Software may be eating the world, but some industries are taking longer than others to reach their full potential.
From iPhones to Teslas, people have grown accustomed to software updates improving the things they already own. But outside of consumer electronics and cars, over-the-air updates aren’t yet commonplace.
That’s starting to change, though, starting with an unlikely product: a heat pump. Last week, heat pump startup Watt said it was rolling out an update to heat pumps already installed in customers’ homes last week. It wasn’t just a bug fix, either: The new software and firmware increased the units’ heating and cooling capacities by more than 20%.
“From the beginning, we wanted to design systems so they could be continuously improved, updated over the air. It’s a model that happened in EVs and gained a lot of traction, but no one had done that before in HVAC,” Quilt CEO Paul Lambert told Techcrunch.
“In cars, they sometimes call it software-defined vehicles. We feel like we’ve created software-defined HVAC,” he added.
It can be hard to prove a negative, but according to heat pump expert Drew Tozer , the update is likely the first of its kind. Typically, when a heat pump — or any piece of HVAC equipment — is installed, the only time it’s touched is when there’s a problem.
But many on the Quilt team didn’t come from traditional HVAC backgrounds. Instead, they were pulled from Nest, Google, Apple, and Tesla, companies where updates are often made. Engineer Isaac McQuillen, who led the capacity-boosting project, most recently worked at Lucid Motors, where he managed heating and cooling for both passengers and batteries.
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“We got some feedback from both [installation] partners and some customers that it would be really helpful if we had a little bit more peak performance,” McKillen said. Some people had larger living rooms or open floorplans that were more demanding. So the team dug in to see if heat pumps had a little extra to offer.
Quilt had specified more and higher-quality sensors than what is typically found in residential HVAC systems, including additional pressure sensors, higher-precision temperature and current sensors, McKillen said. That data was key to the project.
Once the team realized they had room to spare, they began testing the new parameters on the indoor units to confirm both performance and reliability. Quilt updates included both software and firmware running on the main processor and microcontrollers scattered throughout the indoor and outdoor units.
When originally installed, the outdoor portion of the blanket heat pump provided up to 19,700 BTUs per hour of cooling and 20,500 BTUs per hour of heating. Now the cooling and heating ratings have increased to 24,000 BTUs per hour and 25,200 BTUs per hour.
The new ratings don’t change how efficiently heat pumps work, but they do allow them to better cope with extreme heat and cold.
The power of the update ether doesn’t come for free. It was only possible because Quilt used higher-quality sensors, monitored the data more closely, and included network equipment to receive the update. They added a small amount to the overall bill of materials, Lambert said. But the way the company sees it, the benefits far outweigh the costs. “There’s the initial capital cost of the sensors, but we think there’s just so much value from that additional data that we think it’s worth integrating,” McKillen said.
“The hard part,” Lambert added, “is knowing how to build all the integration around it with the software and all the systems that work together.”
Plus, Quilt can now sell units to a wider range of customers without having to make and market a whole new model. Sounds like a win-win.
