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40 minute read
Dr. Jane Melia is an engineer by training — a civil engineer with a PhD in fluid mechanics who spent her early career on wind turbines before moving through a string of clean-energy startups. So when she went looking to replace the gas furnace in her creaky 1920s Bay Area house in 2018, she didn't just want a heat pump. She wanted to understand exactly what it would do to her bills, her comfort, and the grid around her.
What she found was a gap. Heat pumps are wonderful machines — they move heat instead of generating it, which makes them radically more efficient than anything that burns fuel. But there's a catch most contractors have learned to live with, and Jane couldn't unsee it. On this episode of The Heat Pump Podcast, she walks us through what she built instead, and why it might change how you think about the hardware you install.
The problem hiding in plain sight
Here's the catch. A heat pump runs most efficiently when it's warm out — typically the middle of the day. But homes need heat at 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., when it's cold and there's no sun on the grid. Run the equipment in that window and, as Jane explained, you lose somewhere around 20–25% efficiency. You're using more electricity, and you're paying more for it, at exactly the wrong time.
Harvest Thermal's answer is to decouple the two. Pair an air-to-water heat pump with a storage tank, run the heat pump when conditions are best, and store that heat until the home actually calls for it. Jane's framing stuck with me: heating and hot water are the "Goliath" of home energy use — about 60% of the total. The gas stove everyone worries about is a rounding error by comparison. By shifting when that 60% gets made, Harvest moves 10–11 kilowatt-hours a day compared to a conventional heat pump, and up to 35 versus electric resistance.
The result Jane reports is bills down about 30% versus a conventional heat pump, with no change to comfort. The homeowner sets the thermostat and forgets it. All the optimization — weather forecasting, rate schedules, how much of the tank to heat and when — happens inside a control unit the size of a shoebox.
The part contractors actually want to know
A clever system is only useful if it can get installed without reinventing your business. This was the question Ed and Eric kept circling, and Jane's answer was reassuring: it's not a heavy lift.
If you hold an HVAC and a plumbing license, you already have the skills. You're putting a heat pump water heater outdoors, a tank in a closet or garage corner, and an air handler with a hydronic coil instead of a refrigerant coil. The control unit is built to be plug-and-play. Jane said contractor training takes less than an hour — and most of that hour isn't about the install at all. It's about the value proposition, how to explain the system at the kitchen table.
That said, she was honest about the tradeoffs. A full system runs closer to three days for an experienced crew, not one — but that's because you're delivering space conditioning and hot water in a single project, not just a heat pump. It's a bigger ticket, and the homeowner crosses their water heater off the list for the next decade in the same visit.
One detail that should get any contractor's attention: across every home Harvest has deployed, Jane said not one has needed a panel upgrade. The heat pump they use draws 15 amps. Instead of sizing for a brief morning peak, the system makes heat over time and banks it — delivering that peak load without pulling high power from the grid. That's real money saved on electrical work the homeowner never has to think about.
Why this is really a differentiation story
The piece we keep coming back to is what this does to the sales conversation. When every quote at the kitchen table is a well-known brand with very similar equipment specs, you're competing on price, because to the homeowner those systems look identical. Jane's point — and it's a sharp one — is that a system built around shifting load, cutting bills, and maximizing solar is something the homeowner has never had pitched to them before. Those other systems are great. They're just hardly differentiated. Walk in with something genuinely different and, in her experience, you close more deals.
It's worth noting where the honest open questions are, too. The heat pump Harvest currently uses tops out around 150°F water, which matters in places like Maine or Vermont where old high-temperature baseboard was designed for 180°. Jane didn't paper over that. She laid out the real paths — higher-temperature heat pumps as they come to market, low-temperature emitters, or adding a convector at the end of an existing baseboard run to pull more heat out of the water. It's a design problem you solve deliberately, not a brochure claim.
The takeaway
Jane's system is a bet that the future of home heating isn't just a better box on the wall — it's intelligence about when the box runs. For contractors, the more immediate takeaway might be the question this episode forces: is the brand you install actually different from the one down the street, or does it just have a different badge? Harvest is one answer to that question. Whether or not you ever install one, it's worth sitting with what "differentiated" really means when you're the one at the kitchen table.
You can learn more about becoming a Harvest contractor at HarvestThermal.com.
Key takeaways
- Heat pumps face a timing problem, not just a technology problem.
- Storage using a thermal battery helps shift runtime to cleaner, cheaper hours.
- Homeowners care most about bills, comfort, and simplicity.
- Contractors need a system they can install without major retraining.
- Air-to-water design still needs care in older hydronic homes.
- A longer install can still win if the outcome is clearer.
Timestamps
[00:00] – Episode teaser: Rethinking home energy use and load shifting
[03:36] – Meet Dr. Jane Melia and the story behind Harvest Thermal
[08:17] – The problem with traditional heating systems and energy timing
[09:38] – What a “smart thermal battery” actually does
[13:04] – How load shifting benefits homeowners and the electrical grid
[15:05] – Real-world performance: lowering bills while electrifying homes
[22:57] – Why contractors are key to scaling new HVAC technologies
[42:05] – The future of grid-aware heating and home energy systems
[44:53] – A key resource for contractors growing a heat pump business
Connect with Jane
Transcript:
00:00:00.080 — 00:00:49.280 · Speaker 1
Harvest is shifting. 90% of the heating and hot water load of the home to whenever is most efficient. And from a cost perspective, from a grid perspective, and we're talking about most of the energy use of a home, right. When you think about heating and hot water, that's on average about 60% of the energy use in the home.
We're shifting a huge amount of load. Like when you think of your gas stove, that's important, but it's very small in terms of energy use. Heating and hot water are kind of the Goliath in terms of energy use in your home. And we're shifting all of that. What that means is each harvest system, every day, when you compare it to a regular heat pump, is shifting about 10 or 11 kilowatt hours of electricity when you compare it to an electric resistance system.
We're shifting upwards of 35 kilowatt hours of electricity to whenever makes the most sense.
00:00:53.240 — 00:03:29.310 · Speaker 2
Hey everyone! On this podcast we pretty much only interview entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs. Often those are contractors doing remarkable work. But we also love talking to the entrepreneurs who are adjacent to contractors. Maybe they're serving contractors, maybe they're serving homeowners. That's what we do today with Doctor Jane Melia, co-founder of Harvest Thermal Janes, a PhD in a long time energy nerd. She wanted the heat pump she knew was the most efficient option. But then she saw something she couldn't unsee. Her biggest load was heating, not cooling based on where she lives, and she knew her heat pump would run most efficiently in the middle of the day when it's warm out. Exactly when she didn't need heat. Where she lives, she needed it at 9 p.m. or 5 a.m.. That gap cost you efficiency every day, and most of us have just learned to live with it. But Jane and her husband are both engineers, and they didn't want to live with it, so she built a system that erases that trade off. She paired a heat pump with a hot water heater, using that water tank as a thermal battery.
A place to store the heat, so her system runs when energy is cheapest and cleanest, and then delivers the heat whenever the home needs it, which could be 12 hours apart or more. We talk with Jane about what that means for contractors, what it means for you at the kitchen table when you're selling at during install, and then what it means for the homeowner and their bill and comfort. I think it's going to make you reconsider what an efficient heat pump even means and frankly, what differentiated hardware means. So many of my customers are contractors, and they are deeply tied to the OEM brand that they install. This episode is likely to make you ask, is that brand actually differentiated from the other incumbent brands?
Super interesting episode. I hope you enjoy it. And before we start one plug, Eric is a training he's developed called How to Design a Heat pump system that will not come back to haunt you. Our friends at Mitsubishi are hosting a webinar for Eric to give it, and it's open to anyone. He'll cover a few things one. Verifying your manual j assumptions in the home quickly two applying manual S the right way for variable speed systems three. When to use strip heat versus dual fuel versus nothing at all for the hidden operating cost traps by region of the country. And last but not least, a few real world case studies to bring it to life. That training is June 18th, 2026, depending on when you're listening to. This is June 18th at 2 p.m. eastern to the link to registers in the show notes. We'd love to see you there. All right. Enjoy our conversation with Dr. Jane Melia.
00:03:33.150 — 00:03:36.110 · Speaker 2
Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump podcast. I'm Ed Smith and.
00:03:36.110 — 00:03:38.710 · Speaker 3
I'm Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amply Energy.
00:03:38.750 — 00:04:19.030 · Speaker 2
Today we have Dr. Jane Melia. She's the Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder of Harvest Thermal. Harvest makes what they call a smart thermal battery. It's a system that combines an ultra efficient heat pump with thermal storage to deliver heating, cooling and hot water. Their approach is getting some serious attention.
They are one of the time magazine's top Greene tech companies. They're one of fast companies, most innovative companies, and they got a $1.65 million grant from the California Energy Commission. Most importantly for our audience, who are generally contractors, you're partnering with contractors across the country to get this super innovative system in homes.
Jane, thanks so much for joining us.
00:04:19.030 — 00:04:27.150 · Speaker 1
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for that introduction. Good to chat to you, Ed, and also Eric. Looking forward to seeing where this conversation takes us.
00:04:27.190 — 00:04:45.550 · Speaker 3
Excellent. Well, let's jump right in. We want to get into the origin story a bit about the technology, about the business. So you started harvest after replacing your own gas furnace in 2018. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit more about like what you were looking for that didn't exist in the market at that point?
00:04:45.590 — 00:05:33.110 · Speaker 1
That's right. In fact, they often say is found a company based on a real need that you've experienced. And this is one of those stories. I'm sitting in an old like creaky old 1920s house in the Bay area, which had a very old heating system, and we were looking for an alternative to a gas system, wanted to move to heat pumps, but we wanted something that didn't increase bills and that also could maximize the use of clean, cheap, renewable energy.
And we couldn't find one on the market. And so that's when we got our thinking caps on and developed the concept for my home and found that, wait a minute, my bills are down by 40%. This worked really well. This is something we really need to bring to market. And that's the very short story. And I'm happy to give more details on what happened next.
00:05:33.150 — 00:05:48.150 · Speaker 3
All right. So you mentioned cost was like an issue that you were trying to address. What were some of the other like major pain points, technical challenges you were trying to overcome that your existing system couldn't take care of? What are the key innovations that you've created with your product?
00:05:48.190 — 00:08:13.420 · Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, as a baseline, heat pumps are the right way to go. They are fantastic devices. They're super efficient. They move heat rather than generating it. There's so much more efficient than any other option. So kudos to anybody in the audience who's already got the heat pump installed.
However, we can do better. And there are a few things. One is efficiency. It's actually better to run your heat pump when it's warm. That's typically in the middle of the day at noon, but you need to heat your house at 9 p.m. and at 5 a.m.. And so you have that disconnect. You're losing efficiency maybe about 2,025% efficiency.
What that means is you're using more electricity and you're paying more for it. So that's one thing, which is that time dependency. Another thing is which is closely tied to it, is when you're running your heat pump at 9 p.m. or you're running your heat pump at 5 a.m., you're not necessarily using the cleanest electricity because there's no solar electricity at that time.
You might have some hydro depending on what you're living, which is great. You might in some cases in the early morning, have some wind, but most renewable electricity on the grid is solar. And that is not at 9 p.m. and it's not at 5 a.m.. And then the third one is grid friendliness, right. If we want to scale electrification, we have to think not just about our homes or about the overall picture.
And that is the grid. And if we're all adding load at the same times of the day, that drives the need for costly capacity upgrades, that drives up cost. It also takes a long time to get there. So a few things together mean that if we can take heat pumps, which are awesome, but find a way to decouple the time when we run the heat pump from the time when we deliver the value, which is the heating in hot water, we can have an even better system.
And that's the problem that we were solving for, is take an awesome heat pump, but decouple it by partnering it with thermal energy storage. And that means that we get all those good things about heat pumps, super high efficiency, using that clean electricity in the middle of the day, being flexible. So running when there's most available electricity from a grid perspective and getting those bills down.
And so our customers see bills going down by on average about 30% compared to a conventional heat pump, but with no compromise in customer comfort. The customer just gets their heating at 9 p.m. 5 p.m. whenever they need it. They run the order. They get the hot water whenever they need it. They don't actually have to do anything except for set their thermostat and run their faucets and get their hot water.
It just runs automatically, but we deliver a very high level of comfort by getting those savings and using that clean electricity.
00:08:13.460 — 00:08:36.099 · Speaker 3
Love it. So it's you've got an air to water heat pump that's connected to thermal storage, and then you've got like your own proprietary sort of brain that helps run this whole thing. Is that about right? Can you tell us more about, like, what are all the components of your system and other do you also? Is your heat pump uniquely yours?
Is it a third party heat pump? Can you use any heat pump any air to water heat pump on the market? Yeah. Just get into some of those details.
00:08:36.140 — 00:12:38.400 · Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. This is a great question. And you've got the overall we're using an air to water heat pump a third party air to water heat pump which is proven been deployed in hundreds of thousands of homes. But just as an air to water heat pump, we combine that with a tank and with our control over the harvest pod.
If people are interested, take a look on our website so that the size of a shoebox and it sits on the wall above your tank or beside your tank, and then the actual heating delivery to the home is using conventional systems. If you've got four stairs, we use four stair. If you've got a radiant floor, we use radiant floor.
We're pretty agnostic as to how you deliver it in your home. The idea is we don't disrupt your home. We in fact, your home doesn't look any different with the harvest system than it does with any other system. No more widgets on your walls. It's just using the ductwork, using the radiant floor, whatever you happen to use.
The key thing, though, is we're using an air to water heat pump. Why? Because you can store hot water. Most heat pumps out there for heating are actually air to air. You can't really store hot air. That's not a good medium for storage. So what we're really doing with the Harvest Pod is orchestrating all the other devices.
And if you don't mind, I'm just going to unpack that a little bit. So first of all we're doing predictive demand. So this is a smart device. So it's figuring out how much heat will Erik's household need in the next 24 hours based on how your family behaves and based also on the weather forecast. So how much heat will you need in terms of heating and hot water with a known weather forecast tomorrow?
And that tells us how many BTU of heat we're going to have to deliver. And then based on that knowledge, the hardest part is also going to determine, well, when is the optimum time to run that heat pump. We talked a bit about outdoor temperature. So it's going to take that into account. I'm going to try and run it when it's warmest outside.
But it's also going to take into account other things like what are the characteristics of the heat pump. Also what rate schedule is Erica on? Do you have a time of use rate? Do you have a flat rate? Are you playing into a demand response program? Right. How do we optimize for your bills to save your money? That's our number one objective.
Save you money to delivering all that heat and hot water. And then it's also optimizing for things like thermal losses. All things being equal, you want to store that hot water for the least time possible. Right. Our systems are highly insulated, but you lose heat as a function of time. So we're going to optimize for that as well.
The hardest part is therefore optimizing for the time of operation of the heat pump. But then I'd say the key thing that we're also doing is managing a tank as a battery. And that is really it's a relatively complex problem to do really well. And that's something where harvest has really done a really good job.
Right. And that's where we have a lot of our IP. And so basically that tank, which is a standard hot water tank, we're really operating as a modular battery. And what do I mean by that. Well most heat pump water heaters are what they call multi-purpose. So basically you're heating up the whole tank and you're getting a relatively homogenous temperature, I mean hot water float.
So you're going to have a slight stratification. We are really leaning into that stratification. Hot water from the heat pump water heater goes into the top of the tank. Hot water to your hydronic coil leaves from the top of the tank. Cool water comes down to the bottom and cool water goes back to the heat pump from the bottom.
What that means is we have a storage of hot water at the top of the tank, called water at the bottom, and a very narrow thermocline in between. That gives us Modularity. In summer, we may only be heating, say, 20% of the tank, because that's all you're going to need for your hot water in spring and fall may be heating a third two thirds, depending on your heating needs.
In the winter, we're going to be heating the whole thing maybe even twice over the course of 24 hours. We have a fully modular battery, which is allowing us to use efficiently all the energy we're generating without any wastage, and really modulating that based on the needs of the home. And that's really key.
And I'd say another point on that is we're not just managing the tank as a battery. We have the knowledge of the state of charge of that battery. Every day is going to be different. We know to within a few degrees Fahrenheit what the temperature is at any point in that tank. And that means that knowledge gives us control.
That means that you're never going to run out. We can always plan ahead, and we can always optimize for your heating and hot water and your bills.
00:12:38.440 — 00:13:00.640 · Speaker 3
What a cool system. As a fellow nerd, I just love that you're doing a multi optimization problem that's super complex, but you turn it into this super simple experience for the homeowner, where they're just in a thermostat and using their domestic hot water as they need it. But all this magic is happening and being orchestrated by your system.
I have so many questions, but were you going to make a comment?
00:13:00.680 — 00:13:40.800 · Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I dug a little bit deep there into kind of the types of things that we're doing, but essentially for the homeowner, right. That's the one we're thinking of. They got a heat pump outdoors. They got a tank with a tank was they've got an air handler where their furnace was, and they've got this control unit above their tank beside that tank.
It typically fits in the form factor of what they have already, and it's driven by the thermostat on their wall. They set their thermostat and forget it and go and live their lives. And you don't have to worry about it. You can, of course, on our app see how things are going. How much load shifting have you done?
How much energy have you saved? That's nice, but I would say about 50% of our customers are super interested in that, and the others have got other things to think about and they just go and live their lives.
00:13:40.800 — 00:14:16.520 · Speaker 3
And I love like you didn't mention it, but there's got to be this huge benefit. Not only are you operating the heat pump water heater when it's sort of ideal conditions to be moving that heat from outdoors to indoors, or vice versa. I'm assuming you also do cooling, but you can. Unlike a conventional heat pump, you can have these really long runtimes for that heat pump and decouple it from changes in loads that are really dynamic in the space.
So that means that heat pump is going to run even more efficiently because it's optimal part of its modulation and not be short cycling. Yes, that's better for a whole bunch of other reasons. Like it's fantastic.
00:14:16.560 — 00:15:00.480 · Speaker 1
That is, being able to decouple it means you're not in that mode of switching it on, switching it off, you're able to run it at a more steady output. In fact, typically thinking back, of all the homes we've deployed, no home has had to have a panel upgrade because of how the system, the heat pump that we're using is a 15 amp heat pump, right?
And so what that means is it does save on other associated costs that some homeowners have to incur when they're putting in that heat pump. And often you haven't put in a high power heat pump to meet a load that may happen just in half an hour in the mornings, whereas we're able to generate that heat over a period of time, store it up, and still deliver that peak heating load in the morning, but not by drawing high power from the grid.
00:15:00.520 — 00:15:11.480 · Speaker 3
Got it. And so that was my next question of kind of getting into the demand response piece. It sounds like you're able to forecast when there might be a demand response event, or when there might be a certain weather event. You're sort of managing that predictably.
00:15:11.480 — 00:17:44.230 · Speaker 1
So we can get weather information on what's happening in their location. And so for every home, we're taking that into account in planning, what is that heating load going to be based on the weather forecast? If you're off the grid, then we're able to take a standard year and take that into account. In any case.
Now how do we optimize from a cost perspective and different homeowners in different situations? Many of our homeowners are in places where they have time of use rates, or at least they have the option for time of use rates. And in that case, we're saying opt in because we can always shift to those off peak times.
So you're going to save money with the harvest system if you go to a time of use rate. And so in that case it's a it's a time of use rate. It may vary between the summer and the winter. And we're going to optimize for that. Increasingly we're seeing the opportunity for dynamic rates. We've actually got some homes in Vermont which are responding to a day ahead dynamic price signal doing that.
They've got a day ahead pricing or they're seeing it 1 p.m. the electricity is going to cost so much, but at 9 p.m. it's going to cost so much. We take that information to account and we run that heat pump, taking that to minimize the cost. The homeowners have zero comfort impact. Their bills are down. But for the utility, they're making those savings from that electricity purchase perspective.
So harvest can do any of those. Right. So it really is what is your setup. And we can really respond to those needs. But what I see is really interesting here is when we start to talk about the grid and grid flexibility is a growing challenge in terms of capacity constraints on the grid, particularly with that surge of data centers, which is mean that it's getting more challenging from a grid capacity perspective.
Harvest is shifting 90% of the heating and hot water load of the home to whenever is most efficient, and from a cost perspective, from a grid perspective. And we're talking about most of the energy use of a home, right? When you think about heating and hot water, that's on average about 60% of the energy use in the home.
We're shifting a huge amount of load. Like when you think of your gas stove, that's important, but it's very small in terms of energy use. Heating and hot water are kind of the Goliath in terms of energy use in your home. And we're shifting all of that. What that means is each harvest system, every day, when you compare it to a regular heat pump, is shifting about 10 or 11 kilowatt hours of electricity.
When you compare it to an electric resistance system, we're shifting upwards of 35 kilowatt hours of electricity to whenever makes the most sense. Or, to put it in a capacity perspective, about 1000 harvest homes is worth about ten megawatts of free capacity. And that is important.
00:17:44.270 — 00:18:19.150 · Speaker 3
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You can avoid more grid upgrades. You can offset grid congestion issues. There's all kinds of benefits. A couple other sort of HVAC specific questions that I want to get ed into the conversation here. Tell me a little bit more about from a HVAC design standpoint, what's the highest output temperature that we can do?
Like can we use these systems. And like you mentioned, a house in Vermont where you often have these hydronic fin tube baseboard where normally they're designed for like 160, 170, 180 degree water temperature. What kind of options do I have for heating or cooling, for that matter, with this system?
00:18:19.190 — 00:18:59.060 · Speaker 1
Yeah, so that's really a dependency of what is the maximum water temperature that you can get out of the heat pump. So the heat band that we're using right now operates at a maximum temperature of 150 degrees. So that's kind of where it sits. And so you'd need to have either it does then depend on what equipment you have downstream.
And if they're sized appropriately to deliver enough heat into the home. And so you always need to do that analysis. What's your heating design day? What is the type of equipment you have in the home? There are options as you move forward to work with heat pumps that can lift a little bit higher in terms of temperature, and that's going to make it easier depending on the equipment that you're using to meet those particular needs.
00:18:59.100 — 00:19:00.180 · Speaker 3
That makes sense.
00:19:00.220 — 00:19:21.900 · Speaker 2
Jane, having heard all of this, I'm dying to know. And we skipped right past it. Who are you and what is your background? That when you thought, I want to get off of furnace and get on to a heat pump, you looked at the market. You saw that there were no heat pumps that quite did what you wanted. And you said, I'm going to design my own system and install it.
Like, tell us about your background a little bit.
00:19:21.940 — 00:22:19.060 · Speaker 1
Okay. All right. So I'm an engineer. I'm a civil engineer. So I love buildings that people who know me well know that in my free time, I built patios and dry stone walls and do that kind of stuff. So I'm very much an engineer at heart. I also have a PhD in fluid mechanics, which was one of my first passions. In fact, one of my very first jobs.
I was working on wind turbines and the performance of wind turbines under different wind conditions, which is a lot of fun. After a stint in corporate America, which brought me from Europe to the Bay area, I was sitting in the Bay area having a super interesting job in corporate America. But seeing all this bubbling of innovation happening around me in terms of renewable energy, this was in the 2000, and I was thinking, wait a minute, if I don't go back and work a bit more on some clean energy, I will regret this.
And so I left corporate America and joined the very first startup that I was part of, which was a company called Sole Focus. And that was in 2008. And since then I have been working in startups nearly exclusively in the energy sector. A sole focus was a concentrator photovoltaic company. Learned a lot there.
Learned about what it means to be part of a small company where everybody has a role to play. Everybody knows what's going on. Everybody has to have that seamless teamwork to make sure you can be successful. Learn a lot also about fundraising and investment and all those other things that you learn. So that was a wonderful training school, joined in a vault as well.
That's an energy storage company, unfortunately defunct, but also learned a lot about the energy storage space. I did work with a quantum cybersecurity company for a few years where I headed up business development, which was another really, really cool technology in a totally different sector, but super interesting technology as well, where I learned about how do you take a new technology and really bring it to market.
And I was actually at that quantum tech company when my guest, Vernice, was about to break down. And my co-founder, pianoforte, also happens to be my husband, and he is also been in the energy space. He's also an engineer. He's a computer engineer, but also worked in the policy space at NRDC. So between the two of us, right, we knew it had to be clean energy.
We knew about that. We knew about heat pumps. And we would have been, I guess, embarrassed if we'd replaced our system by a gas system. Given our background. Our friends would have never forgiven us, never let us down. So we knew we had to put a heat pump system in. But then that realization that, wait a minute, if everybody puts a heat pump in and they're all running at 9 p.m. or they're all running at 6 a.m., we're not going to be able to clean up the grid, because that grid is going to have to keep those peaker plants because there are no good alternatives.
So we're actually not going to meet those climate goals that we're all talking about. And so it was kind of that realization that there was no good solution for homes. And we just felt we needed to solve for it. So a combination of clean energy knowledge, fluid mechanics, knowledge, policy knowledge and a house that really needed help came together to form Harvest Thermal.
00:22:19.100 — 00:22:23.540 · Speaker 2
That's awesome. And Eric is dying to jump in and say you're backgrounds are very similar.
00:22:24.860 — 00:22:32.260 · Speaker 3
And one of my first jobs was actually at GE designing wind turbine blades. Oh, excellent acoustics, aerodynamics for a good chunk of time.
00:22:32.260 — 00:22:35.260 · Speaker 1
And what's your background? Are you a mechanical engineer?
00:22:35.260 — 00:22:50.490 · Speaker 3
Mechanical. Mechanical? Yeah. Mechanical with a concentration in fluids. Yeah. Got into CFD in the late 90s, early 2000 and super into it. And that's really what brought me into software. And computer science was kind of getting exposed to all those different kinds of tools and systems.
00:22:50.530 — 00:22:52.210 · Speaker 1
Excellent. It's good to know.
00:22:52.250 — 00:23:31.290 · Speaker 2
Yeah. All right. Super helpful background on the technology on you. Let me ask some contractor oriented questions. So we got a bunch of contractors listen to this who are super into heat pumps. Air to water is like it's the rage, but it's also it's expensive and it's not being put into play as much. So if they listen to this and they're like, I really want to try a harvest system.
Talk to us about how different it is today versus what they'd be doing for air heat pump. If they're installing one of those, or if they were going to be doing an air to water heat pump. I'm like, how does this differ compared to those two alternatives?
00:23:31.330 — 00:25:01.490 · Speaker 1
Honestly, it's really not a heavy lift from a contractor perspective. If you've got your HVAC license and a plumbing license. Right. This is HVAC and plumbing combined. You're putting in a heat pump water heater outdoors. That's the same as putting in a regular heat pump. Water heater. You're putting in a tank in a tank closet, the corner of a garage, a basement.
Pretty much the same. You're putting an air handler with a hydronic coil as opposed to a refrigerant coil. So you're running a hydraulic line, a water line to the air handler, and then beside or above the tank you're putting in our control unit. The control unit is designed to be plug and play. So it's wiring and standard wiring and plumbing fixtures.
You're going to have some plumbing connectors between your harvest pod and the tank because that's how we control what's happening. The tank, all the water from the tank goes through the harvest pod before it goes to the air handler or the domestic water. So you have a few more plumbing connections between the pod and the tank.
That's about it. We do have obviously training material. In fact, if folks want to look on our website, there's a contractor page. Go to harvest.com. Looking for contractors? Some videos of what the system looks like. Essentially, it's very similar to what you'd be doing anyway. And what you need to think about is where you're putting the Harvest Pod and how you connect the Harvest Pod.
Otherwise that's it. And to be honest, our training of contractors honestly takes less than an hour. It's more about this is what's different. And this is also the value proposition. This is how you sell the harvest system to the consumer.
00:25:01.490 — 00:25:11.370 · Speaker 2
I'm surprised it's that light. The Harvest Pod sounds decently technical and software oriented. Installation and startup is not terribly complicated.
00:25:11.410 — 00:26:21.000 · Speaker 1
Yeah, well, I mean, one of the first things we did as a company was there's a lot of complexity inside the pod. And our key thing is make sure it's inside the pod and that people don't have to deal with it. The very first system on the wall of my home. I mean, you should have seen it, right? There's blue tape all over the place, right?
Wires, resistors, temperature sensors, flow meters. There's a lot of stuff inside that pod, because the pod really is a control system, not just from a software perspective. There is an electronics board inside there, but it's also a plumbing controller, right? There's flow meters, temperature sensors, a mixing valve, a circulator pump.
We're controlling the speed of the flow that goes to the hydraulic coil to make sure we extract the maximum heat, and we get that a really nice delta T and optimize for efficiency. So what we've done is bake all of that complexity into the pod so that the contractor doesn't have to deal with it and the homeowner doesn't have to see it.
And that makes it just better for all of everybody. So that's why the complexity is managed in the factory. The contractor attached it to the wall, does the plumbing connections and commissions it, and off they go.
00:26:21.040 — 00:26:34.880 · Speaker 3
Can you tell us more about your process for helping a contractor figure out what's the appropriate size storage tank or should do you need two tanks versus one? Do you have other buffer tanks like those kind of components? How do you help with that?
00:26:34.920 — 00:27:10.200 · Speaker 1
Most of our homes, it's the heat pump outdoors. A tank we typically are using most single family homes 119 gallon tank. In a smaller home, it might be an 83 gallon tank. We have a lookup table that allows them to determine which is the right size for the home, and in some cases, you can put in. In most homes you have one single heat pump, but in some cases you may add a secondary heat pump if you've got a larger home.
Just as some homes have two furnaces, you can couple them to increase that capacity. So we give them guidance as to how to size it, but it's pretty standard. It's pretty easy.
00:27:10.240 — 00:27:19.040 · Speaker 3
Got it. And those tanks, it could be any third party 120 gallon or 80 gallon tank. Doesn't necessarily need to be a certain brand, just need to meet certain specs that you have.
00:27:19.080 — 00:28:03.960 · Speaker 1
We sell the tank at the same time as the heat pump, so the contractor can buy that heat pump and tank, heat pump, water heater and tank from their distributor or they can buy it through us, whichever they prefer. Whatever makes most sense. I'd say about half of our contractors buy through us as a one stop shop.
Half our contractors just buy the part from us and they get the rest from their distributor. It's really up to them. We do recommend we do require that you use a certain tank. Why? I mean, it is just a tank, but there are differences between tanks. We need a tank with two ports at the top and two ports at the bottom.
They don't all have that. We need a tank, which is going to minimize vertical mixing. So it's how is that port connected to the tank. So it's not the only tank on the market that would work, but it's just going to give you better performance if you use this tank.
00:28:04.000 — 00:28:13.960 · Speaker 3
Got it. And so if they're buying the equipment directly through you are you drop shipping equipment to the customer location when it's ready to be installed. What does that look like.
00:28:13.960 — 00:28:47.240 · Speaker 1
So we have a distribution partner who will ship that to the contractor warehouse or in some cases the customer site, or they can purchase directly from their distributor. So pretty standard right? We try and make it as easy as possible. We do, but we do work directly with. For the Harvest Pod, we do work directly with the contractor.
I think that's the separate thing, the harvest pod and the hydronic coil that goes with it. Right. But it's going to go in the air handler. These are things that you can only get from harvest. For the rest, you can get it either from harvest or from your distributor.
00:28:47.280 — 00:29:01.680 · Speaker 2
Got it. And so you're not going to your like my local Homans or my local typical distributor. They're not going to have this stuff. You guys are handling that. And so either drop shipping or whoever you're doing fulfillment for you. But you got to do a little planning ahead. But otherwise it's very similar.
00:29:01.680 — 00:29:03.320 · Speaker 4
Correct? Yes, yes.
00:29:03.360 — 00:29:08.160 · Speaker 1
And as we scale, that will change. But right now that's how that's how we're working.
00:29:08.200 — 00:29:23.200 · Speaker 2
Yeah. Makes sense. How are contractors finding you guys. Are you like are you advertising or are they basically just you've got some cutting edge contractors who have homeowners who really want the greenest, cleanest system. And they find you guys. Is that how that's working today?
00:29:23.240 — 00:30:50.390 · Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, it's a range of things. Increasingly, we're getting contractors coming to us because homeowners have said they want to have a system, and that's how the contract is hearing about harvest, which is really nice. And then alternatively, we're reaching out to contractors, right? We're identifying contractors who are leading edge, who are interested in heat pumps, who do a lot of electrification.
And we're saying, hey, maybe you could consider doing a harvest system. I think the value of harvest is that it's a very differentiated product, right. That kitchen table conversation is easier. Why? Because we're going to save your bills by 30% compared to heat pumps. One of the biggest barriers to people putting in heat pumps is that uncertainty about what it's going to do to my bills, not just today, but over the next 20 years.
Harvest is always able to run when the electricity is cheapest, and as the electricity rates change, we're able to adapt to how they're changing. So we're future proofing your system against rising costs. So that really makes a lot of difference at the kitchen table conversation. And then the fact that we're maximizing use of solar, for example, if you happen to have solar on your roof, you're able to self consume with Harvest, which really saves even more money for folks.
But even if you don't have solar on your roof, we're maximizing use of clean energy, which matters to a lot of people. And then that grid flexibility is also nice to have as people think about the future of demand response and flexible loads is again, there future proof with a harvest system because you're not just buying for now, you're buying for 20 years.
And we know that the grid is going to be under a lot of constraints in the next 20 years.
00:30:50.430 — 00:32:02.670 · Speaker 2
Super interesting. All right. I'm going to put on a couple different contractor hats now. So if I'm a contractor who does I've been around 5075 years. If you're that kind of contractor you're often HVAC and plumbing. Yep. So you've got both of those. And a lot of folks have now added on HVAC, plumbing, electrical.
I love what I'm hearing about harvest because I've got the training needed to do this. And that's a differentiator if I'm a company, a different kind of contractor who just focuses on heat pumps, but I don't do plumbing, This problematic for me. Let me ask this. If you were going to go, if you're one of the first kind of company, you do HVAC, plumbing and electrical, but you've got built a good business installing like a five head multi zone heat pump system, you can typically do those with one crew in a day.
Right. And so they have unit economics built around that. You've talked a bit about the installation. But if we get a little bit more into ours if I'm doing a one tank, one outdoor heat pump system for you guys, is that a day install? Is that a multiple day install? What do you think?
00:32:02.710 — 00:32:27.500 · Speaker 1
It takes a little bit longer. And we're doing your space conditioning and your hot water. So you do need to compare that apples to apples as well. What we're seeing for experienced crews it's more like three days, right, that you're looking at in terms of time. So it does take longer and really in part because you're doing not your space conditioning but also your hot water.
And you've got this additional plumbing step with the harvest pod.
00:32:27.500 — 00:32:45.580 · Speaker 2
Clear. But it's a three for. It's your AC, it's your fern. It's heating and cooling and it's your hot water. So it really is because people always complain about heat pumps. You can't just compare us to a furnace because we're more like a furnace. AC right. And so you're basically saying the same thing. It's all three of those items for a home, which is substantial.
00:32:45.580 — 00:33:04.740 · Speaker 1
So it becomes a higher ticket item for the contractor right there deploying all these three systems. And for the homeowner, they don't have to worry about, oh, I've got to do my hot water in two years time because it's all done at the same time. So that's value. But it does take a bit longer than it would if you were just going to put in a cheap heat pump and off you go.
00:33:04.780 — 00:33:04.940 · Speaker 4
Yeah.
00:33:04.980 — 00:34:09.220 · Speaker 1
Now one thing that contractors really like I mentioned that differentiated value. So it is a higher close rate, a high conversion rate because it's a very differentiated product. It also means if you're coming to the kitchen table saying, I've got a system that's going to shift load, reduce bills, maximize your use of solar, etc. And you're competing against, say, somebody who is doing either a Mitsubishi or a Daikin or a Rheem, a heat pump system.
I mean, those are great system, but they're hardly differentiated. And if you're the contractor coming to the table with the harvest system, you've got something which is really quite different. That gets customers attention and that allows you to close more deals. We do have a lot of consumer interest.
We have a lot of folks reaching out to us. We have a wait list of consumers. So we are actually able to give our contractors, particularly as they start out one qualified leads of customers in their zip codes and contractors like that, because then they can go and close the deal and it saves them time, it saves them money, and it allows them to do what they do best, which is installing systems.
00:34:09.220 — 00:34:19.060 · Speaker 3
So Jane, you just mentioned zip codes. Can you tell us a bit more about where you have systems currently being installed around the country? What locations in the US or in other places are you installing systems?
00:34:19.100 — 00:34:51.139 · Speaker 1
So we started in California. That's where I'm sitting right now. So you start close to home, particularly when you're deploying physical widgets. And that's where we have hundreds of systems deployed right now. But we do also have systems in other places as far north as Edmonton, Alberta. So in ultra cold Edmonton, Alberta, we've got our harbor systems deployed and working really well, as well as in Vermont as well as in Colorado, Washington and Oregon.
Next on the list, we might be putting our toe in the water in Texas. I'm really excited about that. And that may be happening in the next few months.
00:34:51.260 — 00:34:57.020 · Speaker 3
Exciting. Texas certainly has a very interesting electricity market, so I can there's all kinds of reasons to go to Texas next.
00:34:57.060 — 00:35:00.660 · Speaker 1
Absolutely. They've got a lot of leadership there, and we're looking forward to working there too.
00:35:00.740 — 00:35:01.420 · Speaker 4
Nice.
00:35:01.660 — 00:35:38.370 · Speaker 3
All right. I want to circle back to a question. We started to kind of get into a little bit. So the water temperature coming out of the unit, it sounds like right now you're capped at around 150°F. Do you have guidance or solutions, future improvements that figure out how you can bump that up? It's a big discussion here in the northeast as we're trying to get more air to water heat pumps installed because like.
Where I live in Maine. About 90% of homes don't have any ductwork. They're all hydronic. And they're almost all of them are set up with high temperature baseboard, where they were originally designed for 180 degree water. How can we help reach those customers?
00:35:38.410 — 00:36:55.250 · Speaker 1
That's an interesting challenge, and one that we're obviously very aware of. And I think there are a couple of path forward. One is ultimately we will be diversifying the types of heat pumps that we're able to work with. So as heat pumps expand their capabilities and are able to deliver higher temperature, we can also do that.
The second is, and this may not really solve the question that you're asking for, but there are now emerging baseboard hydronic baseboard systems that can work at lower temperatures. Right. Use convection that can work at lower temperatures. And we have deployed our systems with those as well. So it is that combination.
There is also a way where you can use existing baseboards. And what's going to happen is that they're not going to emit quite as much heat as they would with the higher temperature, because it's 150 and 180. What you can do is add, say, a single vector at the end of that series. Right. So what you want to do is you want to extract more heat out of the water.
And so if you add a single vector at the end, at the end of your baseboard heating, you may be able to this is part of the design process. Deliver the heat that you need into the home. So you want to be thoughtful and creative in that design process and making sure you're delivering the heat. But there are ways and that these are things that we have done in a range of homes.
00:36:55.290 — 00:37:13.130 · Speaker 3
Got it makes sense. So you can just use I mean, there's all kinds of different hydronic emitters that are out there, whether it's fan coils or more European style or even old fashioned emitters, that if you get enough surface area, maybe you get enough BTUs out with a lower temperature, or just adding extra emitters to an existing home that can get you closer to.
00:37:13.170 — 00:37:20.490 · Speaker 1
That might be the most cost effective way. Keep the emitters you got and add one at the end, or add to at the end. That's going to give you that extra boost of heat that you need?
00:37:20.530 — 00:37:49.210 · Speaker 3
Totally. And I have to ask because the next piece that I think about is, well, the maximum temperature is really a function of the flow rate and how much energy you're kind of putting into your system. So can we just add another outdoor unit to plug into your stores? You get kind of more thermal energy going in per unit time, and then maybe we can get to a higher temperature.
Or are you working on things like that so that you could just boost that input energy?
00:37:49.250 — 00:39:18.400 · Speaker 1
I mean, how many heat pumps we put outside is dependent on how many BTU heat does the household need in 24 hour period? If that exceeds what one heat pump can deliver, you should absolutely be doubling up. If it's not, then it's more a question of the distribution, which is do you have how much heat can you deliver from that hot water tank in a suitable time?
So it's a question of your delivery at that point. What we do is we manage the speed, the flow of the hot water going through the air handler, and you can manage it in two ways. If you're going to keep that flow nice and slow. You can optimize for efficiency. We have a delta T of about 60 degrees. So what that means is the hot water going into the hydraulic coil.
When it comes out it's 60 degrees low. That means we've transferred 60 degrees of heat that was in that water into the home. If you want to accelerate healing delivery, what you might do is you might increase the flow. You're going to reduce the efficiency, but you're going to be delivering more heat. And our system is able to do that.
We have a variable pump inside the pod, which when there is a call for heat, we're able to accelerate that delivery. If you need more heat then say you're eating at the home. You've come away from vacation, your house is cold and you need to heat it up quickly. We may be in a mode where we're going to actually accelerate the flow to get it up, and then we're going to go back to the low flow to keep it stable.
00:39:18.440 — 00:39:19.200 · Speaker 3
Makes sense.
00:39:19.200 — 00:39:28.960 · Speaker 1
So it's that variable flow which is one of the levers that we use. But in terms of capacity we just want to size it. So you've got the right capacity. Heat bumped outside the house.
00:39:29.000 — 00:39:29.960 · Speaker 3
Yeah. Makes sense.
00:39:30.000 — 00:40:01.240 · Speaker 2
I've got I think two more contractor oriented questions on this. Listening to that answer, it sparked for me the technical support teams at a distributor are a big selling point for a lot of contractors. I've heard. I can call this guy who runs Mitsubishi Tech Support at X distributor in my area any time 24.
And he answers, and he'll answer my question if I'm on site, I need that. You guys are new company. You're sort of managing the distribution on your own. What is the technical support look like for contractors for you guys?
00:40:01.240 — 00:41:29.720 · Speaker 1
So I'd say one of our secret sources is our field operations team. So we have really, really good field operations team. And so if there is a question you can call us pretty much any time. Right. Weekends. ET cetera, etc.. And we will answer that call I'd say upstream of that though. This is a really smart device, and we have dashboards monitoring what's happening in every system.
So we typically know before the homeowner and the contractor if something's amiss. We know if the system has been properly commissioned. We know if all the valves are connected properly. We know if you need to scale your coil because you've got hard water. We know all that ahead of time. So we typically are saying to a contractor, wait a minute, you better go and do this.
You better go and do that. And so they can plan ahead of time. So that is actually really valuable. And our multifamily property owners, because we're not just doing single family home, we're also doing multi-family homes. They have a dashboard of all their units and they're able to see yeah, all my units are working fine or I need to go and plan and make this change in unit number 25.
I don't have to do it on a Sunday afternoon. I can plan ahead and make sure it's done on a Thursday morning. This really matters. But yeah, we are delivering that type of support right now. We are owning the dashboard, but there is a near-term future where our contractors will have a dashboard for all their units, and they'll be able to see what's happening in my deployments.
Is everything fine? I'm going to the zip code. Do I need to go and see somebody at the same time? I think that's the future, right? To be honest. Right. It's that's the future of smart devices. And harvest is a smart device.
00:41:30.120 — 00:41:49.960 · Speaker 2
We just had an episode out with reps from all the same time carrier, Daikin and LG. Yeah. And the conversation surprisingly ended up centering around that sort of connected insight a ton. So that's awesome. You have that. And that makes me want to ask my second question even more. If a contractor wants to get in touch with you guys, what should they do?
00:41:50.000 — 00:41:59.840 · Speaker 1
So HarvestThermal.com go to the page for contractors at the top and click on the button. And we can all be on the phone with you following a couple of days.
00:41:59.840 — 00:42:19.270 · Speaker 2
Awesome. All right Jane, super fun. Great answers I'm intrigued by this system. You guys have raised a good amount of money. You've had a good amount of traction, really promising technology. What does the future look like for you guys next 1224 months? Like, what are you hoping to do? What are you hoping to accomplish?
00:42:19.270 — 00:44:34.190 · Speaker 1
So this is really exciting times to anybody. In electrification in particular, you've got electrification and storage because of so many things happening. This confluence of grid capacity and data centers and rising costs and renewable energy mandates and so on and so forth. So I see multiple things happening.
One is that flexible capacity, our ability thousand units is freeing up ten megawatts of capacity that is real valuable, really valuable to utilities as well as to off takers such as data centers. So we're seeing growing partnerships with energy providers to offer rates to consumers to help them have this win, win where utilities and grid operators benefit from the load shifting and consumers save money.
And that is going to be good for all of us. So that's something that's emerging and that we're working on and that we're harvest can really help solve these key problems that are facing energy grid. And then in terms of something else, that's I think you'll see coming to market very soon is when we think about homeowners and costs.
I think we've all seen that many of the heat pump say tax credits for homeowners disappeared at the end of 2025. That's not the case for thermal energy storage for third party owned thermal energy storage. There's actually something called 4080 in the tax code, which is a tax credit, including thermal energy storage systems, if their third party owned.
That means if you're a multifamily property owner out there, you can actually still get a 30 or 40% tax credit of a harvest system. But it also means that homeowners will be able to benefit from that tax credit. If it is a third party owned system, such as a leased system. So I think you can expect to see coming to the market the option of leasing HVAC system lease to buy at the end of the day, which allows you to deploy the system without any money, down monthly payments, and then at the end, own the system.
And part of that is allowing you to benefit from the savings of the tax credit. So utilities one side and then leases are the other side. These are the things that we're working actively on. And we should be able to tell you more about in the coming months.
00:44:34.230 — 00:44:46.750 · Speaker 3
Very cool. Sounds incredible. The idea of a homeowner being essentially cashflow positive on day one. They're exchanging their high utility bills for a lower lease payment and seeing savings. What a cool opportunity. I hope you guys can pull that off.
00:44:46.790 — 00:44:48.670 · Speaker 1
Absolutely. I'll keep you updated.
00:44:48.710 — 00:45:08.710 · Speaker 2
All right, Jane, this has been awesome. The question we always ask at the end is for contractors who are looking to build successful, heat pump focused businesses. What is a resource you should point them towards? And I'm quite curious in your answer, given where you play in the space. Yeah. What would you point folks towards.
00:45:08.750 — 00:46:05.470 · Speaker 1
In terms of building an HVAC business? So I mean, I would first of all say find out more about heat pumps. Find out about thermal energy storage. We try and share a fair amount of information on that on our website, blogs and so on and so forth. So that's a really tough question. I mean, what one I've been trying growing this business, one of the key things for me is making sure I have the right people on board.
And so it's been about how do we recruit people appropriately. And I'm sure contractors are facing that. How do you get the right salespeople? How do you get the right administrative people? How do you get the right contractors on board? And so I've been using resources such as a book called who that you might be familiar with, which is really, really awesome in terms of a nice, repeatable methodology for making sure you get the right people on board.
You have the right culture fit, you have the right performance. So that's been really helpful. So I would point folks who are looking to expand their team and get the right folks on board. I'd point them in that direction. Who are you familiar with that book?
00:46:05.510 — 00:46:07.270 · Speaker 5
It's by Jeff Smart.
00:46:07.470 — 00:46:14.100 · Speaker 2
Yeah. My last company I worked at used the Hou method for interviewing, which is like kind of wild, but very cool.
00:46:14.140 — 00:46:27.900 · Speaker 1
Yeah, that's what we do at harvest. So I found that as being really, really useful. And apart from that, we have a lot of resources on our website. I'd point you also to the Rewiring America and other really good resources out there for heat pumps and incentives and value proposition.
00:46:27.940 — 00:46:30.940 · Speaker 2
Great answer. Jane, thank you so much for joining the Heat Pump podcast.
00:46:30.980 — 00:46:32.980 · Speaker 1
Thank you. Thank you Eric. It's been a pleasure.
00:46:33.020 — 00:46:34.780 · Speaker 3
Yeah, it was really fun. Thanks so much.
00:46:37.740 — 00:47:00.379 · Speaker 3
Thanks for listening to the Heat Pump Podcast. It is a production of energy and just a reminder that the opinions voice were those of our guests or us, depending on who was talking. If you like what you've heard and haven't subscribed, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you.
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