Carrier strategic product manager Matt Vargo tells Sara Gutterman how the company's new air-to-water heat pump pairs space conditioning with domestic hot water in a single ordered package, moving the heat transfer outdoors so it never chills the utility room the way a standard heat pump water heater does. He also outlines contractor training for hydronic systems and Carrier's work on cold-climate heat pumps and grid-friendly peak load shifting.
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Sara Gutterman: Sarah Gutman. I am here with Matt Vargo, strategic product manager with carrier. Heat pumps are really in the spotlight right now. And I know that carrier just came out with a new air to water heat pump system. Talk to me a little bit about this. What makes this technology special and unique?
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Matt Vargo: One of the biggest things that we've realized at carrier is, you know, we've spent a lot of time working towards getting our HVAC prowess and, and leadership. But we realized that hot water is your number two consumer of energy in your home. And on top of that, your hot water tank tends to be right next to your HVAC unit inside the house.
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Matt Vargo: So this product is actually being introduced so that we can combine efforts and actually deliver hot water alongside of your HVAC solutions to give you both comfort in all the temperature and air around you, but also get you the same thing with your hot water needs.
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Sara Gutterman: Tell me a little bit about the benefits of this new system for the homeowner with respect to energy management, cost savings, enhanced comfort, but also for the contractor in terms of inflation.
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Matt Vargo: So this definitely has benefits for everybody in the system. First of all, it's really focused for anybody who's using an electric storage heat. Right now with the storage heat, you have a low efficiency of that unit. Whereas switching that over to a heat pump water heater actually unlocks a lot of benefits in the capabilities of that technology to get you your heat at a much lower amount of energy needed for all of that.
00:01:40:08 - 00:02:14:26
Matt Vargo: So your number one benefit right there is massive infancy increases over electric resistive heat. Then on top of that, you also get the ability to start looking at the capability of getting this year round comfort without having to give up any of the comfort in the home. The. There is already heat pump water heaters out there on the market, but they actually are going to end up cooling the environment around the heat pump or on the water heater itself, whereas this one is actually going to be using your HVAC unit outside and rejecting the heat out there.
00:02:14:28 - 00:02:38:24
Matt Vargo: So the big thing that happens there is you're not going to change the temperature of any spot in your house. And here at carrier, I like to say that we deliver comfort, and I don't care if I'm delivering comfort to your master bedroom, to a closet, or to your utility room. Every spot in your house matters. And so this opportunity here will give you complete comfort along with massive efficiency savings across everything.
00:02:38:25 - 00:03:00:02
Matt Vargo: But it just just doesn't stop at the homeowner. It also is very important for the contractor as well. And that's one of the biggest things that we set out with this product line. Having a combined system like this can be a little bit complicated and a little scary at first to look at. So what we've done with this product line is we've actually taken a lot of the workload away from the contractor.
00:03:00:02 - 00:03:27:22
Matt Vargo: We've offered this solution as a one hit that will have all the parts inside of it. So one skew that you order will have everything necessary to install this unit. It will have the heat pump, the indoor unit, it will have the water heater, the water tanks, and it has all of the internal systems already sized and installed ready for you without having to go and do all those steps.
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Sara Gutterman: How are you training contractors about the fact that one this product is available, but also about this streamlined installation.
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Matt Vargo: We're moving away from an HVAC industry that's going to be focused solely on refrigerant. And so now when we start talking about water and what we have to do from a water standpoint, not the entire nation is used to that. The northeast has boilers and hydronic systems that they're very used to, but that's a small segment of the US.
00:03:56:03 - 00:04:22:20
Matt Vargo: And so we actually have built a comprehensive training program, and we are going through and offering a complete layout of everything that this product is capable of doing. It is extremely versatile because of the way that it's set up. You can hook it up to do many different types of things, including hydronic air coils. You can have resistive heating and cooling in the floor.
00:04:22:22 - 00:04:48:09
Matt Vargo: You can even do driveway melt systems. All those these different methodologies can be combined. And so therefore the training is is going to be needed to be able to explain all those different things. So we have an entire suite of of information about this product line. And we are using our distribution network to help deliver this overall message to our to our contractors out in the field.
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Sara Gutterman: So give a very quick laypersons explanation of how this technology works.
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Matt Vargo: The benefit of this technology is that it does all of the heat transfer it needs to do outside, and switches that over to a water loop. And then we use a water, a loop to actually do all of the heating of the of the water inside or your home environment. And so that's effectively all that it's really doing.
00:05:13:25 - 00:05:21:17
Matt Vargo: It's it's transferring heat into water and then pumping that around and managing that to make sure you have the right temperature for everything that you need in the home.
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Sara Gutterman: So Matt, you are a product development guy. What are some additional innovations that you are tracking that you think will have a beneficial impact on those environments?
00:05:34:27 - 00:06:09:21
Matt Vargo: One of the biggest things that I see is, is cold climate heat pumps is really something that we've already been initiated to with the Doe Equal Climate Pump Challenge, but I see that as something that has a real potential as we move forward. One of the things that have helped heat pumps back in the past is the the fact that it has a lower bound of capacity as the temperature gets colder, and we're really finding new, innovative ways to get through that concern and actually deliver you 100% of the heat that you need all the way down to zero.
00:06:09:22 - 00:06:30:27
Matt Vargo: F or five F. And so getting more and more systems that are built up that can do that can then combine with systems like this and actually be able to provide heat pump solutions around the entire US for all markets at all times. And I think that's going to be really, really strategic as we move forward.
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Sara Gutterman: What's next for carrier? What are some of the innovations that you're working on internally?
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Matt Vargo: Some of the biggest things that we're looking at here at carriers is starting to look heavily into sustainability. And so that's where the the heat pump revolution is really taking full focus here at carrier. And we're really pushing hard on that. But on top of that, we're also looking at the the number one thing that you think of as well.
00:06:53:28 - 00:07:32:11
Matt Vargo: If everything goes electric, what happens with our grid. And so we're looking at new methodologies to integrate with our grid and help alleviate stresses on our grid at the same time. So I'm really excited to see some of the new products that we're working towards that are actually going to start integrating with the electrical grid and actually giving the grid more robustness, being able to do peak load, shifting of your HVAC, all of these types of things, one of the one of the biggest things it doesn't, I don't tend to think about is all of the electricity usage.
00:07:32:11 - 00:07:52:09
Matt Vargo: The worst amount of usage is right when everybody gets home from work right at 4:00 to 8:00. It is the peak load and everybody's using all of the electricity, charging your cars, and you're turning on your TV, running your dishwasher, running, running your laundry. It's all it's the time to get everything done. But that's also going to be a lot on the grid.
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Matt Vargo: And so how do we come up with product that helps with all of that overall solution, while maintaining 100% comfort to the customer? Because that is, like I said earlier, that's what we do at care. We deliver comfort.