The! Heat! Pump! Is! Going! In!
This week, the Quilt installation is a big MacGyver adventure, and, on the podcast, truck tracking with Tive.
You may recall that a couple weeks ago, I announced that I was getting a heat pump, in partnership with Quilt. I’ll be reviewing the system over the next few months, purely independently, but I can already tell you that just the thought of having air conditioning in my hot-as-blazes Oakland hills home has me near tears with excitement. Plus, in a totally unexpected benefit, I’m also gaining a 3x4 foot closet space, because the installers will be removing my old gas furnace. Some people might think this is a chance to get a new closet, but I have some other ideas — I put a poll on my Instagram and micro-library is leading by a handy margin.
The installation is a two-day affair, starting as I’m writing this, Monday, May 4. It involves finding spots for and running electrical wiring for the two outdoor units (luckily, this won’t require any additional work, it’s easy enough, if slightly daredevil, to get to the subpanel in my garage along the side of my house). Then, there are four wall units to install. One is in the main room of the top floor (open concept living, dining room and kitchen), and one in each of the three bedrooms. For the most part, finding the locations was pretty straightforward. The trickiest spot was my bedroom. The units have to be on outside walls, because they have drainage pipes that have to go through to the outside (I’m curious how much condensation will result and whether I should put plants or cisterns underneath!).
The outside of my bedroom is two stories up, there’s an overhang above the deck below, and complicating matters, there’s also a pool. (I feel like I should note here that the pool already has a heat pump for heating, because obviously my priorities are … solid.) That means there wasn’t enough deck space for the wide base of the VERY tall ladder that’s required to get up to the roofline of the house. But builders and installers are nothing if not deeply MacGyver, so after lunch I glanced down and saw … this.
No notes, honestly. Here’s a collection of some of the other install pics. It’s quite the production.
The only interesting note from the installer (shout-out Air Synergy, your MacGyver skills are unmatched) is that during a previous Quilt install, he encountered a problem where the system wouldn’t turn on out of the box because it needed a software upgrade first, which took about four hours. He was installing it in a new build home, he said, so it wasn’t that big a deal, but he didn’t seem impressed. I said, “oh, so like when you get your Xbox out but you haven’t played in a while so you have to download two hours of firmware updates before you can shoot aliens?”
He didn’t seem impressed with that analogy, either. He’s very nice otherwise, though.
This week on Everybody in the Pool
And on the podcast this week, a climate solution hiding in plain sight: shipping and trucking efficiency. Trillions of dollars of goods move around the planet every year, and an astonishing amount is lost, spoiled, or delayed because shippers simply don’t have real-time visibility into where things are, or what condition they’re in. Tive trackers change that by monitoring location and conditions like temperature (like for a pallet of strawberries that has to stay at 32°F). This helps companies intervene if there’s a problem, which prevents all that waste, avoids redundant emissions-creating trips, and can even help create more efficient routes that also save on gas.
CEO Krenar Konomi told me Tive is a stealth climate solution and a resilience solution during what he calls our “state of permanent disruption” — extreme weather, geopolitical shocks, and supply shortages. In other words, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!