If heat pumps don’t actually work in frigid weather, no one told the Nordic nations, which endure Europe’s coldest climates, with average winter temperatures around 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F). As of 2021, Norway had heat pumps in 60 percent of households. In 2022, Finland installed more of the appliances per capita than any other country in Europe, while Sweden has similarly gone all-in on the technology. In the United States, heat pumps are selling like hotcakes in Alaska, and last year Maine announced it had reached its goal of installing 100,000 of the devices way ahead of schedule. These places ain’t exactly perpetually sunny California. (US-wide, heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces.)
I will professionally die on this hill. I’ll go as far as to say that people who say that heat pumps don’t work in cold climates is on par with people who don’t believe in climate change, that the world is round, etc.
Last week a HVAC start up company called Quilt held an event in Redwood City, CA to launch their new product: a residential heat pump.
I feel like I’m uniquely qualified to talk about this company because 1: I’m in the HVAC industry and 2: I’m a huge tech nerd. I lived in the Bay Area for almost 10 years. I follow companies such as Apple, Google, etc. So of course I watched their announcement live. Here are my thoughts.
What is Quilt
Quilt is a brand new HVAC company based in Redwood City dedicated to selling heat pumps directly to homeowners. It was started by ex-Google and Apple employees. It looks like they are trying to tackle the residential HVAC market with the direct to consumer model. Companies like Nest, All Birds, Warby Parker, etc. have tried to disrupt industries by going direct to consumer. Let’s see if Quilt can do the same.
What are they offering
Their product is an all in one solution for residential heat pump equipment, installation, and servicing. From their website , t is a 2.5 Ton heat pump with up to 2 zones on a single heat pump. The indoor fan coil is a high wall mount.
What’s different
What makes them unique is their design aesthetic and go to market strategy.
Traditionally, if a homeowner wanted to install or upgrade their HVAC system, they’d have to find a local contractor. The quality of contractor varies greatly and they usually have a brand or a few brands they are either loyal or comfortable installing. In the latter case, if you have a stubborn contractor, if you wanted to install a heat pump, they may convince you to sticking with a gas furnace since that is probably what they are comfortable installing. Quilt solves that by using contractors that ONLY install Quilt equipment. If a homeowner wants a Quilt system, they have to use their installers.
The equipment they offer looks a lot nicer than traditional mini splits. Most HVAC equipment is not designed to fit in a home’s interior. Quilt designed their equipment to fit into a home’s interior AND exterior design. I have to say these are the nicest mini splits I’ve ever seen.
Pros
The go to market strategy, especially for the residential market is old and confusing, and definitely needs reimagining, disruption, and a new way of thinking. As a homeowner, I appreciate this approach.
The equipment looks amazing. The indoor unit is a wall mount, but they designed it to be as short as possible so they can fit it above a window. They have two different decorative panels that will fit into most home decor. It even has a built in light so you could mount it above a picture or piece of art.
The outdoor unit has a decorative matte black covering. The outdoor heat pump almost disappears in most homes yards.
The thermostat looks very similar to a Nest thermostat and looks easy to control.
Cons
Going to market and scaling is going to be very difficult. There’s a reason why the residential market is the way that it is. It’s very difficult for one manufacturer to service the entire United States. They are also limited to the Bay Area at launch. Scaling and rolling out will involve having to acquire and train local contractors which is a huge undertaking.
It’s expensive. Quilt is charging $6,499 per zone. Granted, it’s an all in one solution including installation. Also, not sure if it includes permits, demo, etc. It does NOT include potential credits and rebates for what it’s worth.
Questions
How many zones can attach to one outdoor unit. It looks like you can do up to two zones on one outdoor unit. The outdoor unit looks like it is a 2 1/2 ton. It looks like this is a pretty efficient unit I wonder who is manufacturing it for them .
How do you address homes with more than two zones? Do they just add more systems or can you add morphine coils to a larger outdoor unit?
My Thoughts
I think what Quilt is doing is awesome. If you think about the process of buying a new heat pump or air conditioning system for your home, it is complicated. First thing you would have to do typically is find a contractor. And there are different types of contractors and the quality can vary. By establishing themselves as a heat pump brand that can do the entire job top the bottom, from supplying the equipment to installing it, is going to make it easy for consumers. They also help with finding rebates which is going to bring down the cost of heat pumps.
The task ahead of them is also very difficult. There’s a reason why most HVAC manufacturers do business the way that they do. The United States is a huge country and it is next to impossible for any manufacturer to serve the entire country by themselves. That’s why the auto industry has car dealerships. But as we’ve seen with Tesla, that business model can be disrupted.
Overall, I think the product looks cool, we’ll see how it performs when the first units get installed. We’ll see how they do, but anything that helps heat pumps get into the minds of everybody, homeowners, building owners, etc. the better for the HVAC industry and for really the entire planet in general.
I can trace the trajectory of my career all the way back to a job walk in Pasadena.
Back in 2007, our sales manager suggested we take a look at an installation of a new type of heat pump. It was one of the first installations of its kind. It had the ability to connect multiple fan coils to a single outdoor condenser. It even had the ability to heat and cool different zones of the system at the same time. The system was called a Variable Refrigerant Flow system or VRF.
I was a young sales engineer at the time and I understood those words but my mind had a hard time comprehending how that could work. I went to the job site and took these few photos with my Sidekick 3. I didn’t know it at the time, but I ended up concentrating on and spending the majority of my career on VRF.
Back then, it was a new technology and even today in 2024, it still is considered “advanced” or “complicated” (at least in the United States). I’ve spent the last 10+ years selling, educating, and advocating the benefits of VRF and I can trace it all the way back to that job site visit.
One of the challenges when using VRF is integrating ventilation or outside air. There are different ways to bring in outside air.
The most straightforward way to bring in outside air through a dedicated outside air system, or DOAS. As the name implies, these are basically specialized rooftop packaged units whose only job is to bring in and temper fresh outside air. The main downside to this is that it will require its own ducting system and you’ll have to find a way to integrate it into the space; either mixing with the comfort cooling system, or by dumping it directly into the space.
Another way to do this is to do what I took of picture of here. Many cassette fan coils have a small perforated hole on the chassis that you can punch out and bring in a duct to introduce outside air.
I always have to preface this by saying it is a SMALL amount of outside air, typically 3–5% of the nominal airflow of the cassette and it will be untempered and unfiltered. But in some cases, it makes sense. I saw this in a brewery in Oakland and it was close to an outside wall and in the Bay Area, the climate is generally mild.
I had to take a picture while enjoying a beer since it was the first time I saw the OA knockout being used.
One of the advantages of VRF systems is that they’re modular and scalable. From single modules starting at 6 Tons, and then combining modules to form systems up to 42 Tons, we have the ability to combine multiple systems allowing us to condition spaces all the way up to large professional sports arenas. Time for a story…
The year is 2017 and the Golden State Warriors finished the season with a 67–15 record. They steam rolled through the playoffs before meeting Lebron and the Cleveland Cavaliers for the third year in a row. They easily defeat the Cavs 4–1 and were 2016–2017 NBA Champions. A month later, I received plans for the largest, highest profile project I’ve been involved in: The job was called New Warriors Arena which was eventually named Chase Center.
From what I recall, the systems themselves were pretty simple. Each system consisted of water cooled condensing units with ducted fan coils and a few cassettes. But with the size of the arena, we needed over 60 of these systems. Everything was tied together with central controllers.
On March 5th, 2020, Steph Curry made his long awaited return after breaking his hand during the 2019 season. I had a neighbor who had season tickets to the Warriors and he invited me to a game, so of course I took him up on his offer. I distinctly remember going to the game because there were stories in the news about people getting sick and my wife urged me to wear a mask while I took BART to the game. Once I got there, I had to take a look up and I saw a ducted fan coil installed above me. It was cool to know that I had a part in getting that fan coil up there. Admittedly a VERY SMALL part, but a part either way.
P.S. It turned out that that was Curry’s only game at Chase Center that year. We all know what happened a week later.
If you’re anything like me, you have interests outside of work, at least one would hope. One way I like to pass time is by watching YouTube. I follow a number of different channels, but the majority of them fall into either Apple, tech, engineering, and explainer videos.
One channel I follow is called JerryRigEverything. He got his start doing mostly tech and iPhone repair and unboxing videos, but I recently saw a video that fell right into my professional interests.
It’s no secret that heat pumps are having a moment right now. With the IRA being rolled out and more awareness into the electrification of homes, you’re more likely to see heat pumps in the news. In one of his latest videos, Zack actually goes over the replacement of his existing furnace and replaces it with a Daikin heat pump.
This is wild to me. I’m seeing more and more efforts from HVAC manufacturers and they are trying different ways to market and reach customers. One marketing channel that I think is vastly underutilized is YouTube. Vy some measures, YouTube is the most popular streaming service in the United States, even more popular than Netflix. That means a ton of eyeballs are watching YouTube at any given moment. And depending on the channel and channel’s content, it’s a great opportunity for businesses to reach customers.
Here are some examples of manufacturers working with content creators to spread awareness of their products and their brands. It’s one of the reasons why I started a professional YouTube channe:l to help market and educate my customers on heat pumps, VRF, and our other products. Please like and subscribe 😉
If you watch one thing
Technology Connections is another great channel. In this video, he shows why it’s important to properly calculate the load of your home so you can choose the right sized heat pump. He also demonstrates that HEAT PUMPS WILL WORK IN COLD WEATHER!
I will shout this from the rooftops until this myth is dispelled.
What Would Happen if Every American Got a Heat Pump – I always get pumped up when I see an article on heat pumps in a major mainstream newspaper or magazine. Wired put out a piece posing the question, “What would happen if every American got a heat pump?”
It’s not a matter of if heat pumps will replace gas furnaces in American homes en masse, but how quickly they’ll do so.
A few years back, I was asked to look at a home with a VRF system that wasn’t working correctly. I showed up and found sagging refrigerant lines and Y joints that were improperly installed.
VRF is an amazing mechanical cooling technology that is efficient and quiet. However, it takes proper designing AND installation for the equipment to work as intended. When I showed up at this house in Reno, I went into the crawl space and found refrigerant lines that were sagging and Y joints that were installed incorrectly. They were vertical instead of horizontal.
Why are sagging refrigerant lines bad? In every air conditioning system, RTU, split system, VRF, mixed in with the refrigerant is some amount of oil. The oil acts as a lubricant where it lubricates the moving parts of the compressor, similar as in a car engine. If there are areas where the refrigerant lines sag, it can cause oil to collect and not make it back to the compressor. Not lubricating the compressor can lead to wear and early failure of the compressor. It’s important to always install refrigerant lines straight with minimal sagging.
And why can’t you install Y joints vertically? Short answer: Gravity.
If you install Y joints vertically, gravity naturally prevents refrigerant from going into that top branch. This means that any fan coils coming off that branch doesn’t get the refrigerant it needs to operate properly. And then THAT leads to under cooling/heating in that zone. They need to be installed horizontally so refrigerant can flow to both branches equally.
With any piece of equipment, it needs to be installed properly or else it won’t work as intended, or at the worst, lead to early failure of the equipment. There are trainings available for each manufacturer. If you need training, please reach out and I can direct you to where you need to go.
Variable Refrigerant Flow is THE best technology for mechanical cooling. Here are 3 reasons why:
Efficient
VRF is extremely efficient compared to older technologies such as rooftop packaged units and chilled water systems. How is this possible? VRF systems use variable speed compressors at the outdoor unit and fans with EC motors at the indoor fan coils. By using these, the compressor will only use the appropriate amount of energy to send the refrigerant to only the zones that need it and the fans will only move as much air as it needs to to hit set point.
Real world analogy: when driving, you wouldn’t floor the gas to reach driving speed, let go, floor it, let go, etc. to maintain 65 mph. It’s EXTREMELY inefficient. You would depress the pedal slowly and smoothly to reach 65 mph and hold it to maintain it. This is how variable speed compressors work.
Scalable
VRF technology is scalable, meaning you use it from small applications from an elevator room to large applications such as hotels and college campuses. We can do this because the equipment is modular. Using various size ODUs and combining them to form larger systems, and then grouping these systems and controlling them via a central controller allows us to tackle any size project.
We also have different styles of indoor fan coils, from wall mounted, ceiling cassette, ducted, and using PMV kits, we can use any 3rd party AHU, which means we have a solution that we can use in any space.
Cost Effective
Using VRF can be cost effective over the life of the equipment. Since the systems are very efficient, they use less electricity to operate saving the building owner thousands over the life of the equipment.
It also uses a small footprint compared to other systems. Refrigerant piping takes up a fraction of the space of the equivalent ductwork of a RTU system or CHW/HW piping of a chiller/boiler/cooling tower system. You are able to place the outdoor heat pumps on the roof and eliminate mechanical equipment rooms, or even entire floors dedicated to mechanical equipment and open it up to leasable space. More leasable space to rent out to tenants and generate more money for the building owner.
If you’d like to see if VRF systems are right for your application, please reach out to schedule a lunch and learn.
It’s no secret that most people absolutely fear public speaking. Twenty five percent of people have said they fear speaking in public. In any sales role, being able to effectively communicate the benefits of the widget you’re selling to a group of people is probably the most important part of the job. If you can’t do that, how do you sell anything?
DALL·E 2024–02–27 14.15.07 – An image of a Filipino sales engineer giving a presentation to an audience in a less spacious, more intimate conference room. The audience is seated a.jpg
As I mentioned in the last issue, most HVAC companies do a great job training their inside sales team on products, but they do a terrible job of actual sales training. I gave some tips on how to go out and get started on getting to know your accounts. This week, I thought I’d give some tips on giving presentations.
Know your audience. You need to know who you’ll be presenting to so you can tailor your presentation to them. Are they young engineers? All salespeople or will there be some support staff? Have they heard of you, your company, or your product? Knowing the type of people you’ll be speaking to will help you tailor your presentation so that they get the most value out of it.
Refine your slide deck. I could write a whole piece on slides.
Lay out objectives. Let them know what you’re there to present and what you hope that they get out of it.
Simplify. If your audience has to read your slides, you’ve failed. Slides are only meant to be visual guides. They should have on them at most, a graphic, a couple bullet points, and/or a statement. They are there to hear YOU speak. They are not there to read slides.
Don’t memorize. You should know the material and the order and flow of your presentation, but don’t memorize what you’re going to say word for word. You don’t want to sound like a robot. Your slide deck should be your visual cue as to what is next on your presentation. Look at the slide and then talk about what is on the slide and get your point across.
Have a consistent theme. Let’s be honest: we all borrow and take from existing presentations. Both internal and external. But at least make it look consistent. Nothing bothers me more than when a slide looks different from the previous slide. Same fonts, font sizes, colors, etc.
Watch your timing. Most humans have an attention span of about 45 minutes to an hour. Keep your presentation shorter than an hour, or include a breaks every 45 mins or so for longer presentations. You’ll lose your audience if you don’t.
Relax. One thing I realized is that people in the audience are generally interested in what you have to say. If you’re nervous, you generally start to talk faster, and the audience senses it. I make it a point to speak slower than I would when conversing. It lets the concepts sink in with your audience and it paces you so you can think of what you’re going to say next.
If you read or watch one thing
Sam Altman wrote a blog post on how to be successful. Sam is best known for being the CEO of Open AI but his thoughts can be applied to any field.
Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.
I think this is underrated. In our HVAC industry, you don’t realize how much you communicate. From a larger scale such as presentations, to even daily tasks such as email, we are constantly communicating in some form. So the better you are at getting your point across clearly and quickly, the better you are at your job. You’d be surprised at how many people love to talk just to hear their own voice.
Sam on building a network:
An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago.
We all know how small our industry is. I’ve had opportunities present themselves just by keeping in touch with people and generally trying to leave a good impression on them.
I was recently at a client’s office and I was making my way around the place and I got to the desk of a young sales engineer. He’d been there for a couple years and he’d finally gotten his break: he was being promoted to sales engineer and given his own accounts. He was talking about how he was going to go out and introduce himself to his new accounts, and the question came up, “What do I do?”
That immediately brought me back to when I got my own accounts and thought the same thing. It dawned on me that aside from a few bits of advice, no one really tells you how to sales engineer. At least the social part of it.
I’ve been around for almost 20 years and worked for and with a number of rep firms and distributors. They are all set up in a similar way: there are inside sales engineers and then outside sales engineers. The inside sales engineers support the outside sales engineers and during this time, they learn the ins and outs of how the sales process works and more importantly, they learn the products and product lines they are selling.
Obviously, this model works great! There’s a reason why it’s copied throughout the industry. But no one really shows you how to call on and service your customers. I mean, there are a few mentors out there that do go over this vital part of sales, but not nearly enough.
So I thought I’d leave a few bits of advice I’ve picked up over the years. This is just from my experience and probably will not apply to every situation.
Find out who is the principal of the company. At larger firms, you may have to go down and find the head of engineering or a project manager. Set up a meeting to introduce yourself and leave them your business card and line card.
Get to know the person at the front desk. They might be a friendly face, but realize they are the gatekeepers. Get on their good side.
Once you get in, identify the key influencers. Head of engineering, project managers, mechanical principals, etc.
Get to know them. I struggled with this part the most. Especially as a young engineer. Most key influencers are senior and a bit older. We were at different stages of life. But one thing that always worked was to find something on their desk or in their office that I could relate to. It could be a picture of their family or something that indicates a hobby. Any common ground, aside from work, that you could stand on, is a great starting point.
There are a ton of other things I’ve picked up along the way but here is the one key takeaway I’ve learned from all my years:
People will do business with people they like.
Think about it. At the end of the day, we are all selling HVAC equipment that more or less does the same thing. Sure, there are differences in the type of equipment, efficiencies, features, etc., etc., but we are all selling things that cool and/or heat spaces. But when you really think about it, if given the choice, you’re more likely to work with people that you like.
So for me, that means being available, honest, and efficient. I’ll pick up the phone when it rings. Or call back ASAP or message back that I WILL call when I can.
I’ll be up front and honest. If our equipment is not the best fit, I’ll give my honest opinion, even if I lose the sale. In my experience, your customer will respect that you were honest rather than pushing to get the sale. Or if I messed up placing an order. I’ll own it, rather than make up an excuse and blame something else.
And the last point: efficient. What do I mean? I’ve learned that another aspect that people look at when choosing who they want to work with is how easy it is to get information that they need. So for me, that means being as efficient as possible. I’ve built systems to help me do my job efficiently, quickly, and accurately. I want my customers to know that I am quick to respond. We are all under some sort of deadline, so if I can help my customer get the information that they need, the thought process is that they will come to me for everything.
If you want to know how to streamline your workflows, please reach out.
Do any readers have good tips to share with fresh outside sales engineers? I’d love to gather them and share them in a future issue.
If you read one thing
AHR was last week and looked like a lot of fun based on the pictures I saw on LinkedIn. Every year, they put together a market trends report for the upcoming year. This is a great way to take a look at what different people think is coming this year. Some common points:
* Decarbonization and electrification
* IoT, automation, and data analytics
* Increased product adoption of technologies such as heat pumps
Toshiba Carrier U Series Launch – Toshiba Carrier launched our new generation VRF U Series product. Check out the introduction video here. There is a separate video going over features and benefits here.
