Software might be eating the world, but it is taking some industries longer than others to realize its full potential. From iPhones to Teslas, people have grown accustomed to software updates improving the things they already own. But outside consumer electronics and automobiles, over-the-air updates are not yet commonplace.
That is beginning to change, starting with an unlikely product: heat pumps. Last week, heat pump startup Quilt announced it pushed an update to heat pumps already installed in customers’ homes. It was not just a bug fix. The new software and firmware boosted the units’ heating and cooling capacities overnight by more than 20%.
From the very beginning, the company wanted to design systems that could be continuously improved with updates over the air. This is a pattern that has happened in electric vehicles and gained a lot of traction, but no one had really done it before in HVAC. As Quilt CEO Paul Lambert explained, in cars they are sometimes called software-defined vehicles, and he feels they have created software-defined HVAC.
According to heat pump expert Drew Tozer, this 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 is touched is when there is a problem.
Many on Quilt’s team did not come from a traditional HVAC background. Instead, they were drawn from companies like Nest, Google, Apple, and Tesla, where frequent updates are the norm. Isaac McQuillen, the engineer who led the capacity increase project, worked most recently at Lucid Motors, where he managed heating and cooling for both passengers and batteries.
The project began after receiving feedback from installation partners and customers that it would be useful to have a slightly higher maximum operating capacity for larger living rooms or open floor plans. The team investigated to see if the heat pumps had a little extra to give.
Quilt had specified more and higher quality sensors than what is normally found in residential HVAC systems, including additional pressure sensors and higher accuracy temperature and current sensors. This data was key to the project. Once the team realized they had room to spare, they tested the new parameters on in-house units to validate both performance and reliability.
The updates included both software and firmware that runs on the main processor and microcontrollers throughout the indoor and outdoor units. Originally, the outdoor portion of a Quilt heat pump provided up to 19,700 BTUs of cooling per hour and 20,500 BTUs of heating per hour. Now, the cooling and heating figures have increased to 24,000 BTUs per hour and 25,200 BTUs per hour, respectively.
The new ratings do not change how efficiently the heat pumps run, but they do allow the units to better cope with extreme heat and cold. The power of over-the-air updating does not come for free. It was only possible because Quilt used higher quality sensors, monitored the data more closely, and included networking equipment to receive the update.
They added a small amount to the total bill of materials, but the company sees the benefits as far outweighing the costs. There is the upfront capital cost of the sensors, but there is so much value to be gained from that extra data that it was worth the integration. The hard part is knowing how to build all the integration around it with the software and all the systems working together.
Plus, Quilt can now sell the units to a broader range of customers without having to design and market an entirely new model. It sounds like a win-win.