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

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

#221

Post by jacquesm »

I've been electrifying the heating of our house bit by bit and I'm probably in the target market for your product. The big killer for direct-to-consumer here is that the refrigerants used are environmentally hazardous and most of them are greenhouse gas producers. Making it so that you don't need a licensed professional (who will charge you an arm and a leg for something that should be simple and end-user safe) would go a long way to drive adoption.

What refrigerant are you using?

Will your device require internet access? (if so it is a non-starter for me, I don't want any of my appliances connected to the internet and to have some stupid service grafted on).

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

#222

Post by jacquesm »

daredoes wrote: post #76
cmui wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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

Seconded.

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

#223

Post by UncleEntity »

dang wrote: post #39

Offtopic but for those wondering: there are two Launch HNs on the front page today because we're getting close to Demo Day for YC's W23 batch, so it's launch season. When we do pair them, I'm trying to select two startups that are uncorrelated with each other. Also, I thought it might be good to start the week with two launches that have nothing to do with LLMs.

I vote for a whole month of no LLMs.

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

#224

Post by cmui »

ROTMetro wrote: post #180
cosmosisjones wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

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

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

#225

Post by turtlebits »

bartislartfast wrote: post #176

$14,000 is competitive with quotes I've seen for heatpumps. I've been quoted up to €18,000 for a small retrofit. I would have expected the cost of heatpumps to have fallen as adoption goes up, like solar, but instead the opposite seems to have happened and they're far more expensive now than five years ago. Any insights into why this is?

Labor is extremely expensive. The costs of heat pumps has fallen greatly. I put in a 12k mini split in my house last year which cost $850. (The tools to DIY cost around ~$150, but I've done 2 installs so far).

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

#226

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

daredoes wrote: post #76
cmui wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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

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.

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

#227

Post by cmui »

runako wrote: post #215
cmui wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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/…

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.

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

#228

Post by oceanplexian »

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #169
sokoloff wrote: post #59

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…

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.

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

#229

Post by turtlebits »

mdeeks wrote: post #93
kayson wrote: post #64

Ducted systems are horribly inefficient. Why heat/cool the entire house if you're only in one room? We paid $11k to have a 4-unit 42kbtu mini-split system installed in our condo. We love it. We turn the two units on in the living areas during the day, and just the two units in the bedroom at night. Each unit comes with its own remote and can be programmed individually. No need for an app-enabled/iot multi-zone thermo…

My main problem with mini-splits is that they are just ugly. I can't get past it. Neither can my wife nor others I've talked to. My engineer brain loves the idea, but I just don't want them on my walls nor do I want five different remotes laying around. I suspect thats a problem for many others too.

You can get ceiling cassettes as well as radiator style floor mounted air handlers. They just cost more.

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

#230

Post by gcheong »

How far away can the condenser be located from the air handler? Does it have to be outside or can it work in a garage? Also, how do I determine the size of system I need? Biggest problem with our current nat gas furnace, which isn't a fuel problem per se, is that it isn't zoned (which I can alleviate somewhat with the ecobee and its remote temp sensors) so I am considering installing mini-splits in the bedrooms and downstairs room and having the main furnace for heating the living room and other areas as needed but I'd also like to move the main furnace off nat gas as well at some point if possible but I don't want a big condenser taking up space in the rear patio which is potentially where I could see your unit come in.
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