This small startup's new tech is slashing home heat, hot water, and AC costs: 'It's cutting our bills by 42%'

In 2018, Jane Melia needed to replace the nearly 40-year-old gas furnace in her home. As an engineer with a background in clean technology, she decided that instead of just swapping it out for a more sustainable option, she'd build an entirely new system from the ground up — one that could heat and cool her home, and keep her water warm, too.

Fast forward six years and you get Harvest Thermal, the award-winning startup co-founded by Jane and her husband (Pierre, also an engineer) that uses an efficient heat pump and a "smart thermal battery" to heat, cool, and provide hot water in homes, all using clean energy when it's available. 

"One thing that was a light bulb for me was that heating and hot water are two-thirds of the energy use of homes," Melia told The Cool Down in an exclusive conversation. "Heating is kind of like the neglected child of energy use. … You just stick it in a closet, you forget about it, but it is the biggest energy that we have."

And that can add up to sky-high energy bills and contribute to planet-warming pollution.

Harvest's HVAC system, however, aims to reduce those bills by roughly 30% by storing cheap, clean energy in your home's hot water tank as if it were a giant AA battery. 

"We manage that tank as accurately as, say, Tesla manages a lithium battery," Melia said. When you need to take a hot shower or adjust the thermostat, the energy in that "battery" is already ready to go.

"That means I can save bills, I can save emissions, and I can electrify in a way that's cost-effective," Melia told TCD. She walked us through what makes Harvest's "3-1" technology unique and how it can save customers money while also helping the planet.

💰 Savings for your wallet

Melia showed us an email she recently received from an enthusiastic Harvest customer. It's a chart comparing two winter heating bills: Before the customer installed Harvest's system, his bill was $1,125. And after? $477.

"People get enthusiastic when this happens," Melia told us. "They get excited. They make charts, they share it with their neighbors."

The secret to making Harvest's system so cost-effective is that it combines the efficiency of a heat pump (which, despite the name, can both efficiently heat and cool a home) with a hot water heater that doubles up as a giant battery. The battery can pull energy from the grid during the middle of the day when electricity is cheapest and solar energy is plentiful — and then it can store it as hot water for use throughout the rest of the day when energy is more expensive.

Harvest reports that homes replacing gas appliances with their system save on average 30% on their energy bills.

🌍 Savings for the planet

Residential "buildings are responsible for a large part of climate emissions," Melia noted. "In fact, just heating and hot water are responsible for 10% of U.S. emissions. So if we don't fix that, it's going to be actually hard for us to fix climate change."

The great news here is that Harvest's technology reports it can slash emissions by 90% compared to gas furnaces and 40% compared to heat pumps without thermal batteries attached. Again, a lot of that is because Harvest's thermal battery can store solar energy when the sun is shining, helping homeowners avoid using polluting fuel sources that typically power the grid during peak hours. Plus, Harvest's system is compatible with solar panels if your home has those installed.

According to Harvest, the energy saved by making the switch is more than you'd save by switching from a gas vehicle to an EV.

"One of the motivators behind creating Harvest was the urgency of acting — now," Melia told us. "Every gas furnace put in today is a lost opportunity" because "it's going to keep pumping out CO2 emissions a lot for the next 20 years."

"For our system, the proof points of the lower bills and the lower emissions tend to be light bulb moments for people," Melia noted.

❗ Plus … those tax credits

Harvest's patented thermal battery technology means that customers can get an even higher national tax credit from the Inflation Reduction Act than they would from just switching to a heat pump. The credit is 30% of the fully installed cost, whereas for heat pumps, it's typically capped at $2,000.

Nationwide, Harvest customers are getting that higher tax credit when they file their taxes (rather than at the point of sale), "so even with just that tax credit, we're competitive with a regular heat pump system," Melia noted.

There are also regional incentives to look into, especially in California where most of Harvest's products have been installed to date. 

"We're going to make sure our system is really cost-competitive, even without those incentives and tax credits over time," Melia told us, "but right now, we're small, and so … the role of incentives and tax credits is to bear with us while we scale up, and we're going to do our job to get it as cheap as possible."

To that end, the Department of Energy recently awarded Harvest a $2 million grant to get its thermal battery system into more American homes by streamlining installations and further lowering the cost.

📌 Where is it available, when, and how much?

Harvest has an established installer network throughout most of the West Coast, having sold over 200 units and installed more than 150 since launching in 2022, according to Melia. 

"We've also deployed now in Canada, in New Mexico, in Oregon, [and] soon, Vermont," she said. "And now people are calling us from various parts of the country," asking to get in on the action. 

The team aims to create a nationwide network in the future, but for now, if customers are eager to get started, Harvest can set up training programs for contractors in their area "and get them deploying the system," said Melia.

As for pricing, Melia mentioned that it varies widely depending on the size of a home, its location, and its current heating and cooling system. For more of an apples-to-apples comparison, she said Harvest's system can beat a comparable gas heating, hot water, and cooling system in California. "And the reason we can do that is because we're eligible for more tax credits and rebates than gas is." 

Without incentives, Harvest's system is roughly the same price as a high-end heat pump system. "But in the real world, we capture more tax credits … so you can get a Harvest system, which is basically a high-end system, for the same price as a … standard heat pump system," Melia noted.

💬 What customers are saying

It's been a minute since Melia and her husband decided to ditch their gas furnace and build what's now the OG Harvest system. "I've had device No. 1 — I've been living with this since 2018 … after we realized, wow, it's cutting our bills by 42%."

"It works well," she said. "You have quiet, stable heat. It meets all your hot water needs. … It's not complicated to operate. You can set it and forget it."

And the co-founders aren't the only happy customers. "We've actually got really, really good customer satisfaction," Melia told us. "If people had cold showers, we wouldn't have that, right?"

💚 What gives you hope for the climate future?

"I've been working in this space for a long time, and it's so encouraging to see that, you know, we can fix problems. We can actually generate electricity from the sun. We can generate electricity from the wind. We can run clean cars and clean vehicles and so on," Melia told us. 

"So you see this bubbling of great innovation happening that can solve, help solve these issues. You know, 20 years ago, people were saying, 'Hey, how do we fix climate change? We don't have the right technology.'"

But now … "we do have the technology. So that's really exciting."

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