Aeroseal CEO Amit Gupta asked anyone considering switching to high-efficiency heat pumps and air conditioners: How much heating or cooling energy are you willing to lose due to leaky ducting? He believes that electrification and decarbonization of houses and buildings can be a decisive factor.
Now, 12 years after slowly building a business for new Aeroseal pipe sealing technology, Gupta sees a combination of conditions setting the stage for significant growth: the pursuit of decarburization at unprecedented speed and scale, the advent of heat pump technology, and billions of dollars in government incentives to increase energy efficiency and electrification of houses.
Over the past year and a half, Aeroseal has become an overdrive for this moment. Last year, the company raised $22 million in venture capital from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Energy Impact Partners and Bill Gates’ Building Ventures, its first venture capital investment since it was founded in 2010. The company has now raised a total of about $30 million to hire about 40 engineers and expand production at its Dayton, Ohio manufacturing facility, Gupta said.
According to a growing body of research from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy Laboratories, a typical duct network loses 25 to 40 percent of the energy generated by a central heating and cooling system due to leaks, holes, and loose connections that prevent tightening. up these pipes is critical. According to Gupta, in the US, “100 million households have plumbing systems that need to be sealed.”
The Aeroseal system pumps a non-toxic aerosol of water and vinyl acetate into air ducts where tiny particles adhere to them and clog holes and cracks from the inside.
It’s much easier and less labor-intensive than the traditional duct sealing method, which involves sending workers to attics, basements, and basements to seal the ducts or paint them with caulk. In fact, the old-fashioned method is so expensive, time consuming, and annoying that few contractors or homeowners are willing to use it, especially when it’s hard to know how much pipes are actually leaking and how much. This job promises to save money.
But that doesn’t mean that cheaper, simpler alternatives to Aeroseal will easily hit the market. Aeroseal scientific consultant and UC Davis professor Mark Modera first developed the technology in the 1990s as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He started his own company and then sold it in 2001 to the large HVAC company Carrier. But in its nine years as a subsidiary of Carrier, the company’s technology never caught on.
“It’s a bit of a mismatch in terms of scale,” Modra said of Carrier’s timing of the technology. â�<“在一家大公司中很难受到重视。” â�<“在一家大公司中很难受到重视。” “It’s hard to be taken seriously in a big company.” Carrier, which makes money selling HVAC equipment, may not see a business incentive to improve ductwork that would allow customers to order smaller, cheaper HVAC equipment, he said.
Gupta and Modera spun off Aeroseal from Carrier in 2010 with the goal of simplifying the technology and developing the right business model to bring it into space.
According to Gupta, the first business model developed by Aeroseal was to sell equipment directly to HVAC contractors, rather than through large regional distributors that supply equipment to these contractors. This is still the main part of his business today.
To date, Aeroseal has sold its technology to approximately 1,200 contractors and is used in more than 200,000 homes and buildings, primarily in the United States but also in more than two dozen other countries. But Gupta said that with roughly 100,000 U.S. HVAC contractors, there is plenty of room for growth, especially beyond the small subset of contractors who focus on whole-house efficiency and weather resistance.
The technology package, which Aeroseal sells to contractors for about $35,000, consists of two parts: a handheld device that can be brought home with software and sensors that allow contractors to connect to air ducts and determine how leaky they are, and a larger truck. – or trailer-mounted air compressors pump the aerosols through a series of clear plastic tubes into the home’s air ducts.
The portable device includes a dial screen that shows how much energy is leaving the pipes – something that an HVAC contractor can easily read and show homeowners. You can see these dials in action in a 2016 clip from the PBS series The Old House. Providing such clear and understandable data was one of Aeroseal’s first goals, Gupta said.
Most homeowners only replace their HVAC systems when they fail, and they usually want to replace them as soon as possible and as cheaply as possible. Putting Aeroseal technology in the hands of HVAC contractors increases the likelihood of its use during this critical time period.
“New HVAC systems are installed in eight million homes every year,” Gupta said. â�<“我们希望每辆HVAC 卡车都安装该机器，这样每次更换HVAC 时，您都会得到管道密封。” â�<“我们希望每辆HVAC 卡车都安装该机器，这样每次更换HVAC 时，您都会得到管道密封。” “We want this machine on every HVAC truck, so every time you change HVAC, you get a duct seal.”
To that end, the company plans to start leasing its systems to contractors, he said. The company is also working on a smaller device that can run sealant spray through a home’s air ducts without an onboard air compressor system.
Aeroseal’s other business model is focused on new builds because they are easier to seal than residential buildings. Aeroseal has partnered with major home builders such as DR Horton, Lennar and Beazer to seal air ducts in new builds. This job can be done in about an hour and costs about $500. This is significantly less than the cost of sealing ducts in an existing home, which can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $2,500.
The company has also developed another technology called AeroBarrier, which sprays aerosols all over newly built homes to seal leaks in walls and windows.
While duct sealing can cost up to $1,500 in a residential building, the resulting energy savings will pay off in an average of four to five years, Gupta said.
But not all contractors are interested in helping homeowners fix leaks in their plumbing systems, because contractors usually make money by selling equipment and charging for labor, rather than cutting home energy bills over time.
Andy Frank, founder and president of Sealed, a New York-based residential energy efficiency startup, said these dynamics make it difficult to bring efficient HVAC equipment into homes, especially replacing gas stoves with heat pumps.
For a company like Sealed, which links revenue to the performance of the systems it installs, sealing pipes is “very important,” Frank said. But “A lot of HVAC guys don’t care what a duct leak is.”
Sealed likes to use Aeroseal technology “as a guarantee of customer comfort and heat pump performance,” he said, in projects to replace air conditioning systems with heat pumps. â�<“我们不确定泄漏会是什么。 â�<“我们不确定泄漏会是什么。 “We are not sure what the leak will be. But if it is high, it will definitely have a bad effect on the comfort and performance of the heat pump. I’d rather not risk it if I don’t have to. ”
Leaky ducts are a big reason many American homes have fossil-gas stoves to vent superheated air, Frank says. â�<“众所周知，煤气炉尺寸过大，”他说。 â�<“众所周知，煤气炉尺寸过大，”他说。 “Gas ovens are notoriously big,” he says. This wastes energy and, of course, leads to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Relatively few contractors are willing to risk having clients too indifferent to accept oversizing as a sound business decision. But for a company like Sealed, which is replacing fossil-fuel home heating with electric heat pumps, that’s no longer an option.
Heat pumps use electricity to compress the refrigerant, which traps heat from outside and moves it inside, much like an air conditioner works in reverse. This makes them more energy efficient than gas stoves or other fossil fuel heating systems. But this efficiency depends on how much air is supplied to rooms throughout the house without overheating. The temperature of the air leaving the vent should be high enough to keep the room comfortable, but below body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
When the air is delivered by a central heat pump, “when you feel it with your hands, it feels cool because its temperature is below skin temperature,” says Gupta. Leaking pipes can drop those temperatures another 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, making it “very important” to seal plumbing systems for heat pump installations that not only keep homes warm, but keep homeowners informed, he said. moment for both contractors and homeowners.
弗兰克同意泄漏管道和中央热泵性能的不确定性是â�<“项目中的一大挑战。弗兰克同意泄漏管道和中央热泵性能的不确定性是â� Frank agrees that leaky pipes and uncertainty about the performance of the central heat pump were a major problem in the project. That’s why we’re making more ductless systems at Sealed, such as mini split heat pumps that draw hot air from wall terminals instead of ducts.
There’s also the issue of upfront costs, Frank says. Most customers gravitate toward lower installation costs over long-term energy savings, especially if they are not sure how many years they will keep them in their home to recoup the extra cost of their energy efficiency investment.
Getting more contractors to use the Aeroseal system will require lower costs to purchase and operate it, he said. “That’s what they were trying to solve in terms of technical and business model.”
The reduction in cost and complexity should widen the range of projects that Aeroseal can economically plan for contractors and clients, Gupta said. Incentives are another important part of this cost-benefit equation.
Utilities, a major source of efficiency incentives in much of the country, have been ramping up incentives for improved plumbing and home sealing in recent years, with some companies offering incentives of up to $1,000 per project. He noted that federal tax credits and incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act add another layer of value to homeowners switching to electric heat pumps. Once the more portable Aeroseal technology becomes available, a combination of federal and utility incentives should cover much of the cost of sealing the pipeline, Gupta said.
However, keeping the cost at a staggering level compared to standard HVAC alternatives is only part of the challenge when replacing an old gas oven with a new electric heat pump. There is also the issue of ensuring an adequate supply of new equipment, educating contractors on how to install it cost-effectively, and explaining the benefits to both contractors and homeowners.
Gupta emphasized the need to take his company well beyond the early adopter market to make a significant impact on heat pump installations, greater home electrification and ultimately the fight against climate change. About 13 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions come from the direct combustion of fossil fuels in buildings, most of which is for heating.
That, he says, is what prompted Aeroseal’s new investors to invest in an already lucrative business. Gupta noted that many of the cutting-edge technology companies that Breakthrough Energy invests in aim to make a significant impact on climate change for a decade or more. Aeroseal 希望做出â�<“今天产生真正的影响，而不是10 年后。” Aeroseal 希望做出â� Aeroseal wants to make “a real impact today, not 10 years from now.”