More than half of the energy used in typical American homes is just spent on heating and cooling — which makes finding the most efficient HVAC system key to lowering your utility bills.
The best solution right now is an all-weather heat pump, which is 3-5 times more efficient than gas boilers, and can heat and cool a home throughout the year.
And there's one startup, Jetson, that's on a mission to make heat pumps easier and more affordable to get by selling them at nearly half the cost of other companies.
"It's not too good to be true. It's just there's so much inefficiency and waste in the existing [HVAC] industry," Stephen Lake, the founder of Jetson, told The Cool Down.
Less inefficiency and waste = thousands of dollars saved for customers.
And the reason Jetson can commit to such shocking pricing is because it's a vertically integrated, direct-to-consumer startup. This is a fancy way of saying it has completely cut out all the middlemen (and middleman markups) that are typically involved in the heat pump process — so no separate equipment manufacturer, no separate distributor, no separate local HVAC company, you get the idea. Even the heat pump itself is designed by Jetson.
If you've ever bought a Casper mattress online and wondered how it could be such good quality and such a great deal at the same time, this is that same concept. Not easy to pull off, or else everyone would be doing it, but it can pay off when done right.
Lake is no stranger to streamlining products and processes, with his last tech company selling to Google for an undisclosed amount (by some counts $180 million) in 2020. When he turned to climate tech, simplifying the heat pump installation process — where homeowners are often the ones expected to be the experts — seemed like a huge problem to solve
"Our mission is to get the 100 million homes today that are burning fossil fuels off of those fossil fuels, and doing it by making it extremely easy and simple — at a much lower price point — for owners to make that change," Lake said.
In an exclusive conversation with The Cool Down, Lake walked us through how homeowners can switch to an all-electric heat pump without massive upfront costs or logistical headaches.
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The cost 💰 How the process works
The Jetson process is fully online, Lake told us, and from there it typically only takes a single day to install a new heat pump system for your home. Here's how it works:
"You go to our website, you put in an address, and we look up a ton of information about your home — its footprint, square footage, the year it was built, the way it's facing, a whole bunch of data points. We use that to model the whole home's heating and cooling needs. We design the system automatically, and we'll give you an instant price for that," Lake said.
That's your preliminary quote for an all-electric, central ducted heat pump setup. (In the future, Jetson plans to offer mini-splits, as well, that would actually be powered through the same system.) Then, Lake explained, Jetson will ask users to send a few relevant photos of their existing equipment, electrical panel, etc. That's when the team does a full electrical and HVAC load analysis to finalize that quote for maximum accuracy. The Jetson team is also available to answer any questions customers have.
Once homeowners are ready for the installation process, Jetson's project coordination team steps in. "They'll follow the permits needed. They'll confirm the system design. In some cases, we'll do a virtual walkthrough. In some cases, we don't need to, based on the photos, and we're good to proceed," Lake said.
"Then we'll move you to our single-day install process: Our green all-electric vans show up, and in a single day we'll … take out your existing gas furnace, cap the gas line, remove the equipment, install the whole-home central heat pump, the new outdoor unit, [and] new electrical circuits. Everything's done by the end of the day," Lake said.
How customers save on installs
After factoring in available local and federal rebates, Lake estimates that Jetson can often offer pricing that's "50% to 80% less [than what traditional contractors charge] depending on the specific program and state."
Lake walked us through an example: A homeowner in Massachusetts might average around $10,000 in rebates. "Our top-line price might be between $15,000 and $17,000. So after rebates, that's $5,000 to $7,000. A typical contractor might be $25,000 before rebates, so they're $15,000 after." That's savings between $8,000 and $10,000.
"That's very typical," Lake said. "A lot of customers will post on Reddit et cetera that they've got 11 quotes or something for their home, and that we were 50% of their lowest quote, in some cases, after rebates. So significant difference for sure." Jetson also includes reviews and cost-saving testimonials from satisfied customers on its website.
What happens if something goes wrong
All Jetson units come with a 10-year parts and labor warranty, and because customers are working with one company for the entire heat pump process — rather than a separate manufacturer, local HVAC company, installation crew, etc — there's a built-in element of trust.
"[Trust is] super important in this category," Lake told us, "because if you look at heat pump failures and issues people face, a huge percentage of them … are installation issues: It's when the contractor hasn't installed it properly … things were done by rules of thumb and not measured."
Lake explained that for Jetson, "we take an engineering approach to all that. So there's checklists and software tools being used. Every system we install, there's a full digital commissioning where at the end of the day, we're actually measuring the performance of the system and ensuring it's actually performing at 100% as expected."
And if something does go wrong during the lifetime of the heat pump, "we service everything in-house directly," Lake said. "Every system we install we remotely monitor as well," he added. "The huge difference in the equipment we install is that it's our own electronics and software running on them, and we get [around] 150 data points back in real time from every single system running."
That means that in the future, if a homeowner is experiencing issues, the Jetson team can review in real time. "We can just pull up your home remotely, and we can tell you, okay, is there something wrong? Do we need to send someone to look at it, or actually have you just not changed your air filter (which turns out to be like two thirds of service calls for heat pumps)."
"Because we have that full, closed-loop product that we've designed, we can then offer a much more cohesive kind of peace of mind to the homeowner."
Where Jetson is available
Jetson currently operates in Vancouver, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New York state. "We are rapidly opening up across major metro areas, mostly across the U.S. right now, and then some Canadian cities to follow as well," Lake added.
Vision for the Jetson future
Since launching last year, Jetson reports completing over 1,000 installations for customers.
And while Lake sees heating and cooling solutions as "the biggest bang for the buck" that Jetson can help customers with, there are other areas the company is looking to expand into in the future. "We think about things like EV charging, smart panels and controls, eventually batteries and solar through the right partnerships — just helping bring homeowners along on that journey of … an all-electric home over time is something that we're excited about."
Research shows around 20% of all U.S. energy-related emissions come from heating, cooling, and powering residential homes. If considered a country, that pollution would add up to the world's sixth-largest emitter, higher than the entirety of Germany. So finding ways to electrify homes so that they run off renewable, clean energy (from wind, solar, geothermal sources, etc.) instead of fossil-fuel polluting sources like coal and natural gas is incredibly important to helping protect our planet.
"Everything we can do to get more … homes off of fossil fuels and onto all-electric systems is basically what we're focused on every day," Lake said, "and so we need to continue to scale."
Jetson also offers its own smart thermostat and whole-home app with an energy usage dashboard, remote monitoring and scheduling, and real-time diagnostics. The company also just launched an updated model of its all-electric heat pump and a new AI-powered energy manager, as well as its own "smart" heat pump water heater that can adapt to your home's unique hot water needs.
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