30F keeping the house at 69F.

> I don't know the contractors they are talking about, but I literally had to say the words "heat pump" to my local Carrier installer and they did all the rest.

There's definitely a bias against them when natural gas is available. Until probably the past 3-4 years very few HVAC contractors in the midwest were familiar with heat pumps or had bad experiences 5-15 years back and recommended against them as it's "too cold" for them to work here.

My gas-powered water heater failed in my northern US location. I asked a friend who’s a plumbing engineer (!) who said to get a heat pump. I called the HVAC company which had installed the gas water heater and gas furnace some years before and asked for a heat pump water hearer, and they said oh yeah we sell one of those and people love it. I get the feeling that as you say 5-15 years ago it would have been a different story but now it’s routine.

Heat pump water heaters are great, also a much simpler install than an HVAC system.

Resistive heating is very extremely inefficient compared to gas though

Only 17% of homes have heat pumps at the moment. 80M (though I believe its closer to 88M) homes in the US are single family detached homes.

What region are you in? Local contractor knowledge around heat pumps is quite regional.

The problem with trying to charge a nominal/flat fee is the same for all contractors.

Not all houses are alike, and you'll never know what is inside a wall/attic where a customer wants to install it, or what kind of electrical work will be needed. (might have to run a new 240v line). Dirt work may be required for the exterior condenser.

Totally get it. If you're into it for a few k to install, that's one thing. To me, the total costs for this seem a bit high. Who knows, maybe with scale things get cheaper. I'm definitely not their target customer, despite wanting to be.

> The rest of the world has heat pumps figured out, no need for a tesla-ish version charging a premium.

USA has heat pumps (the technology) figured out as well.

What the USA does NOT have figured out is how to accomplish trades like HVAC and construction without massive grift.

>What the USA does NOT have figured out is how to accomplish trades like HVAC and construction without massive grift.

The US has professional licensing schemes which increase costs. I had to work 5 years in the field doing HVAC work before even being eligible to get a license. Licensing limits the supply of labor while (in theory) establishing better quality. I've lived in countries with zero professional licensing and the quality of work is atrocious.

I live in the USA and have seen plenty of atrocious work. I currently have the best HVAC expert in the world. YMMV.

Was said work performed by a licensed individual?

Fun fact - In some states, contracts with unlicensed contractors are unenforceable.

So, what I'm hearing is software engineers should be licensed.

> The rest of the world has heat pumps figured out

A single digit percentage of homes globally are using heat pumps, most of the world does not have it figured out. That's specifically why Electric Air exists, they're chasing what is going to be a gigantic market (if it were already such a figured out market they couldn't get funding without a revolutionary 10x approach, YC would have little interest).

I'd say in New Zealand we definitely have them figured out. Every rental needs a heat-pump if there's no fireplace. Landlords will prefer the heat-pumps primarily because it's less maintenance. Apparently 25% of all households in NZ have one: https://www.genesisenergy.co.nz/tips-and-tricks/articles/use...) you may also be interested in: https://figure.nz/chart/HkvN4YjwyylwL2A4

Ours are exactly the same sort of units that I saw in Singapore - they're A/C systems, but can do cold or hot. I remember when I saw the 'heat-pumps' in Singapore, I was like "Wow, why does everyone have a heat-pump" and everyone looked at me and went "What's a heat-pump?" as they always called them A/C units - doubt they ever got above 16 degrees or something.

Aligns with our experience in China for the four years before the pandemic. Apart from a couple of apartments we visited in Harbin that had gas boiler radiators, everwhere else we found apartments heated and cooled by heat pumps. It makes total sense in countries that have hot summers and cold winters.

Europe as a whole has been utilizing heat pumps for residential heavily over the past decade. With global temperatures rising, heat pump installs in OECD countries are skyrocketing as the climate becomes uncomfortable for larger and larger groups of people.

In the Netherlands, I can purchase a minisplit with installation for under €4k. It could get cheaper if I wanted something less powerful.

While your point about "single digit percentage[s]" is accurate, it's not helpful when discussing the merits of this product, or the wider industry as a whole in most of western world.

Where are you looking for <€4K installs? Most around here start at 4. But that is using daikin.

I’m a bit concerned about what happens when it freezes. Can the outdoor unit still I operate?

> it's not helpful when discussing the merits of this product

Of course it is. How would global market size, present and future, not be helpful as a discussion topic? The parent I replied to was referencing that very issue, directly or indirectly. It indicates heat pumps are still a relatively small market, and the OP company is betting it's going to get a lot larger, meaning there is a landgrab going on right now and they're aiming for capturing a segment of that future market.

You contradict your claim that it's not a helpful discussion point in pointing out how usage is skyrocketing (ie the market is getting bigger fast) and having to reference the larger established use in some parts of Europe to try to make your point. You proved it is a pertinent discussion point in trying to claim that it's not.

$500 + $150 (install) mini split works fine in Japan and it should be fine for other worlds where central heating isn't a thing. US is one of the richest country and rest of the world spend less.

I mean, they estimate $10k for installation, so you are calling an HVAC company and having them install a heat pump system. It's not clear to me from the website if the idea is that they are actually integrating installation in-house or if they will contract out the work, in which case it's likely the exact same installers as if you ordered a system from somewhere like Home Depot.

Well, at least the ones that agree to work with it. For example, the most reputable HVAC company I can find locally has picked their favorite 1-2 brands and largely only installs those, so they know what they're bound to be repairing later.

They also tend to only install units that you can't buy directly and only quote for total cost not parts and labor so you cannot easily tell just how much they are charging for the labor.

What difference would the breakdown on parts and labor make to you as a prospective client, given that you cannot buy the units directly?

It must make a difference otherwise they'd provide the breakdown when asked.

I suspect most consumers don't know how much the appliance should cost, it is a complex piece of machinery. But the labor part is easier to reason about.

So seeing $12k all in to install a heat pump might seem reasonable, people will shrug and say heatpumps must be expensive, but if they see that's $5k for the heat pump and $7k for the labor then it doesn't seem so reasonable.

And there are alternatives. You can buy comparable units from other manufacturers directly and shop for labor only (harder to find but not impossible). And there are sealed DIY units you can install yourself.

The answer to this, assuming the breakdown was actually honest, is exactly why they don't typically provide a breakdown. You would see an hourly labor rate that would make a lawyer blush. There's just something unpalatable to most people about seeing a $200-300+/hr labor rate, especially considering that the average person paying that rate probably make closer to $20-40/hr.

You could buy an equivalent system, they just use special contractor only models so you cant easily see the price online.

From your comment, it sounds like managed to find a price for this unit. I’m on my phone, and the preorder page says nothing more than a $100 deposit. Why would anyone order this without the full price bring front and center? Is this a mistake or are these people hiding this info?

How will you compete with Goodman/Daikin and needing lineset runs with usually high voltage work and panel upgrades that sometimes come with converting to a heat pump.

If you don't use 24V AC controls i don't think it would take off with any installers and you seriously limit and then hinder yourself needing way more customer support.

What refrigerants are you considering as there is more environmental stuff coming out killing 410A.

You will be competing against installers that can offer 10 year warranties (Bosch, Mitsubishi) without any of the backing of a large company saying parts will still be available and that is a big worry with start ups, at least when nest got bought you can still run systems without the cloud or could swap to any 24V controls system.

I used to be an installer but am out of the trades now and I think you'd kind of off the mark with your shortcomings to the current experience, the biggest issue you're gonna find is duct leakage and contractors skipping out on the testing and then the old vac n run and the new construction builders literally will want whatever is cheapest and gets them through the build fastest (80% gas single stage with a empty coil box is hella common)

I hope you have seen the variety of retro installs that will need to be done as there are still lots of oil burners out there.

Honestly i've almost talked myself into the idea that I should be working on this project. LMAO.

Please tell me you aren't going to rely on internet and at least use local RTD sensors at least.

> What refrigerants are you considering as there is more environmental stuff coming out killing 410A.

I'm also interested in this. Specifically, I'm interested in R-744 (CO2) as it has a GWP (global warming potential) of only 1. R-32 (Difluoromethane) has a GWP of 675 while R-410A has a GWP of 2088. Japan has had R-744 heat pumps for years now.

Drawdown lists refrigeration improvements as the single most effective method (we need to do all of them) for combatting climate change.

https://www.drawdown.org/the-book

Some background on CO2 systems. On the one hand, great, because CO2 has a GWP of 1 as you point out. On the other, the operating pressures are much higher than other conventional refrigerants (80+bar vs 20bar). Because of this high pressure the components are more expensive, and you don't see any field installs of refrigerant lines like in a mini-split setup. Instead the CO2 systems typically come as factory sealed air-water systems.

24V controls: Any inverter heat pump will run best with a communicating thermostat. We can make efficiency sacrifices to run the system on 24V controls, but it would not be my recommended setup.

Refrigerants: this is largely dictated by compressor availability. At this point it looks like R454B is the winner (GWP 467)

You're right about new construction builders wanting whatever is cheapest. They don't bear the cost of ownership, so there's very little incentive to go for efficient equipment. Doing replacements on oil is great! The monthly savings when moving from electric resistance, propane and fuel oil are huge.

Connectivity - system runs fine standalone without any internet connection.

If you decide to get in the heat pump game come say hi at the next AHR expo!

Can you open the communication API so that FLOSS licensed software/hardware can run the unit instead of replacing/repairing your interface?

He will reply with a pile of word salad again and again, never addressing the crucial API issue.

Existing established companies offer centrally ducted heat pumps. You can purchase them direct, and are even sold by your big box home improvement stores. (search for "ducted heat pump)

They are generally contractor only as homeowners generally can't DIY the 240v electrical and lineset hookup. What exactly is being improved upon by your startup?

A few major improvements - (1) Purchasing experience, we'll connect you with a local contractor, arrange financing and help with rebates. (2) HEPA filtration, fresh air intake and humidity control fully integrated into the system, actuated off PM2.5 and CO2 sensors in the thermostat. (3) A smart thermostat that is optimized for operation with a variable speed heat pump, and reduces your monthly bills. (4) Help for the contractors in the form of a web app to do load disaggregation for heat pump sizing and figure out if the existing ducts can be used for the install. This is something a lot of contractors need an effective tool for.

Are you considering following in the footsteps of Project Solar? I've received 20 quotes from other solar companies like Solar Run as well as local solar companies, and they're quoting me around $3-$6/watt. This price includes their sales commission. Project Solar, on the other hand, eliminates the middleman, allowing us to purchase their system for just $2.2/watt. Those $3-$6/watt quotes didn’t make long-term sense to us. Project Solar made financial sense to us.

As a VC-backed startup, it's worth checking out their business model.

This is a big deal because if you can beat the rates of your competitors and guarantee a quality workmanship, then that takes away the 100+ hours we spend on sourcing quotes and negotiating better prices.

Here’s a story about what happens when you DON’T spend 100+ hours sourcing multiple quotes. You end up with a $36,000 heater + air conditioning unit where the installer caused a leak to occur on on the second floor. We were so desperate for cold air that we didn’t have time to get 20 quotes, but the 5 other quotes we did get ranged from $48k to $64k.

If you can save us that 100+ hours of time and give us a cheaper deal while guaranteeing workmanship, then I’m sold.

We’re getting really really really tired of overly inflated prices and the negotiation process.

I'm really not sure how any of this is worth the extra ~$8k in price difference. Not saying there aren't people out there willing to buy but it's not for me.

1 - I already have a local contractor and financing shouldn't be a reason it costs more. 2 - This is ~$500 and I already own a air purifier. 3 - This is ~$200 and I already own a thermostat. 4 - I can't speak to the value in this but in my case I don't have central ducts.

HVAC engineer here - this looks great Chris. How are you doing the humidity control out of interest? I've done a few datacentres that won't touch ultrasonic humidifiers because they generate dust in areas with hard water. Less of an issue in resi but perhaps something to consider. Also, are you doing energy recovery for your fresh air intake? If you're ducting both intake and exhaust/spill, is there any opportunity to direct the exhaust/spill air back through the external condenser on the way out to get some extra efficiency?

First -- good luck with this!

> Purchasing experience, we'll connect you with a local contractor, arrange financing and help with rebates.

Hopefully constructive feedback: I replaced 2 of our residential furnaces within the last few years, in two separate transactions with two different vendors. I can say that this pitch doesn't resonate as an improvement because vendors already make this turnkey.

You call a furnace/air conditioning company, they come out and recommend a unit. You sign their financing thing, they come out the next day and install. I interacted with a single primary person (on-site) at each company. Cost aside, it's actually one of the more pleasant buying experiences of any major home improvement.

Finally, I can tell you who installed the ($$$$$) units but I definitely could not tell you who made them. Branding might be tough unless you do the installs yourself.

Thanks for the feedback. If you feel comfortable saying, what region are you in? I think where you might start running into friction is if you want a heat pump vs a furnace. There's a lot of variation between local markets in terms of heat pump install competence.

In addition to the software concerns above, I would have severe reservations about the ongoing maintenance of the system.

How would maintenance be handled? There are a large number of contractors in my area that can service the major brands. Would maintenance come from the company itself, or via third party partners? If third parties, what if they prove unreliable? Will there be enough diversity in providers to give me choice?

More importantly, what happens if the startup is acquired or shuts down? This is an expensive kit that, depending on system sizing, costs as much as a car. I need this type of system to work for years, with high availability of parts and labor, and replacement as-required.

Going with a new company in this space seems deeply risky. And yeah, the existing manufacturers don't play super nicely with smarthomes and cloud-based control and whatnot, but it's far from enough of a pain to offset the risk IMO.

Those established companies don't have units with smart thermostats that get bricked if the company goes out of business.

Please consider on-boarding to Home Assistant.

Avoid proprietary protocols to communicate between sub-systems as much as possible.

The system should be self contained from the start and must be able to function without a local network & internet.

Do not require internet connectivity, a hub, or some intermediary solution if a third party system (such as Home Assistant) wants to communicate to the system.

My biggest fear is attempt to lock me into an ecosystem that charges me a monthly fee to just exist, while selling data about me. No promise will make this fear go away, as consumers mistreated many many times in the past. Show it through your open design.

Good luck.

> What issues have you had with your existing heat and cooling, and do you have any interesting stories around a heat pump install or use? I would love to hear your ideas, experiences, and feedback on any and all of the above!

Fan motor on compressor broken, company insist everything needs changed. Another similar incident was with a capacitor. Such rip-offs create a disdain in consumer.

In some very cold nights, the heat pump fails to keep the heat and emergency/aux heat kicks in.

I hear your concerns! Just want to reiterate (since this is one of the top comments) no internet connectivity is required to operate the system. We will have integrations that also allow you to change the setpoint with your home system of choice. We're not interested in holding people hostage, we want to make the best way to heat and cool your home, and make it easy to get. If you're willing to turn on wifi, you can ingest demand response, weather and rate plan signals to optimize energy, and remotely operate the system.

> The system should be self contained from the start and must be able to function without a local network & internet.

Rural users often have limited or no access to Internet service, yet need technology like this to heat and cool their homes.

Hey, that's me! We wound up getting a pellet stove, super cheap to operate and very efficient so far, but I'd also be open to a heat pump at the right price range. We're some of the few with high quality Internet. Lots of my neighbors have wood burning stoves or pellet burners, because they're so cheap to operate compared to the next possibility, which is propane, a very expensive fossil fuel.

Pellets being renewable is great, but if the heat pump does just as well, or at least assists, they might get lots of rural bites. I'm excited to see where this goes.

Yes, the internet is not as ubiquitous as some might presume, and not just in rural areas. Some newly developed suburbs of large cities do not have internet connectivity, not even Starlink yet. I have learned about this in Ohio, Delaware, Texas, and most recently in Florida. Some where just too isolated & not big enough for the carriers, some were blocked by politicking, and some I have no idea why.

> Fan motor on compressor broken, company insist everything needs changed.

Ugh, this happened to me recently.

“It’s an old system and the replacement parts can’t be found. Have to replace the whole thing. $12k”

After they leave I found a replacement on Amazon and replaced it myself 2 days later in under an hour.

Fair point, I should do a better job of communicating the unit sizes. Heat pump capacity varies as a function of outdoor temps. A standard unit is rated at 47F but the sizes I'm showing are at 5F (cold climate conditions). Also for this price you get the air quality module which does HEPA, fresh air intake and humidification and a smart thermostat that's designed to fully optimize this heat pump system.

First - this thing is awesome so nice going.

Second - yes, significantly better communication on the website is going to help. Some economic analysis (the section of savings is ambiguous) with specifics, specifics on how it would look with financing, for different house sizes etc would get a lot of people across the hump. It's quite unclear to me if this thing makes sense financially.

Third - nice going, this really is awesome.

If you want to control air quality, you do this with a separate fresh air intake, not with a ducted furnace. Many older homes have furnaces taking air from sub-optimal spaces such as garages or crawl spaces.

Great point. You don't source from the same spot you source combustion air - you run a separate fresh air intake. This system has HEPA, fresh air intake and humidity control packaged/integrated together well. The fresh air wouldn't come from a garage or crawl space, but from the outdoors via a dedicated (small) duct.

When you say it's rated at 47F do you mean its efficiency is measured at 47F? If so, does that matter much?

The unit linked in the post you're replying to states that it can operate as low as -13F.

Talking about capacity for heat pumps is tricky, their available heating power changes continuously as a function of outdoor temperature. The convention is to refer to the available capacity at 47F for 'normal' heat pump and the capacity at 5F for a cold climate heat pump.

Makes sense. How much does their capacity typically change over their operating temperature range?

so what about places like Duluth, MN where it can be -20F ambient, then -40F to -50F with a windchill for several weeks of the year?

Windchill doesn't effect, and you can handle small dips below -15 F (like for a couple hours at night) because the house has some thermal mass. However, Duluth, MN is right at the edge of being too cold for this heat pump (99th percentile cold temperature in the coldest month is -15.16 F). If I was in Duluth and was considering a heat pump, I'd want to make sure I had an electric furnace or some space heaters as a backup. However, it would still be worth it to get the heat pump because you'd be able to heat your home much more efficiently/cheaply >99% of the time.

Even in coastal California, most ducted heat pumps have a built in electric or gas furnace.

I imagine anything sold in areas where it actually gets cold will as well.

Here at 7000' near Santa Fe, I know dozens of homes, many new construction, that are heat pump only to all effects and purposes (i.e. they may also have fireplaces but these are not part of the normal heating systems nor part of any plan for the 0F-5F winter nights we can get.

Heat pumps can handle things by themselves down to around -10F to -15F, if correctly sized and installed.

What brand?

Most of the low temperature ones I’ve seen include resistive heating. At some point the COP of the heat pump approaches 1.

Also, having heat to -15, then switching to no heat isn’t ideal.

Mitsubishi. Their "extreme" models do not switch to resistive heating, but deal with the critical problem at very low temps: partial freezing of the refridgerant. They divert some of the heat into fully melting the refridgerant. This reduces the COP but keeps them functioning.

Windchill is irrelevant here, it only indicates what the temperature feels like to warm blooded mammals.

I was tempted to give a similar answer, but I'm not so sure it's irrelevant. Yes, the windchill won't affect the energy efficiency of the heatpump. But it will affect the rate at which the house loses heat, and thus the BTU's the system needs to provide to maintain a temperature. If the heatpump has been exactly sized to maintain a house temperature of (say) 70F at the expected winter low, adding a strong wind on the exterior of the house seems like it might make for a chilly morning. The effect isn't as strong as it is for bare skin at body temp, and hence the exact numbers will be off, but it's still there, right?

windchill as a concept can be applied to all evaporative cooling systems.

Heat pumps are not an evaporative system.

You can't lower the temperature across a gradient lower than the fluid temperature, no matter how fast that fluid is moving. You can cool things down faster, but you can't go lower.

So if it's 10F, a 5F heat pump will work equally well at 0mph wind and 30mph.

You got it. A brief technical aside, heat pump performance is hurt by frosting, which happens at intermediate outdoor temps (~35-50F). Basically the outdoor coil is both below freezing, and below the dewpoint of the air. The frost forms a thermal insulating layer around the coil, and intermittently you have to run a defrost cycle to melt off the ice. This is a small hit to system efficiency.

Yes, I never claimed they were. I was responding to the idea that only warm-blooded mammals have the concept of wind-chill. Any system that takes advantage of evaporative cooling will have the concept of wind chill. A "swamp cooler" is one example.

It's not designed for those areas. The world is plenty large, they don't need to accommodate every single address in the country to have a viable or useful product.

Custom ground source heat pump my friend :) side benefit (energy cost) free hot water.

Ground source is great! (if you can afford the install).

I would be very interested in stats on the gradient of home energy use by average outdoor temperature. I imagine that "Places where it gets too cold for heat pumps" represent a large percentage of heat usage; That is, there's (made up numbers) 10% of the population living in those areas, but they represent 90% of heating energy use.

If every home that could use your heat pumps year-round installed one and used it exclusively, what's the upper bound on energy saved? If every home across the country installed one and used it primarily (whenever it was warm enough outside), what would be the energy savings? Not to disparage, I'm certain it's still significant, but I'm curious to quantify it.

This is quantified by "heating degree days" and I don't think your intuition is correct here.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/United_S...

The difference between "Can use a heat pump" and "can't" is only maybe 10º or 15º. The coldest places are only ~20% colder than much more populated areas with millions of more residents.

Metro Boston has around 5 million people -- that's more than 3x as many as who live in North Dakota and South Dakota combined. Their climate is cold and they get around 6,000 HDD every winter compared to the frigid upper plains who average something like 8,000 or 8,500. So 1.3x more heat requirement per person but spread out across 1/3 as many people.

Not to mention all of e.g. Chicago, Denver, Des Moines, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, the rest of New England, etc. etc. where heat pumps do just fine.

I think you are going about this the wrong way.

If you want to build a better experience with converting fossil fuel or electric resistance systems to heat pumps then you want to put together a network of installers and standardize on widely available equipment from existing manufacturers.

If you want to design the next generation of heat pumps, then don’t sell directly to the consumer.

Your price so far is pretty outrageous, a Mr Cool unit is an order of magnitude cheaper for the same BTU. No it won’t monitor CO2 and air quality, etc. But at the prices you are asking it’s a major investment into a startup and these systems require support more than technology.

Lastly, your sales pitch is off. There are loads of heat pumps or there, from DIY installed units to multi ton full systems. If your main value proposition is the integration of air quality and humidity then explain why a whole house humidifier and a HEPA filter won’t be enough. Just explaining what a heat pump is isn’t going to cut it.

"Preorder". "Shipping Winter 2024".

"While we don't have any physical prototypes at the moment, we have the industrial design and also largely understand how this will be built."

No. You have to build it before you can sell it.

Reminds me of Noria (later Kapsul), a somewhat early Kickstarter darling that promised to have revolutionized window air conditioners. Theirs would be quiet and light, and inexpensive ($250!), and would ship within a year, all they needed to do was raise $250,000!

The timeline graphic is still up here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kurt/noria-cool-redefin...

They raised nearly $1.5MM, because as it turns out, people will throw money at a solution that sounds amazing, regardless of their understanding of manufacturing and physics. They finally started delivering some five years later, and what they delivered amounted to a repackaged traditional window air conditioning unit. Still noisy, still heavy, and the build quality wasn't great. Cf. https://www.phillymag.com/news/2021/06/23/kapsul-air-conditi...

Johnson Controls does $20-$30 billion in annual revenue. They've swallowed up all kinds of other HVAC companies over the decades. Turns out, there's not a whole lot of innovation to be had in the HVAC world, because of the limitations of physics.

Nest, on the other hand, did some wildly overdue disruption on the control side of things, doing a little bit of math on historic local data to help figure out how to cycle radiators more efficiently, but for the most part, the cost savings tended to be from Nest suggesting that it's silly to be running your AC at 68 degrees F on a 98 degree day.

I appreciate there's an attempt to be transparent at the cost here, but "shipping winter 2024 even though we don't have a physical prototype" for an HVAC system is as big a red flag as there is, to me.

I was reminded of Noria/Kapsul as well. I paid the $1 for the chance to opt in later, so I was still getting their apologetic emails to customers as of last year, six years after backing.

The last email (May 2022) said they had delivered to ~700 backers, and had "a long way to go."

No further news since then.

I get where you're coming from. There's a lot of scope to this though, and not a lot of technical risk. I think in this case it makes sense to sell units, and also generate feedback about the product as early as possible. We're not selling fusion or self driving cars.

Where will you be building these?

I think in this case it makes sense to sell units, and also generate feedback about the product as early as possible

So you're going to use end customers as your test base? That's pretty gutsy. Especially when they're shelling out $10K and ripping out their existing (and working) HVAC system to do this. Don't use the car analogy here, there's no backup if it doesn't work.

Unless you predict 100% flawless execution and satisfaction on that aspect, you're going to get screwed. Your customers, more so. A few fucked up installations, or performance below expectations, and it's over.

Definitely agree that a good customer experience is key here. We're not shipping half baked hardware to end customers. That's what engineering development (alpha build, design validation build, production validation build, home pilot) is for. After all that happens, then customers can an install (and one that's well designed and tested).

I guess your definition of "feedback" is different than mine. Maybe that's a Tesla thing.

In this particular case, and given your background, I am not worried about your ability to build it. Yes, a bit easier than fusion energy :)

I am wondering, though... Why don't you make a prototype, and attach a webcam in front of it, with a few sensors, etc?

I am clearly not your target audience. (Around here we measure AC/heat pumps in tons, not BTU and mount them outside the home.) But I'm willing to provide (fairly obvious) feedback.

Price: yikes! Other: I stopped at price. Clearly you were expecting this because you hid the price underneath 10 pages of stuff I didn't read while I scrolled to find the price.

Even people who would spend that kind of money are going to see a Juicero logo on your product. I may be wrong, but you will really need to elevate your sales pitch to survive long term. Do you have a $2000 toy model that people can use for their garage or basement/attic apartment before they gamble bigger money?

Seems like a lot is being promised here for a 7 month old startup with one employee- SW, multiple different HW components, high end thermal mechanics delivering all of this by EOY 2024. Best of luck, I am legitimately rooting for this to be a winner (I love the concept of design meets efficient heat pumps and believe there is a substantial market here)... but how can outsiders trust to give you their money for a deposit when it's clear there is very high risk that this ever reaches market?

You're right - hardware is tough, and the scope is large. But this is an important area to build better products, there are a lot of people passionate about this/want to work on this and the hardware doesn't have to be designed from scratch. As for trust, the deposit is pretty low stakes, $100, fully refundable, reserves your place in line for a system. For those of you that placed a deposit, thank you, it means a lot!

In Norway most homes have one or more heat pumps. We are living in a cold climate and the pumps are being used like 9-10 months a year.

The most common brands are Japanese: Toshiba, Mitsubishi and Panasonic.

I will not agree that the user experience is bad at all. They are very good products. Stand alone they work well and with integration they work together with the power company to optimize the energy consumption vs energy price during the day.

Be careful to just think the existing products are bad because you want them to be. It’s an existing, competitive, multi billion market with very good products.

It really depends. Old hot water radiators were ugly in their own way. Even with modern forced air HVAC I find the soffits and boxes to accommodate ductwork unsightly.

Some brands make units that interface with existing radiant baseboards, or individual heat pump heads that recess entirely into the ceiling leaving just a vent visible, like https://mylinkdrive.com/USA/M_Series/R410A_Systems-1/One_Way...

this is why I went with LG ceiling mounted cassettes. IMO it's even better than floor vents (they stay cleaner, floors are easier to clean) or ducted ceiling vents (each cassette can target the air movement direction actively toward humans).

and all the electronic bits are in the attic so the noise is a little better.

Chris, one of my biggest worries is that your startup will get acquired or go out of business and then the firmware will leave me with a $14,000 brick.

What if I want to keep using the cloud-based thermostat when your servers get shut off or moved to another system, or if something like Google Nest closing down their API happens after you've exited?

This is an expensive system with an expected long life, and I'd want some guarantees that I can control it entirely myself.

I totally get this concern. Any good piece of critical home infrastructure should be able to operate without the cloud or an internet connection. Following this logic the thermostat + heat pump combination can operate fine without the cloud. You leave some optimized behavior on the table like demand response and weather response, but everything else will work (you'd have to manually enter your TOU rate plan to get that energy optimization).

Would your company be willing to provide an open-source local-first websocket-based integration with https://www.home-assistant.io/ or use the new Matter + Thread standard to provide it for everyone?

If that's available, this would be my top choice as I'm actively shopping for all-electric heat pumps

It's something we'd definitely consider. Is the desire to have thermostat control via any third party?

edit - The current plan has been Matter/thread Homekit + Google Home integration. We can expose at least temperature control via this to everyone.

(not OP, but I also use HA)

The important bit is to have an open API that can be connected to from the local network (or via Matter + Thread, etc), and via a cloud. Then anyone can develop a client. This also has benefits in UX: the latency to update is much lower than cloud based polling, since that's almost always rate limited.

The closer anything is to the bottom of the chart here, the better. When buying something as expensive as a heat pump, I wouldn't even consider something that isn't at least local polling:

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...

That being said, I'm not opposed to value add things via cloud services. Want to get the weather via a cloud service, even if that changes the schedule? Totally fine! But ultimate control must be local.

Agreed, this isn't a $100 thermostat that I can just pull off the wall and replace - we're talking an expensive investment with a 10+ year lifespan. That said, even for my thermostat not being bound to the cloud was an important reason I went with Emerson/Sensi (the only value-add I lose if their cloud goes down is usage reporting, everything else I can do with the native Homekit support).

Consider it is as a competitive advantage.

An API that is public, well-documented, and easy for other systems to securely integrate with would mean that customers get the integration they want. If someone builds a better way to utilize your system, then you just got value-add on your product at basically zero cost.

Amazon can hook Alexa into it. Google can hook their Home thing into it. And whatever comes next, whatever doesn't even exist today, should have an easy time integrating, continuing to add value.

Completely agree on this point. I've worked over half a decade with smart home systems, and it's just so much easier (and cheaper!) to integrate well documented, open APIs (and please make them secure, I have nightmares of all the open, unencrypted UDP based alarm systems) that is purely local. This means we would highly recommend these products even tho we made zero money off them, and customers would actually prefer them as well - it's well beyond the time of people naively buying this stuff, and they know that clouds can just "go offline".

What also can't be underestimated is the tinker community. Many people in the smart home business are tinkerers themselfs; create a great product for them and they will inevitably try to use it at their job. But this really isn't only applicable to integrators, really.

If you support home assistant then I am far, far more likely to purchase this. My wife and I are buying a house sometime over the next year and one of my higher priorities is getting a heat pump. At the same time though I also refuse to use cloud based services and instead prefer to run my own home assistant installation.

You should consider this a huge marketing opportunity- the home assistant people are obsessed with perfecting HVAC (half of these people have their own weather stations) and are also the kind of geeky first adopter who will push useful tech on all their friends. It's also not a small community, as the subreddit alone has over 222k people on it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/

I just preordered and I will echo this.

On track to replace my gas furnace in the next few years, this sounds awesome, but HA integration would be very highly desired.

Chris, I think there's a lot more here to uncover. Most of your competition has no sensitivity, and almost no openness, about these aspects. I think this could become a really important part of your go-to market, but also a differentiator vs other products.

I'm a VC since recently, but have been a tech guy for a long time. Feel free to ping me if you'd like to discuss it further. $HN_username at gmail.

HA user here as well, having a non-locked down API at minimum (i.e. not actively trying to stop folks using it), through to an open and documented api (would be great), through to open firmware (would be best) and or releasing your own integration for HA would likely get you those kinda customers.

If people have a preferred way of integrating their devices, like home assistant, I'd want to make that possible for people to do with Electric Air.

Re the sizing question - this is a part of the site that needs improvement. 12kbtu is 1 ton. The 48kbtu system is a 4ton system, but rated at 5F, if you're in a more temperate climate, two of these will likely have plenty of capacity for you. It's also likely that your current system is oversized.

The good news, at least, is that almost anything will work. You don't need full Matter support for Home Assistant folks to be happy. The bare-minimum, local REST api built on a Monday by an intern will do it. Someone will write the Python code to fully integrate it. I get that there would be some security concerns there, but you get my drift.

If worried about security concerns, just provide a common port interface (RJ-45/RJ-11) on the unit with a simple, well-documented, serial-based protocol on RS485/RS232. You can sell an add-on device to bridge that to Ethernet/simple API, and easily replace/recall that inexpensive module if there are issues.

The hackers will do what they want to anyway, and they'll implement cool interfaces/HA plugins/controllers on RPis or ESP32s for free. Someone will get enterprising and package a pre-built/programmed ESP32 unit that makes it plug-and-play for nerdy, but less capable users, and your company can avoid any liability from users using an 'unsupported' add-on.

As someone about to be in the market for something like this, propriety lockout is a complete deal breaker for me.

Also, I'm in the market for a new AC/heater - so have been looking.

Your specs are in kbtu, but at least for cooling I'm used to tons; I have 2x4.5ton units, and I think that's ~120kbtu, so I wouldn't be able to get just two of your biggest units?

That would be 108kbtu, but you are likely oversized. With proper duct configuration including ACCA Manual D calcs and air sealing, you will most likely be more than fine with 96kbtu. Most systems (even in very nice houses) are just sort of thrown in rather than actually calculated, and then they are installed sloppily with a lot of leakage and only roughly resembling the design in at least a few locations. I do these calculations for a living, and would recommend presuming that will be the case until proven otherwise. Obviously get hard numbers before full commitment.

My company took GP’s suggested strategy and got an incredible community response. Really resonates with the high-end residential market, both DIY and DIFM (pros / CEDIA).

I think the desire would be a locally accessible API so that anyone could build an integration to it.

For me, it's just peace of mind. I need to know that if cloud servers go down, or even my internet goes down, my house still works. My Nest thermostats are currently cloud-only (the only parts of my house left that are), and I had to write a script to never update them exactly on the hour. That's when their API is very likely to 500; I'm guessing because most people have automations trigger on the hour.

I guess I can sum it up like this: I only want to deal with my own problems in my free time in my own home.

My desire would be to have the possibility of thermostat control (entirely) via first party, me. Odds are I would never even touch it, but the fact that I couldn't would be a dealbreaker for something like this.

The point is to not have your company as a single point of failure for the thermostat. So yes, integrate into a wider (open) ecosystem, and that problem is addressed.

Yes, and particularly in a local/LAN/no internet manner. Local push or local pull.

I would like to be able to add it to HomeKit without it ever phoning home once. Matter + Thread help make that a possibility.

I consider Matter support to be vital for any product that’s “connected”. You can keep all the specialised features limited to your app but basic controls should be exposed via a standard protocol like Matter so I can use any Matter controller to set the temperatures and such.

I think going with Matter would give you the best bang for your buck as you would get virtually every major smart home hub system.

You would still be able to do more with your own app as matter will probably mainly support the lowest common denominator across your category.

The desire is to have any control/knowledge you'd want to have as the creator/developer. I want to be my own mechanic, and if I'm not that mechanic I want to be able to have anyone be that mechanic.

Do you want to know what the active airflow rate is? I want to know what the active airflow rate is. Do you want to know power consumption? I want to know power consumption. Do you have a way to write unique schedules/programs that get executed on the heat pump? I want a way to write unique schedules/programs that get executed on the heat pump.

Context: Full-Stack Software Engineer (worked at a few start ups including Bird Rides). Active Home Assistant user and community-run integration creator (Linked Lovelace)

The incredible part about a company like yours is the ability to do hardware at scale. There's no reality in which I'm safely and cost-effectively building my own Electric Heat Pump, or television, or [cool product here].

Companies that make it easier for me to do my own things stand out.

If you don't want that for the standard customer, fine. Provide some way to open up the device and trigger dev mode, or manually upload firmware, or OTA update firmware.

Side notes:

- a failed kickstarter I joined shipped out their original product with bad firmware and no way to do a physical firmware update without destroying the product, so they tanked instantly despite having a great hardware setup. Despite their failure, I and a few others opened up our products and manually flashed custom firmware onto it to make use of the product we bought

- I exclusively buy LG Televisions now due to their usage of Web OS (has a local-first [HA Integration](https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/webostv/)) which used to be hackable with https://rootmy.tv. With that, my TV runs custom Linux software that controls lights just like [Phillips Hue Sync](https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/explore-hue/propositions/e...) but free/open-source and no additional hardware. Compare that to Samsung which is like 40% ads now?

- I don't mind using a voice assistant, steal my ideas Tim Apple. I hate the part where the request goes (phone -> router -> cloud server -> router -> local server -> light bulb) instead of (phone -> router -> local server -> light bulb) or worse (phone -> router -> local server -> router -> cloud server -> router -> local server -> light bulb).

EDIT: my markdown is showing, I should stick to lurking

Speaking of heat pumps and granular control, I recently figured out that some Midea heat pumps (usually sold rebranded to various brands) contain two interfaces to get and set detailed information:

1) Detailed diagnostics i.e. RPMs, feeds, speeds, currents, temps etc can be read from the high voltage signal line between the indoor and outdoor unit - there is an official tool (search "Dr. Smart Midea" on YouTube) that does this. If you look in the right places, there is a PowerPoint with a schematic of the PHY that you need to interface with this using a LV isolated controller

2) The outdoor unit can be driven manually using the same tool using an i2c port that is on the PCB on the outdoor unit

I have the new generation of their Dr. Smart tool, which I haven't had the time to thoroughly test or document. If there is interest I will likely try to reverse engineer and document these protocols properly.

> "I want to be my own mechanic, and if I'm not that mechanic I want to be able to have anyone be that mechanic."

> "Do you want to know what the active airflow rate is? I want to know what the active airflow rate is. Do you want to know power consumption? I want to know power consumption. Do you have a way to write unique schedules/programs that get executed on the heat pump? I want a way to write unique schedules/programs that get executed on the heat pump."

There's one feature of this diagnostic interface that I really really like. It allows you to "drive" the hardware of the unit manually, like Program Auto mode on a camera. You can manually set the frequency of the compressor and fan, and the control board will continue to enforce safeties.

I haven't tried yet, but something I really want to try to implement myself is "frequency lockout". This is a common feature on commercial variable frequency drives. I noticed that under some operating conditions, the unit vibrations resonate with the building and create unpleasant sounds - I'd like to program it to never dwell on that frequency and skip over it.

> The desire is to have any control/knowledge you'd want to have as the creator/developer.

While I was exploring this, I had this in mind constantly. I definitely had this diag interface in mind when I was selecting a unit.

Can you provide any more details on the I2C interface on Midea units?

I found some sparse documentation on Midea's (and rebadged units) Modbus-esque protocol over RS485 (aka XYE connectors), and I control it via an ESP32 on HA. From the indoor unit, the diagnostic data I could reverse engineer is limited to temp sensors (intake, indoor coil, outdoor ambient) and basic running modes. I believe the outdoor unit also has a modbus/485 that has more info, and obviously the signal wire passes some comms between the two, but Midea doesn't make this stuff public.

For me the goal is 100% local control. I found out the other day that I couldn't turn my 8sleep mattress on because a guy down the street struck a fiber line. My bed was basically a $4k brick as soon as the internet went down.

Look at it this way, it saves you money in server costs and performs much better.

Hey, that happened to me too this weekend! Do you also live in Ingleside in SF?

If I'm gonna invest in a heat pump for the long term, I don't want it committed to any software technology that may be obsolete in 10 years. I want it to use something so dead stupid simple that anything in 50 years can still operate it without a lot of work.

The simplest example I can think of is MIME (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME). It can be embedded in basically any transport type. It can encode anything you want (binary, UTF8, etc). It is very old, stable and well-tested. It is fairly trivial to implement a limited instruction set of.

Transport security, authentication, authorization, etc, are nice, but not nearly as important to me as a future-proof interface to my heat pump. Give me the option to enable an admin port and just run a single unsecured connection with a basic dumb text protocol, and I can hack together a client in 30 minutes in any programming language. It's not fancy but it will work forever.

I agree on the point of not wanting to end up with a brick due to obsolete software. Note though that heat pumps typically last 10-20 years.

This is extremely disappointing, given their price point.

I've seen an oil furnace still running after 50 years with just basic maintenance. Did it cost 2-5 times as much in inflation-adjusted dollars as a heat pump does now? No.

IMO I would prefer a Bluetooth thermostat that once paired, you don't have to login again. One thing that really annoys me about home "smart" devices is arbitrarily being logged out and having to remember passwords etc. and I don't see a reason I need to be "logged in" to control my thermostat. Also I don't want it to stop working when your servers are down... (had this happen the other day with my garage door opener sigh...) If you want internet connectivity, it should connect to some hub to bridge the Bluetooth to the web account.

My dream is something equivalent to a Dumb TV + Chromecast.

We need an entire industry of 'appliance based Rpi's to be able to act as modules in a standardly compute plug-in-form factor (just like blades) with a unit preloaded with a config and just swap out inter connects - ich that we have an appliance hub, the solar/whatever input pushes power and the distributor determines where to push or halt the power - with a selector that tells me the input costs, and output draws, such that it can have a system to auto switch to best performance.

Honywell missed the mark on the importance of thermostats on the economy.

I also would appreciate a local-only user experience.

I'd also be concerned about dealing with "cannot find server" alerts popping up every time I use it.

Please also be careful about selling to incumbents without a strong guarantee (ie contractual penalties) your product will stay in market for many years.

I know smoke detectors and a couple other crappy home goods have been fixed by scrappy upstarts, sold to the losers for <100M, and then shuttered to avoid pivoting the existing business. Heartbreaking lost progress every time it happens.

1. There's a plugin for WeeWX that will happily fling readings from a weather station to my RainMachine sprinkler timer, so perhaps you could still support weather response as long as the user ran their own weather station.

2. The thermostat should support at least as much local control as the REST-ish API on the Venstar ColorTouch series.

that's good to hear, I'd make sure it's mentioned in the FAQ at the bottom.

You can either go using open source protocols at first or at least guarantee open-sourcing most of it in case of leadership change. For reuse.

I'd go starting with it and let a community build by itself around it, tho.

I agree with this. I would rather have it automated without cloud functionality. I think people on HN just like hacking lol. But when it comes to appliances and cars I would rather not mess with their code and break them.

Crazy idea:

Pressure plates in the streets which are pressed when cars drive over them - pushing fluids through your coils, but connected to multiple units on either side.

Harvest the kinetic energy of cars passing through the streets to apply pressure to pumps that feed fluids through the system, capturing that energy in a dynamo way?

Put these plates in every high trafficked area. Piping the pumping action from parking garages to freeway exits and shipping ports which roll off weight from water to street and pump a f-ton of fluid based on vehicle traffick and weight.

Make smaller installations... make an adapter interface to railway. heavy as cars on trains constantly hitting the pump valves. (yes we still need to deal with the bureau assholes in that industry... Im talking engineering)

I like the out of the box thinking! Unfortunately I think this one doesn't quite pass first principles. Any pumping action from the vehicles would be extra work they have to perform, so you just shuffle the energy expenditure from your local heat pumps, to a fleet of vehicles.

Aren’t the cars already performing that work, just letting the energy dissipate into the road surface instead of going somewhere?

No. The cars would be doing a little extra work. Imagine if you did it with half-filled hoses of water going in a loop. The car tires would be pushing the water through the hose, adding drag. The energy cost would come from the gas or electricity of the car.

It's like the usual analogy I used to use for content mills or adtech: it's like setting up wind farms along the interstates. The wind from the trucks creates free energy! Awesome, right? Except that those trucks are no longer drafting off each other quite as much...

(And I say "used to use" because it used to be a small tax, a bit of an extra nuisance here and there, and people largely felt like it didn't really cost anyone anything. Now it's more obviously expensive, like making the entire roadbed out of little rolling wheels that charge generators, so you have to "drive" 80mph in order to progress at 50mph...)

It takes more energy to drive a car through mud than on pavement. The same principle would apply here.

For a similar reason why riding a bike through sand is more difficult than on flat tarmac, this will require additional energy and you will pay for it in locally burned petrol. Moreover, it will be less efficient than if you just burned that fuel in a power station.

I can already see the "Avoid bumpy roads" option right next to the "Avoid tolls", "Avoid ferries", ...

I'd be careful catering to everyone asking for everything but the kitchen sink. Creating a non-cloud capable system is dumb.

If you have customers like commenter above maybe put in a clause in the contract that says they will receive a partial refund if/when there is an acquisition event during the warranty period and bump up their price by 20%.

> Creating a non-cloud capable system is dumb

No, you haven't understood. It will be cloud-capable. They're asking that it's not cloud-only.

No, you don't understand. Making it non-cloud-capable incurs a cost.

And there is no they, the commenter is a single individual.

"As someone about to be in the market for something like this, propriety lockout is a complete deal breaker for me." - StrangeATractor

"Would your company be willing to provide an open-source local-first websocket-based integration with https://www.home-assistant.io/ or use the new Matter + Thread standard to provide it for everyone?" - daredoes

"Most of your competition has no sensitivity, and almost no openness, about these aspects. I think this could become a really important part of your go-to market, but also a differentiator vs other products." - simonebrunozzi

"I would like to be able to add it to HomeKit without it ever phoning home once. Matter + Thread help make that a possibility." - X-Istence

They.

Yes this is HN what do you expect, of course everyone and their grandma here is gonna want a fully unlocked, open source and free as in freedom fries product.

I expect to be able to refer to those people as "they".

I mean, aside from the fact that you misunderstood the whole point, nobody ever paid 20% extra for a heating system which didn't have cloud connectivity. In fact, the whole idea that there's something wrong with a heating system which doesn't require an internet connection is so incredibly bizarre that I can only wonder if you're someone who came out of a time machine.

Lastly, a partial refund does fuck all to compensate for the fact that you have a multi-tonne brick in your house that has perfectly functioning hardware but broken software (because the server it used to talk to is gone). It also doesn't compensate for the wasted resources.

> Creating a non-cloud capable system is dumb.

For a system that absolutely doesn’t need a “cloud” to operate?

But this is my second concern.

First is availability of replacement parts after the get bought out and they shut off the servers.

My thoughts too. Local heating/cooling should not be tied to the cloud period. If it doesn't use the normal wiring people already have it's a hard pass from me.

Disagree. There are a lot of advantages in being able to coordinate heating/cooling and general home electricity use based on stuff like weather forecasts, your electric company's rate tiers (including working around peak hours), when you are home or about to come home etc. Of course there should be a fallback mode where the system can work 100% offline, but being connected is definitely worth it.

I agree. Use standardized wiring and let me control it from a $100 smart thermostat that i can replace if it becomes obsolete.

If i want HomeAssistant integration, ill buy an HA-compatible thermostat.

I dont want an expensive HVAC system to be in a walled garden of its own.

You lose about 30% efficiency using "standardized wiring" with an inverter heat pump instead of a communicating thermostat, because running a heat pump at 33% power continuously instead of 100% power 20 minutes of every hour results in a COP about 30% higher.

Why do inverter heat pump need proprietary wiring? Everything I've seen indicates inverter and dual stage heat pumps can use standard wiring.

They don't need it, they just don't get all their rated efficiency, which is much higher than single-speed systems. Single-speed systems commonly have cooling efficiencies around 10-14 SEER, the Gree Sapphire is 38 SEER. If you ran it at only full power, it'd probably only be 30 SEER.

Counterpoint — I have an app for my Mitsubishi heat pump and use it all the time. It’s way more convenient and lets me hyper optimize my house. I actually don’t even use the physical ones at all anymore

What is your plan if Mitsubishi cuts off access in 20 years or updates in a way that you're not comfortable with (like add advertisements to the panels)?

You can replace the thermostats with dumb versions.

Yes s/he is. Mitsubishi force you to use their Kumo Cloud controls, which are 1) expensive (a few kk) and 2) require cloud. Supposedly Mitsubishi is replacing Kumo with something else, but that just makes the problem worse.

Wat. First of all, I have Kumo Cloud and it did not cost thousands of dollars. It was a few hundred for the adapter, and then I paid an HVAC tech to install it. That's it.

Second of all, you aren't forced to use Kumo Cloud. Even though I have it, I still have a remote that operates the Split. No network or cloud required.

you can get a converter to get Mitsu to work with any 24v AC controls PAC-US444CN-1, ive installed a few of them so the customer could use their existing Nest and Ecobee thermostats.

I'm a former diamond certified Mitsubishi installer

I've used the PAC-US444CN-1 (at our house) and fully native Mitsubishi thermostat/controls (at our in-laws). The converter is better than a simple 2-stage set up but is still not as good, in my experience, as the fully native one.

It has to translate a 2-stage signal into a fully modulating output, and it still seems to do a lot more on & off with high fan speeds than I would like or would be most efficient (as an aside, yes I have verified that the dip switches are in the correct position on the converters).

On the other hand, the unit at my in-laws tends to blow gently but consistently which is both more comfortable and more efficient.

Mitsubishi heat pumps has a local thermostat that operates by remote, no cloud access needed, so if the app's servers go down it will still function.

Pretty sure they were asking if you could still access all the functionality currently provided by the app if it were to go away for some reason (who can see the future? It's not impossible Mitsubishi goes out of business or the app gets cancelled/pulled after some number of years)

If you lost your phone, would you still be able to manage the heat pump through other interfaces?

If the app wasn't updated for ${latest phone OS}, would you be be unable to upgrade the phone OS?

Exactly. I will not even buy a $100 remote-internet-controlled thermostat that relies on a cloud service [0], and I've looked for both my home and my shop.

I would not even consider buying the hardware that keeps my pipes from freezing if it depends on an internet connection.

I'm happy if there are non-critical OPTIONS available that use the internet (e.g., as another poster mentioned, available optimizations based on real-time elec rates, etc.), but if there is any key function that'll fail without an internet connection, that's immediate disqualification, hard nope, not looking anymore. Period, full stop, even if it is "free" as in beer.

OTOH, if OP can deliver a true stand-alone system and guarantees that it will never require a connection for any core function (as above, optional ok), then he'll have a large market.

[0] any remote-via-internet control function should be able to directly access my IP, static or transient. Not only are non-static home IPs actually quite durable in my experience, there are a variety of easy solutions to keep track of the home IP. Yes, some of those are cloud services, but they are not tied to any hardware.

Edit: That said, I'm ok with requiring wiring beyond the normal thermostat-HVAC wiring.

Normal wiring is terrible, though, since it only supports turning the equipment on & off. If you have a variable-speed fan and variable-speed pumps, it would be nice for the thermostat to throttle those based on the load, but it can't.

If this company has a solution for variable-speed equipment, the best thing they can do is publish an open standard. Suppose the thermostat talks to the equipment over CAN bus, for instance, using a well-documented protocol. If they go out of business, anybody can hack together a compatible aftermarket thermostat.

A lot of solar equipment is already going this way, with batteries talking to inverters over open CAN bus protocols. As one of the biggest energy loads, the HVAC equipment should get in the game too.

What do you mean? There are variable speed furnaces that can be controlled via a normal thermostat and a 4-wire thermostat setup. Like you said, though, there's no open standard so that can be an issue, but it's standard wiring.

https://www.pickhvac.com/thermostat/ (halfway down - "Communicating HVAC System")

https://www.pickhvac.com/central-air-conditioner/extras/comm... (deeper dive into Communicating vs Non-Communicating HVAC systems)

Well, that just makes it worse! OP strongly implies that there is no good variable-speed solution, but if the industry already has an assortment of products, what exactly are they even selling?!

Heat pumps are basically ACs with inverters allowing them to work at partial load (i.e. 10% pr 20% or 70%). Otherwise, they are as efficient as ACs at full load.

There are few off the shelf AC thermostats that work with most heatpumps: they are usually the on/off variety.

Remotes coming with heatpumps would do the right thing, though, and there are IR blasters that can replicate those signals and integrate into your home automation system.

I think you're misreading the OP slightly. There's no cross-compatible system for variable equipment, which is why the OP says you can't use variable speed equipment with Nest. Nest is basically a really fancy switch only. To use variable speed equipment, you have to use your manufacturer's proprietary system. I'm not positive this is right, but I'm pretty sure it's backed up by https://www.pickhvac.com/central-air-conditioner/extras/comm...

So basically, the premise of this product is that the proprietary system they design will be nicer than the proprietary systems HVAC manufacturer's design. That's probably true, but as an owner of a Carrier proprietary system, it's totally fine.

The issue isn't that an open standard for fully variable speed isn't possible, the issue is that nearly all of the manufacturers to date have considered this proprietary (as they want to own the entire ecosystem from controls > equipment) and a purposefully boxing Nest, Ecobee, etc, out of being able to control it in order to sell more thermostats and trying to capture more value.

Only problem, their thermostats and apps really suck.

I think you have to go thru a licensed HVAC installer to get an inverter system. These guys are DTC.

Mitsubishi heat pumps, and most others I assume, have local thermostats that communicate by remote (I assume radio waves), but do not require the cloud. This is a fine solution, as stable as wires but not tied to the cloud.

Unfortunately, they (or at least mine) communicate by IR, which is not as stable as wires – two of my rooms have very intermittent response to my IR pucks.

Huh? My Lennox basic middle America furnace already does this if I am understanding your comment correctly.

Maybe Europe market is ready for this.

Considering how unstable the residential electrical and internet grid is in the US (instead of being dug in, into the ground all the cables are hanging between the trees and there are constant failures), relying on that AND on the cloud for an essential service is a no-go.

I live in a rural part of New England with an electricity company that everyone dislikes because it's super expensive and sometimes things go bad. Since 2010 we've had the following major outages:

* October 2011 Snow Storm - Lost power for 4 days, didn't end up being that cold

* October 2019 Thunderstorms - Lost power for 3 days, thankfully generator kept the house going

* August 2020 Tropical Storm Isaias - Caused widespread grid damage, but only lost power for 18 hours. Internet was out for 36 hours.

* August 2021 Hurricane Henri - Widespread grid damage, lost power for about 6 hours. By this point I had powerwalls. I didn't even turn down the air conditioner.

That's it - every other outage has been a few hours. And that's living in a rural area that is heavily wooded with most of the power lines above ground and often long runs close to trees. If I lived in a suburb or city those times would be even less.

The grid in the United States, despite some widespread and documented regional failures (2021 Texas, 2003 NE Blackout), is remarkably resilient.

I would say it depends on where you live. The grid in CA has (in some parts) not been reliable for 5+ years. To Chris' point below though, it's not really relevant because gas furnaces need electricity to operate, too.

A common misconception is that you can use your forced air furnace when the power is out - you can't because the blower relies on electricity to move air around. Your point on the cloud service is a good one, which is why cloud services are value-add but unnecessary for core system functionality, ie your system works if there's no internet.

In California power outages are very frequent (PG&E is now cutting off the residential power upfront, to avoid fires and associated liability).

I’ve experienced 4-5 outages last year, a couple were local, a couple were widespread. One lasted 2 days.

Fortunately I do have a small 3.2kWh battery backup power, so I can keep the refrigerator from defrosting. I do think that this is sufficient to power the air furnace as well, but I haven’t tried.

The residential internet outages also are pretty frequent, but we don’t notice these as much as power outages.

the US power grid is not in any way unreliable. US residents enjoy some of the highest grid availability figures for anywhere in the world. Sure, sometimes things go horribly wrong but their system is not unreliable by design as this comment insinuates.

>If it doesn't use the normal wiring people already have it's a hard pass from me.

Why? a real smart thermostat can just use the existing wiring for power and then use IP over Wifi or Matter/Thread to communicate. Way better than the crappy wiring in most people's houses for thermostat control.

Because HVAC in theory should outlive most other standards that have come and gone. Its totally fine to built on top of it, but using basic hard wiring to turn on/off is essential - even if just as a fallback. in 20 years the hvac should still be working, but will the wifi spec it shipped with? What about matter/thread?

Theres certainly a middleground between "must use existing old ass 2 wire setups" and "requires fancy always on cloud subscription"

Surely we could come up with a device that might require an electrician to run a few extra wires (or maybe even larger wires or something) and still run perfectly fine offline, for as long as the hardware functions, with some type of integrated manual controller. And of course this device could also have an internet option and an app and wifi for all of the fancy stuff.

It's hard pass for you because you know what a cloud is. Many don't and you don't know what many know.

I'd want to see a guarantee of "We will either keep running the servers forever, maintaining all current features, or we will opensource all the server side code, so you or someone else can keep running it".

I'd want the code handed over to a third party to guarantee this (so the company can't walk back on their promise).

If the server code is too complex, at least give me an OpenAPI spec (or equivalent) that the server must adhere to, so I can spin something simple up on a Raspberry PI to solve the problem myself.

Statically there is a great chance the people that would guarantee will be replaced upon failure or success in an early state startup.

The software is certainly a concern, but I would also heavily emphasize the ability to get spare parts and service quickly. If your heat goes out in the middle of winter you don't want to wait weeks for spare parts, or be unable to get them at all if the company goes out of business.

Yes, making spare parts and service work is super important. We'll likely set up regional distribution points for spare parts so anything critical can be easily sent next day.

What about labor? I'm pretty handy but there are definitely parts of my HVAC system where I'd be unable/unwilling to DIY it. I currently have a local HVAC contractor on-retainer for same-day emergency appointments - and honestly I don't think I'd be willing to consider anything less since my current heat pump is my exclusive source of heating in this house.

I'm in a temperate climate so there's little actual danger, but the idea of freezing/roasting my butt off for multiple days to wait for parts/labor is deeply unattractive.

Yeah, good question. The system is not meant to be DIY. The same contractor that does install also offers service. Logistics for replacement parts is important we will have quick, easy access for contractors.

Have you worked on creating a network of qualified contractors? In my region, there are lots of contractors who are little more than unreliable DIYers, especially in the mechanical space.

My hesitancy is in the ongoing service. I’ve looked into geo-coupled heat pumps but the lack of qualified contractors locally deterred me.

How would you ensure that spares are available in the event a model is discontinued or the company shuts down? It’s likely there will be few parts or trained techs in that case.

Wait, is this not going to have the usual "pair of wires you short to turn it on" feature of every furnace made so far? That's the ultimate control for when all the cloud features disappear and would be a deal-breaker for me.

I will not buy this without a fully unlocked everything.

This company is going to wait a few years and then charge you a shit ton for subscription to keep using your device.

No thanks, and honestly whoever goes with this is going to regret it if they don't make changes to their software.

Pick one:

- Sell the device

- Sell the software

If you do both, you're going to alienate your customers and get regulatory wrath on you. Don't emulate Apple. They're going to get their ass handed to them in the near future.

Take it even a step further and make the code AGPL. That way you know you're protected if a company decides to steal from you.

I understand the concern around lock in. There is a technical hurdle to optimized thermostat <--> variable speed heat pump interop. You have to turn the temperature error between setpoint and actual temperature into a compressor speed command and also factor in behavior such as defrost, compressor cycling limits, etc. So you have to have a communicating thermostat to fully utilize the efficiency of these variable speed heat pump systems, not just a collection of analog on/off wires.

This is not strictly true.

Mr. Cool has a 2-Ton heat pump (Designed to work with existing ducting) that can operate off of a normal non-communicating thermostat. It still hits 19 SEER and does a lot of that optimization on the controller side. And when it comes to mini splits there are lots of them that will work with a normal thermostat.

I know this, well, because I’ve spent many countless hours trying to find something that will work with Z-Wave and not a proprietary communicating system. Granted it might be less efficient but efficiency is way less important than having the ability to do that. The only exception I would consider is if the communicating thermostat was fully open and had a decent API that worked without Internet access.

This doesn't seem at all worthy of anything proprietary, though -- a simple RS-485 or 10BASE-T1L protocol and a page of docs would do the trick.

And if you build this, you can also sell the same hardware plus a BacNET or MODBUS gateway for a bunch of money to the commercial building management types :)

Or you could support existing commercial 0-10V thermostats.

FWIW, if this were my startup, I would probably use 10BASE-T1L. The programming model is simple, and cloud or other “smart” integration is natural if the system already uses IP. For that matter, one ought to be able to support wired 10BASE-T1L and wireless Matter/Thread thermostats without much duplicate effort.

This could be prototyped on a BeaglePlay :)

FWIW,

BACnet allows multiple PHY implementations, including 802.3

I suspect that 802.3.cg is also kosher, but haven't looked in detail. It's been 5 years since I looked seriously at whether BACnet was the correct solution for a product family.

Single pair Ethernet is indeed cool tech.

That's totally fair and reasonable. I still will demand that it be able to function in a bang-bang mode using dry contacts, especially from a new entrant to the market, because there's a fair risk that the unit will be in my house longer than your company is in business.

This behavior is how current variable speed heat pumps operate with Ecobee and Nest. You leave efficiency on the table, but I get it provides some future proofing assurance for homeowners. Definitely something we can integrate into the board.

> I get it provides some future proofing assurance

I don't think you're getting it, and a lot of us around here want you to. If I were actively researching heat pumps (a thing most homeowners do before dropping 4-5 figures on ANY hardware), if you are locking me into your ecosystem -- or even have the appearance of locking me into your ecosystem -- your product is not getting onto any short list from me or likely anyone else around here.

All of us -- every tech person who has ever gotten into home automation in a real way -- has thrown out some hardware rendered useless by a company. We've already seen this play out. You're an unknown and so are the riskiest kind of company to buy into.

You need to get this -- deeply -- if you want to sell to this market. The pull quote above makes me want to run for the hills.

This all especially true given the expected time frame a heat pump is supposed to have. No one wants to spend $14,000 for a paper weight. Whether that’s because the software disappears, spare parts can’t be found, or it’s impossible to service. Any of the above are real risks that need to be considered seriously and addressed. HVAC can also become an issue when trying to sell a house, so it’s not like trying to sell to traditional early adopters. The majority of this market is going to be very conservative.

I’d honestly just try to market to heat pump believers first who actively are looking for what they are selling. First, it’s an easier sales pitch. Second, they will be more forgiving of growing pains. Go through the 1-3 years trying to get the manufacturing, maintenance, and installation locked in before trying to sell in bulk to a larger market.

As it is, it’s just too risky for many to buy. (And for my house, it would be impossible to install).

Agreed. As someone in the market for a good heat pump, I'm already turned off by this offering. I don't want more features (air quality module) that are more points of failure and complexity. I just want an efficient heat pump that'll work reliably for a long time, integrate well with HA, and won't cost a kidney to install.

Yes, that MAY be required for full optimization

Wonderful option to have: "Subscribe, and we'll improve your efficiency by 10%++"

OPTION

Another option would be "we'll send you a download with the latest weightings for our optimizing AI firmware for $14.95, or every month for a subscription of $49/year" whatever.

I, and most other sharp people will happily ignore you and buy a system that is 50% less efficient and twice the cost to avoid your lock-in.

I'll also happily buy and subscribe to your reasonably-priced optimization service as long as it is OPTIONAL.

Just look at the nearly violent reaction that BMW got when they suggested that their heated seats would be a subscription option.

If you want your company to die before it even gets started, keep making excuses for why you need to lock us in.

If you want a growth giant, architect it from scratch so someone can happily use it where Starlink doesn't even service, and offer extra-efficiency OPTIONS that OPTIONALLY use internet service.

And yes, open-sourcing the code would be a huge step in giving people confidence that you are serious, and that their investment has a future that is not a brick.

Yeah I wish these companies would “get it” but they never do.

Provide an open API with the option to use a cloud service. Some cloud services are great, and have way better UIs than the self hosted stuff which I would gladly pay for. But take away the option to go self hosted and I lose all interest. If a device can’t be controlled locally you don’t really “own” it, you’re just renting it from someone else.

98% of consumers who would buy a heat pump have no idea what an API is.

That's quite generous to estimate that 2% of the population knows what is an API !

My first guess would be more like 99.98% don't know about APIs

But yes, that 2% or whatever is an important set of leaders

That's just not true.

1. 99.99999% will never care about code, open sourcing it etc. All consumers need is to have a guarantee it will work in case company is out of business or there is no internet. It doesn't matter how that guarantee will look like.

2. Sell device OR software is the exact reason most tech is so bad. Doing one of two is 10x easier than doing both, and results are 10x worse. If you do both you actually have a chance to do something nice.

Just buy an LG heat pump. They have cloud capabilities, though you have to install a separate module for that.

I have the same question, but on the hardware side. Since HVAC is critical infrastructure for a home, where will replacement parts be in a decade?

FWIW: the "cloud based" part is the flexible bit, it's the fixed equipment that you're stuck with for two decades. I see the problem as exactly the opposite: I could in principle switch from a Carrier to a Lennox to a Nest to an EcoBee in probably 10 minutes, but I can't, because all the equipment manufacturers are shipping their own garbage with closed protocols.

So I had to fight with a contractor to get them to install our fancy new heat pump in "traditional dumb thermostat" mode, and then handed them the Nest box (which doesn't speak Carrier-ese) and put it in the contract that it had to work. It took them several hours extra to do things the "portable" way. They were absolutely not prepared even though the manufacturer claims this works just fine.

So... I think there's absolutely a spot in the market for an Electric Air that can make this work cleanly. The existing HVAC players are really, really bad at this.

It'd be super helpful to mention the total cost will be close to $14k on the $100 pre-order page or at least somewhere near the top of the homepage. Also probably one of the implicit reasons this comment got upvoted.

Yeah, not a bad idea to place pricing (or a link to it) on the preorder page, in addition to main page.