Software may be eating the world, but it has spent a longer industry than other industries to realize its full potential.
From iPhone to Tesla, people have become accustomed to software updates to improve what they already have. But external consumers Electronics and carwireless updates are not common yet.
But, starting with unlikely products, this situation starts to change: heat pumps. Last week, the heat pump started Quilt It said it pushed for an update last week to heat up pumps already installed in customers’ homes. It’s not just a bug fix either: new software and firmware improve the unit’s heating and cooling capacity by more than 20% overnight.
“From the beginning, we wanted to design systems to constantly improve, update in the air. It’s a pattern that happens in electric cars and gains a lot of traction, but no one has really done it in HVAC before,” Quilt CEO Paul Lambert told TechCrunch.
“In cars, sometimes they call it software-defined vehicles. We feel like we have created software-defined HVACs,” he added.
It may be difficult to prove negative, but according to heat pump experts Drew Tozerupdates may be the first of their kind. Typically, when a heat pump or any HVAC device is installed, the only time that the touch is problematic.
but Many people are in the quilt team Not from a traditional HVAC background. Instead, they are drawn from it nestGoogle, Apple and Tesla, frequent updates are the norm for companies. Leadership Additive Project Engineer Isaac McQuillen 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, it would be really useful if we can have a higher maximum operational capability. Some people have larger living rooms or open floors that require more.
McQuillan said the quilts have more mass sensors than commonly found in residential HVAC systems, including other pressure sensors, higher accuracy temperature and current sensors. This data is the key to the project.
Once the team realizes that they have space, they set out to test new parameters on the internal units to verify performance and reliability. The update to the quilt includes software and firmware scattered across the main processor and microcontroller throughout the indoor and outdoor units.
The outdoor portion of the initially installed quilt heat pump provides up to 19,700 btus per hour cooling and 20,500 btus per hour heating. Now the cooling and heating numbers are increased to 24,000 btus per hour and 25,200 btus per hour, respectively.
The new ratings won’t change the operating efficiency of heat pumps, but they do make them better cope with extreme heat and hot and cold.
The wireless update feature is not free. This is possible because the quilt uses higher quality sensors, monitors data more carefully, and includes network devices to receive updates. Lambert said they added a small amount of the total amount of materials. But, as the company has seen, the benefits far outweigh the costs. “The upfront capital cost of sensors is, but we think there is so much value from this additional data that we think it’s worth putting them together,” McGlenn said.
Lambert added, “The difficult part is knowing how to build all the integrations with the software and all systems.”
Additionally, the quilt can now sell units to a wider range of customers without the need to design and sell brand new models. It sounds like a win-win situation.
