Heat pumps take a while. They outsold gas furnaces for the second year in a row, and homeowners who install them are eligible for thousands in incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. But they are not growing as fast as perhaps they could be. Getting consumers to adopt new technology isn’t always easy, especially when it’s something as fundamental as heating and cooling.
Consumer hesitation has been at the forefront of Paul Lambert’s mind as he navigates bringing Quiltnew heat pump on the market.
“No matter where someone comes from today, what state they’re in, we want them to feel like they’re being upgraded,” Lambert, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
Heat pumps are different enough from existing heating and air conditioning setups to give many consumers pause. Some of them are design: The most common installations use mini-splits inside the house, which are basically large plastic devices that hang high on the wall. Not exactly something you could proudly show off to your friends.
Quilt says its heat pump will address those concerns, promising a sleeker design that can be installed in more places around a room than competitors’ offerings. The company has released only one teaser image so far. It looks promising, but we’ll have to wait until it unveils the final product on May 15 to make a final judgment. The company built the core of the system in-house, although it works with a manufacturing partner to produce the units.
Design is not the only challenge traditional heat pumps face. Many customers are locked out of the way they operate. In most homes, a single mini-split (known as a “head”) handles both heating and cooling for a single room. Each head has its own thermostat or remote control, which means that if someone wants to adjust the temperature for the whole house, they have to visit each room.
Instead, Quilt has assembled the controls for its system. Each room still has a head, which also has a way to sense the temperature, but users only need one physical controller to adjust set points throughout their home. Alternatively, they can also use the Quilt app.
“If you have that thermostat in your bedroom and you want to make sure you’ve turned off the living room or you want to change the temperature in the kid’s room or whatever, you just swipe to the room and do it from the thermostat.” Lambert said. If changing individual rooms isn’t your cup of tea, “you can also set a temperature for the whole house from the thermostat.”
The Quilt’s control setup suggests a level of integration that most consumer heat pumps don’t offer.
“It’s kind of like a mesh network for Wi-Fi, where everyone works together to heat and cool the house,” Matt Knoll, co-founder and CTO, told TechCrunch. “But then they have full control over every space, too.”
In addition to the usual thermostat, each duvet head has a millimeter wave occupancy sensor. Most heat pumps include passive infrared sensors, which tend to send false vacancy signals when someone is not moving, such as watching TV or sleeping. The Quilt sensor does not suffer from this problem. The company’s software uses data from these sensors to map the room to determine when people are present, but Lambert points out that it doesn’t create a true picture.
“We don’t put a camera in anyone’s house. These are just signals on a chart that when interpreted just say there is a person here or there isn’t,” he said. “It gives us a lot of confidence when rooms are empty or not, which means we can’t waste energy heating and cooling empty rooms.”
In anticipation of its upcoming product launch, Quilt raised a $33 million Series A round led by Energy Impact Partners and Galvanize Climate Solutions with participation from Garage Capital, Gradient Ventures, Incite Ventures, MCJ Collective, Lowercarbon Capital and “Property Brother Drew Scott. It’s a hefty raise considering it announced a $9 million seed round less than a year ago.
The startup plans to use the new capital to expand its marketing efforts and installation capacity. Quilt’s heat pumps will initially be released in a few areas before expanding further. “It’s like we’ve built this basic R&D organization, now we’re turning into a real company,” Lambert said.
