PowerX

@hellenhunt I have to agree with you Helen. I also trained as a systems engineer, worked at a major power and electric company, before moving into a control engineering role at a hard-tech company in the Bay Area. These claims are bit outrageous indeed - 65% ?!? That implies a HUGE market opportunity that has been missed by BILLIONS of dollars in companies operating in the heating and indoor IoT space. It just doesn't seem believable. @manuelschoenfeld, don't mean to sound rude, but do you have actual DATA to back up your claim? Do you even have an actual product?

@hellenhunt Dear Hellen, many thanks for your comment and please excuse my late response. We were on a long flight and had meetings scheduled right after. On your questions: (1) Qualifications: We are a team of 5 people. A core part of the hardware development was done by Matthias Veitinger, a senior engineer who has worked on heating systems for years (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt...). I myself worked in Energy Consulting as a manager for McKinsey and Company and graduated from Harvard University with an MPA/ID studying statistics and data science. I wrote the first version of our optimization model which is constantly updated based on data. By now we have 2 software engineers working on the model full-time. Finally, we are backed by VC companies Antler and Y Combinator. Both have very stringent vetting processes and review their founders very well before accepting them into their programs. (2) Prototype: We have working units installed in Switzerland, Germany and several states in the US. (3) I would be very happy to get in touch. Would you mind to send me an email at contact@powerx.co so we can give you a demonstration? I fully agree with you that most heating systems are highly efficient and that there is no chance of getting anywhere close to 65% in efficiency improvement. However, this is also not the claim of PowerX. Our claim is a reduction in the heating bill of up to 65%. And we have actual use cases that have achieved these numbers as we couple several efficiency and non-efficiency factors, including completely stopping heaters when users are out of the home, and heating at times when energy prices are low (in Texas or New York, e.g. energy prices can vary substantially every 15 minutes).

@joy_xu Dear Joy, I very much appreciate your feedback. I think it is not rude but rather due diligence to ask these questions. We do have an actual product that is installed in three countries by now and our cost numbers are directly based in the real-life data we gathered. One important point to make is that we claim to save up to 65% off the heating bill, not that efficiency is improved by 65%. We indeed have users that saved up to 65% in cost. We achieved these numbers by coupling several efficiency and non-efficiency factors, including completely stopping heaters when users are out of the home, and heating at times when energy prices are low (in Texas or New York, for example, energy prices can vary substantially every 15 minutes). If you have any further questions, I would be very happy to get in touch (please send me an email at contact@powerx.co) and I will reach out. Since we are also in the Bay Area I would be happy to meet up in person!

@karen_m Thanks a lot Karen! :-) We really appreciate it! Climate change and saving the environment is exactly why we do it :)

@steven_daniels1 Many thanks for the comment and for pointing out Y Combinator. Regarding Antler, I would not take one Medium article only as a source for due diligence (anyone can write anything on Medium, really). In fact, there are hundreds of positive articles written about Antler as well so I think the view is more balanced and the program is similar to Y Combinator. Personally, I had a very positive time with Antler - they really cared about founders as people and are helping with the environmental angle of PowerX. One question: if you like the idea, why the downvote?

@michaelirene Mike, thanks for the great question! The value proposition depends a lot the specific model. Generally speaking, PowerX makes tanked heaters more similar to tankless ones using the PowerX optimization software. But there are also a number of other benefits tanked heaters with PowerX can provide to you. (A) you get rich insights on your personal PowerX dashboard, including how much energy you use, how much of it is wasted, how you compare to the local average and personalized tips on how you can save energy (B) PowerX optimizes for energy prices. If you are in a state with variable pricing PowerX makes sure to heat when energy prices are low and wait with heating when energy prices are high (e.g. in Texas or New York, energy prices change every 15 minutes and can increase over 200% over the course of a day) (C) For electric heaters, PowerX can do load-balancing with utility companies. Virtually combining heaters is like building a large distributed thermal battery. If there is surplus energy in the grid, PowerX can distribute it into heaters, if there is risk of blackout, PowerX can turn off heaters that still have enough heat, hence helping to balance the grid for entire municipalities. These benefits are worth a lot of money to utility companies and we try to capture this value and forward it to users sending users regular checks :-)

@matthias_veitinger Thanks so much! We really appreciate it!

@sanketchauhan Sanket, that is super nice of you - thanks so much!

@marcela_gutierrez1 Thanks so much for your review, Marcela! We love it when people love the environmental aspect of PowerX!