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Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
681–690 of 809 posts
Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#682Google.com
Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#683HVAC distro is a racket that was mobbed up along with the financing. There seems to be no marketing distribution conspiracy to find the 2M of 120M homes per year that need to be replaced. Massive problem for cos like watsco. The marketing costs for installers are insane and finding the 2M homes is a needle in a haystack biz. Heat pumps are only kosher for mild winters. Demographics shifting stateside might make this…
More than 2M per year - this article implies 8M combined natural gas and heat pump installs in US: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/heat-pumps/chart-americ...
Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#684Seems 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 depo…
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!
Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-Commun…
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.
Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Heat pump passion is kind of a thing for some reason! Because they are throwing money at it. Billions. All policy driven, not science-driven. If every home in the US switched to electric powered HVAC heat-pump systems we'd have huge blackouts in every city. Our power grid and power generation systems are not ready for this at all. Add electric cars to the mix and the scenario gets much darker (no pun intended, ligh…
Let's suppose that you want to switch over, say, Chicago, to be fully electric heat pump driven. Let's further suppose you want to do this over 25 years. There are just over 1M households in Chicago. If we assume (wrongly) that nobody has heat pumps today, that conversion needs to take place in 123 households every day of every year for the next 25 years. If the contractors don't work weekends, it's 153 households a…
> your hand wringing over heat-pump induced blackouts seems misplaced.
I would very much appreciate it if we could keep to a mutually-respectful conversation rather than resorting to insults. We only learn if we respect each other's positions. I have no problem being wrong. Show me how and will forever be grateful.
I have no problem with anyone challenging anything I say. Thanks for questioning my claim.
I can't get into numbers for Chicago without doing much research. Not sure that data exists. This is what I was able to find quickly though:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/220357/manufactured-ship...
According to this information over six million HVAC systems were sold per year in 2021. I think it is fair to assume these systems were installed. They don't provide information on the geographic distribution, kind or type of installation (residential, commercial or industrial).
What it says for me is that there's a great deal of installation capacity. This page gives us a sense of the concentration of contractors per state:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1243016/plumbing-and-hva...
This association link gives us an idea of how many HVAC contractors exist in the US:
https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-busi...
Their number is 145K.
The first link says Illinois has about 4100 contractors, or 2.8% of the national number.
I am just trying to get a sense of proportion here with some quick math. I do realize these numbers come from different years.
If I take the 6 million annual HVAC system sales rate for the US and calculate 2.8% of that, we get 168K units per year. Per this metric, installing a million units would require just 6 years.
If the million units, on average [0], require 3 kW of power, we are adding a power requirement of 504 MW per year. I am trying to keep it simple. In terms of power demand, the average is meaningless [0], what matters are outliers on the high side of the distribution curve. Keeping it simple...
By this metric we would need to build half a nuclear power plant [1] per year in Illinois, for a total of three brand-new nuclear power plants in six years.
I think these numbers more than support my thinking that power problems might be severe. If we understand that, once again, averages are a horrible metric [0], the numbers are likely much higher than this.
Over that period of time electric ground transportation would experience significant growth, further exacerbating the problem.
BTW, I have not addressed the issues we will have with the grid itself --power transmission lines, substations, transformers, etc.-- not being able to handle the increased load.
The current estimate is that a full transition to electric vehicles will roughly require a doubling of the entire US power generation and transmission infrastructure [3]. This means the equivalent of 1200 brand new nuclear power plants. By this I do not mean we have to build that many, I am using them as a unit of measure for a sense of proportion [1]. Electric heat pumps will add significant demand on top of this.
As I said in another post, this, I feel, is a cart before the horse situation. There's nothing wrong with electrification. What's wrong is that we need to put the horse (power generation) ahead of the cart. As far as I can tell, we are not doing that, at all, anywhere. Solar and wind are not enough. We need a non-trivial program to boost energy generation and transmission capacity. This, in my opinion, must include nuclear power.
Notes:
[0] I truly hate using averages because it is a horrible figure that has no merit when applied to the entire population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_averages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
[1] I like to use nuclear power plants for a sense of proportion because the typical plant is rated at 1 GW and people can understand the severity of needing new nuclear power plants.
Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 a…
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.
Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#688I'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…
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Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#689I'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…
> 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 r…
> 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?
Re: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
#690I think well-controlled fresh air intake is the most uniquely appealing part of this offering. I built a few prototypes to provide CO2 based fresh air intake in our house and it has made our bedrooms much more comfortable ( https://www.instagram.com/p/CUYBYm_v0IV/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= ). I think it’s hard to appreciate until you sleep with it for a week! I’m currently working on specifying the HVAC for our next house.…
Very cool prototype. Fresh air is a bigger deal than people realize. Shoot me a note at the email in my bio, I'd love to connect.