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

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

#271

Post by daredoes » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

cmui wrote: post #88

daredoes wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#272

Post by pjsg » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

I want to know how to prevent my house from freezing (I'm in New England) in the middle of winter during a multiday power outage. Today, I run a 7kW generator that can keep the oil furnace running and the fans to circulate the air through the heat-exchangers (it is a multi-zone system).

It seems that I need soft-start compressors and coordination between the different units so that they don't all try to start at once.

I don't care if the house gets down to 40F during this period. I just don't want the interior water pipes to freeze.

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

#273

Post by thaeli » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

Nition wrote: post #242

It's strange seeing this post describe heat pumps as if they're a new thing, and everyone commenting as if they are. I live in New Zealand and heat pumps have been standard in new builds for just about 20 years now. They're great. If you want to add one to your home you can call up various companies to do it for reasonable prices (not sure how this stacks up against US prices, but I recently had a small 2.5kW cool/3.…

I'm in the US and have had a heat pump for 15 years. It was a fairly small cost add from a straight cool. I get this depends on region, especially for the older units, but I never understood why they were such a hard sell even in mild heating climates.

Ironically, I bought this system because at the time natural gas looked like it would be becoming more expensive more quickly than electricity in my area. Since the cost delta was small, and I don't think it made my total monthly utility bills any higher, no big deal, but I might not have even bothered with a heat pump if I'd known about the fracking boom at the time. (I'm also fortunate enough to live in a state with powerful utility regulators, so electricity prices never spiralled like they did in "deregulation" areas.)

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

#274

Post by gregmac » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

I have been an Ecobee user for years, and one of the main things that sold me on that is the room sensors.

In my house, there's large south-facing windows that let in a lot of sun, and for a lot of the year the north side of the house will be several degrees cooler than the south. I was constantly battling how to set the thermostat, especially to keep the upstairs a decent temperature at night.

The Ecobee 100% solved that: at night the upstairs room sensors control temp, while during the day mostly the main floor does. No guessing: it just works regardless of how sunny it was that day. It would be hard to give that feature up.

Another handy feature which I didn't realize until owning it is the "min fan runtime per hour". Even set to 20 mins, this helped drastically with evening out the temperatures throughout the house.

There's already a thread about an open, local API, and I'd mirror that here. The Ecobee isn't open+local, but if they were to go under (or do something stupid like block HomeAssistant), it's $$$ to rip it out and switch to something else. When we're talking about a $$,$$$ system I wouldn't even consider it without a company committed to providing a proper local API -- including that it won't disappear in an over-the-air firmware update.

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

#275

Post by stingraycharles » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

cmui wrote: post #88

daredoes wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#276

Post by leviathant » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:01 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #79

"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.

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

#277

Post by fourseventy » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:02 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #219

toss1 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tw…

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.

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

#278

Post by cmui » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:02 PM UTC

gcheong wrote: post #230

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 d…

Condenser can be typically ~25ft from the air handler. It would have to be outside, otherwise it would act as a refrigerator for the garage, and tank the efficiency of the system. System size - we're working on an online tool to get you close to the right size. In the current flow you preorder and a contractor will prepare the final quote and system sizing (we give them a web app to turn a utility bill into a heat pump size).

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

#279

Post by mlfreeman » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

cmui wrote: post #45

z3ugma wrote: post #12

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…

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…

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.

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

#280

Post by gwbas1c » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

What's the COP?

There's just a vague 3-5x more efficient claim on your web site. More efficient than what?

I currently have a 5-year-old 2.8ish COP whole house system that won't last forever. I get a monster bill in January and February, so when it's time to replace it, I'd like to go with something a bit more modern.