Why a former AirPods engineer is now building heat pumps

In 2022, California announced its desire to install 6 million heat pumps by 2030. So far, it has only installed about 2.3 million, meaning that, to achieve that goal, it will need to average about 2,000 installations per day over the next five years. Achieving this goal can be difficult, considering that a typical mini-split can take about a day to install and costs about $4,000 to $6,000 per zone, according to EnergySage.

“We have to do something different,” Mary Ann Rao, co-founder and CEO of Merino Energy, told TechCrunch.

Merino Energy, which has been working in secret, wants to change both parts of the equation by dramatically simplifying the heat pump. The startup gave TechCrunch an exclusive sneak peek at its new product, the Merino Mono, which costs $3,800, including a one-hour installation process.

Rau previously worked at Apple, where you may have seen her in a keynote or two introducing the new AirPods, and Quilt, another heat pump startup. While at Apple, she worked on electrifying her home in San Francisco. She installed solar panels, an induction cooktop, and an electric vehicle charger, but when it came time to install the heat pumps, Rao was in for a shock.

“That’s when I realized that if it’s not accessible to me — right, I’m lucky — it’s out of reach for the vast majority of Californians and Americans,” she said.

Typical heat pumps consist of two parts, an internal heat exchanger and an external condenser. Merino combines these elements into one unit that takes up as much space as a typical under-window radiator. It plugs into a standard 120-volt outlet, which means homeowners are less likely to need electrical upgrades. “If you can plug in a microwave and it works on that port, the Merino Mono will work on that port,” Rao said.

The Mono has all the usual things expected from a new generation of heat pumps: it’s connected to Wi-Fi, it can sense the presence of people in the room, and the different units in the house can coordinate their work for efficiency and comfort. Rao said the company is developing integration with the Oura Rings so the heat pump can lower the room temperature by two degrees when the wearer is in REM sleep.

To install the mono, workers make two holes in the wall, one to draw in air and the other to exhaust it. The air in that loop flows over the condenser coils, which then send the refrigerant to the heat exchanger. There, another loop draws air from the room to heat or cool it. The only things visible from outside the house are the intake and exhaust ports and the condensate tube.

By moving all the components into one unit within the home, the Merino design becomes much easier to install, Rao said. There is no external unit to connect to the indoor unit, which would involve soldering copper lines and charging with refrigerant. “It’s very expensive from a business perspective,” she said.

In miniaturizing the system, Merino has traded off some efficiency, which may make the product more suitable for smaller living spaces. The Merino Mono has a SEER2 rating of 15.2, while the dual-zone Quilt system reaches 25. Large external capacitors do a better job. But the startup felt that for many applications, including apartments and apartment buildings in dense urban areas, it made sense to keep everything as in-house and streamlined as possible. Mono “is a solution where the cost matches the problem we’re trying to solve,” Rao said.

The company is currently installing 48 heat pumps at Civic Center Apartments, a low-income development in Richmond, California. For now, the company is focusing on California as its initial market, although it has plans to expand into other states such as Hawaii, Oregon and Washington. So far, six installers have signed up in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The company is now taking pre-orders for delivery later this year.

Rao hopes the simplified product will help heat pumps conquer the market. “If we can reduce the amount of time and complexity of installing a heat pump, we can expand its adoption,” she said.