Software may be eating the world, but it takes longer than other industries to fully realize its potential.
From iPhones to Teslas, people are getting used to updating software that improves what they already own. However, outside of consumer electronics and cars, aircraft updates are not yet common.
But it’s starting to change and starts with the unlikely product – heat pumps. Last week, the heat pump startup quilt said last week it pressed an update to a heat pump already installed in a customer’s home. It wasn’t just a bug fix. New software and firmware have increased the unit’s heating and cooling capacity by more than 20% overnight.
“From the beginning, we wanted to design the system and make it possible to continuously improve it and update it in the air. This is a pattern that happened with EVS and gained a lot of traction, but we never actually did it with HVAC.”
“In cars, sometimes they’re called software-defined vehicles. It feels like you’ve created a software-defined HVAC,” he added.
Proving a negative can be difficult, but according to heat pump expert Drew Tozer, the update is probably the first of its kind. Usually, if a heat pump is installed, or any fragment of the HVAC device can be touched only when there is a problem.
However, many of the quilt teams did not come from traditional HVAC backgrounds. Instead, they were pulled from Nest, Google, Apple and Tesla, where frequent updates are standard. Isaac McKillen, the engineer who led the capacity increase project, recently worked for Lucid Motors, managing both passenger and battery heating and cooling.
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“I got feedback from both of them. [installation] McKillen said partners and some customers are really useful when the maximum operating capacity is slightly higher. Some people had larger living rooms and open floor pans.
The quilt specified more high-quality sensors than would normally be found in residential HVAC systems, including additional pressure sensors, higher precision temperatures, and current sensors, McQuillen said. That data was key to the project.
Once the team realized they could afford it, they decided to test new parameters in their internal units to verify both performance and reliability. The Quilt update included both software and firmware running on the main processor and microcontrollers scattered across indoor and outdoor units.
The outdoor section of the originally installed quilt heat pump provided up to 19,700 BTU of cooling per hour and 20,500 BTU of heating per hour. Currently, cooling and heating figures have increased to 24,000 BTU per hour and 25,200 BTU per hour, respectively.
The new review will not change how efficiently a heat pump works, but it can better deal with extreme heat and cold.
The power of over the air renewal is not free. This was only possible because quilts used high-quality sensors, monitored data more closely, and received updates, including networking equipment. They added a small amount to the gross total material bill, Lambert said. But as the company sees it, profits far outweigh costs. “There is a leading capital cost to sensors, but I think it is worth it from that additional data.
“The difficult part,” Lambert added.
Additionally, Quilts can now sell units to a wider range of customers without having to design and sell an entirely new model. Sounds like a win-win.
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