And We're talking about retrofitting 60 million homes to remove all the fossil fuel usage from them. When you understand what it takes to do a single home, my god, like 60 million of them is just like a mind-boggling task. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, where everywhere in the world. Welcome to episode 244 of the Climate Confident Podcast, the go-to show for best practices in climate emissions reductions. I'm your host, Tom Raftery. And before we get started, a quick reminder. This podcast has a subscription option. For just five euros or dollars a month, you can unlock the full back catalog of hundreds of conversations with climate leaders who are actually moving the needle. Subscribers also, get a personal shout out here in the show plus direct access to me so you can pitch new directions, guests and ideas for climate Confident. Everyone else still gets the most recent 30 days of episodes free, but if you want access to the archive and a hand on the wheel, hit the subscribe link in the show notes. Now onto today's conversation. My guest this week is Grant Gunnison, founder and CEO of zero homes. Grant's story is a fascinating one. He went from NASA and MIT to neighborhood job sites tackling one of climate tech's most stubborn blind spots, decarbonising existing homes. His company Zero Homes uses smartphone based 3D scans to design and deliver certified, permit ready, electrification plans. No site visit required. It's a game changing approach to retrofitting millions of American homes, cutting both carbon and cost, while making life easier for contractors and homeowners alike In this episode, Grant and I discuss how software is driving real traction, where policy alone has stalled. Also, what he learned moving from rocket science to residential retrofits and why home electrification might be one of climate tech's hardest and most urgent frontiers. Grant, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks for having me on Tom. And yeah, for, for everyone listening, my name's Grant Gunnison founder and CEO of Zero Homes. We are a technology based platform to help homeowners upgrade their homes with heat pumps and all electric appliances. And we're based in Denver. Okay, and Grant, why, I mean, we had this on the intro call, you told me you went from NASA and MIT to managing home upgrades in neighborhoods. What, what sparked that leap? I guess I grew up in the trades and I think I knew enough to be dangerous. And when I grew up it was relatively common knowledge that, homes used a lot of energy. When I was in, in undergrad, I realised the relationship between energy and carbon emissions all to find out, that about 20% of emissions in the US come from single family homes. And I felt like I had the knowledge needed to go do something about that. I spent two years running my family's business full time and really realised the struggles that contractors have in delivering solutions. And, the challenges homeowners have, purchasing solutions, and so, there's just a really nice nexus of challenges in that space that I thought both I had the knowledge because I'd been in the problem for so long. And then the, the technical background to build a solution that could actually maybe solve that problem in a, elegant way. Unlike what a lot of you know happens in the industry today, it's a lot of it's just in the physical world. You Hmm. with people in person and whatnot, and, we can leverage better tools to help us go faster, to make it less expensive, to make it easier for everybody. I thought there's really cool opportunity there. Okay. And what would you say has surprised you most in your journey from NASA and MIT to now being CEO of Zero Homes? Ooh. I think in startup culture it's almost like a, a badge of honor to pivot what you're doing and, and whatnot. And, this is my just finishing my fourth year working on this. We really haven't changed our, our mission. It's taken us a long time to build some of this technology. It was pretty hard to do. And, and maybe that's why, I, I've been in for four years. And sort of feel like we're really just really launching the business growing up a big inflection point going up the growth curve at the moment. But it's been super fun to do that. And it just really take us a long time to, to build the technology out. Okay. And talk to us a little bit about the technology then, because you mentioned that it's difficult for tradespeople to work with their customers and it's difficult for the customers to get together with tradespeople, so you said there were multiple challenges there. What are you doing to fix those issues? Yeah, well, maybe let's just define the problem, which is, when homeowners are trying to go purchase some kind of upgrade for, for their home, they're typically trying to solve for four things. What is it that I actually need to do to solve this problem. So define the scope of work. I need to define a price for that scope of work and that's hard to do. We can talk about why. They're looking for an installer they can trust, and the trust part is really critical to do that scope of work. And then they often need financial help. So some kind of financing. About 50% of these types of projects are financed. And so we need to deliver all four of those things to a homeowner. And that education process today typically is done over the kitchen table. Someone will come to your house, they'll poke around to figure out what the problem is, to figure out what they think is the right solution or maybe some different options to discuss with someone. And then they'll try to price that out. And in that journey, a homeowner sort of gets to decide, well, do I like this person? Do they seem reputable? Do they, are they talking in a way that I think they're gonna get the job done well? And then, that contractor installer may have some financial tools as well to offer, as they're going through the process. And so really all that happens there is someone comes over to your home to be a little reductionist. They poke around, they come up with a price for something, and then you have a conversation about it. The the challenge with that, of course, is, having a skilled trades person driving around, meeting with homeowners is very expensive, right? These are non-revenue hours for, for contractors. And so, what that ends up looking like is an arduous process for a homeowner because it's not easy for them to compare pricing quickly. So people often get two or three, or even more quotes than that. They're meeting with this person in their home for a couple of hours. The process for homeowners pretty tough to say the least. And then it's just very expensive for contractors, right? Three to 500 bucks per truck roll. Meaning per per visit is generally what that ends up costing. And so the ecosystem has to bear that, cost somewhere. And ultimately it's in the, the price of the job that that homeowner will take from one of the, three to five folks that come over to give them a price. And how are you fixing that? The goal here is to wholesale delete the in-home visit process for, doing sales and, we really focus on energy systems today. So what I like to call more definable projects, right? We're not talking about, kitchens and bathrooms, flooring, and some of the soft and, touchy- feely projects, but more, Hey, can we actually do some engineering to define what the right solution is here? And if we can do that, then can we do it in software? The first thing that we had to do is figure out, well, how do we get all that information? Unlike in the solar space where people had satellite imagery to leverage there's no information for what's inside of a house, right? It's also like very personal information. People don't necessarily want that just wafting in the wind. But we had to go figure out a way to, to capture that. And so we built a, a system on smartphones. A photogrammetry system to be able to build both the 3D model of the home that's very accurate. But then also, leveraging photos can capture all the semantic data about a house. So we can effectively leverage that to, build the digital twin of the home. And once we've transformed the, building from a physical to digital space, there's a wealth of opportunity to accelerate these processes because we can quickly turn around, options, solutions, pricing, et cetera, to homeowners without having to go to the home anymore. As long as they have a smartphone, we can accelerate that process pretty dramatically. It's worth noting though too that this is, yes built to be a world class purchasing experience for homeowners, but it's also as an outcome of that, helping contractors simplify their businesses. Right? The challenge that a lot of contractors have is that they're spending a huge amount of time not driving revenue, but going and, meeting with homeowners and sort of a necessary evil of the business from a just dollars and cents perspective. And so what we're able to do with that then is turn around fully scoped, sold jobs to contractors so they don't have to do sales, marketing, equipment ordering a bunch of different things. So helping them have higher utilisation and, revenue-driven hours as opposed to spending a lot of time, just driving around to capture business. I'm guessing then the model is that you take a cut of the deal that the trades person comes up with, with the homeowner, or in fact you negotiate that on the trades person's behalf. Effectively, yes, we, we are a licensed contractor as sort of a, a ramification of US regulation in, in a lot of ways. But ultimately, you're right, we're a marketplace. And so we're helping the homeowner define that scope of work. We're actually pricing that on behalf of a contractor and then turning around and handing them the work. Sort of the remarkable thing though, Tom, is that this is not a cost plus offering to homeowners because the funnel cost is so high in the US to deliver these projects that we're able to dramatically reduce that, take a cut to pay for the service and then hand the work to the contractor and everybody wins. Meaning that it's typically about 10% less expensive for the homeowner. A contractor gets to make a good margin on the work, and then we're happy what we take as well. Very good. And, you mentioned at the start that one of the things that the homeowner has to do is meet with 2, 3, 4 contractors and decide which one they like or they trust. You are taking that away. So how will they know that the contractor they get is one that they trust? Yeah, so, we really are the contractor in a, in a lot of ways, right? So they're sort of, agreeing to, to work with us directly. But we do vet contractors of course, and we own the risk of that project. It would be very different if we were signing, a homeowner up with, ABC Plumbing as an example, but they're signing up with Zero Homes and so, they don't need to go vet those folks ahead of time. Maybe at some point we'll have more of an open marketplace approach where people can directly select the contractor they work with, but when they're signing a contract with us to deliver the work. They don't actually know who the subcontractor is ahead of time. So we're orchestrating all that in the background without having to do introductions and, and the like, and, of course the orchestration part is, is hard enough. So we're, we're trying to simplify that by not having a homeowner do that selection themselves. Okay. And is there any restriction on the kind of phone that the homeowner needs to have? I mean, as long as it's, a smartphone probably built within the last five to six or seven years. About 85% of smartphones work with, our software. So there are some exclusions, but generally speaking, if you have a decently new smartphone, then you should be should be good to go. Right. Okay. And of course, this is the Climate Confident Podcast Grant. So how are we helping with climate emissions reductions doing this? Yeah, well, I think the goal and mission as a company is to go electrify the world's homes, right? And the reason for that is ultimately the emissions profile of single family homes is, very substantial. And when I was looking at the ecosystem four years ago, what I didn't see was a business that could scale up to actually meet that moment. And we're talking about retrofitting 60 million homes to remove all the fossil fuel usage from them. When you understand what it takes to do a single home, my god, like 60 million of them is just like a mind-boggling task. Right? And so it, was pretty obvious to me that we needed something that could scale to help every one of those homeowners go through a bespoke process, right? That that's really hard to do. We're delivering that with one-to-one human interactions today. And we just simply didn't have that workforce. So I think the important thing for us is just to say we're trying to build a system and a technology platform that can scale to help everyone not increase costs, but rather reduce costs and help people select not just climate friendly technologies, actually technologies that are just better for their home, they're higher performing technologies. And, we could talk about all the products that we install and what the value proposition is against their, fossil fuel counterparts, but broadly speaking, they're just better. And I think that's kind of a nice, an important point here and that, people often talk about the green premium and, and, and different things in the, in the space. And the truth is that, yes, some of these technologies are more expensive, but they're also delivering more value. And so, this isn't just a one-to-one, like for like replacement, that just happens to cost more. There's actually real value propositions for the products themselves. We just need to help make them more accessible, more affordable, et cetera. Okay. you mentioned heat pumps, but that's not the only thing you're installing, so gimme a run through of what it is people can go to you to get installed in their homes. Yeah, so the the four primary appliances that use fossil fuels are heating air and water, so your space conditioning and your water heater. Also cooking often is the case and in some cases clothes drying as well. Hmm. So those are the four primary fossil fuel appliances that we're trying to get outta the house. However, what comes along with that is also often weatherisation, insulation work, air sealing work. Sometimes it can also be batteries. We, we don't do solar but in some cases also windows. So, we're really focused on those four primary applications. But we will help folks that are doing one of those projects to also do some of these other things as well. Okay. Do you get pushback from your recommendations, let's say I go to you and I say, I want to install a new gas stove. Would you push back and go, no, I only do electric? Or how does that work? Yeah, so we will install a dual fuel heat pump systems but we won't install other gas appliances. And if folks want those, it's great. There's lots of people, in fact, most contractors will go install those appliances, so, not a problem. There's plenty of supply for that, but I would say, it's pretty seldom that we're having someone come to us saying, Hey, I really want help with like a new gas furnace. We're pretty unapologetic, I would say, in our branding and whatnot around the things that we're focused on. And if you're not looking for that, you're likely not gonna pick up the phone and call us. Fair enough. And what makes installing things like heat pumps so complicated? Ooh. Okay. Well, I, I think one of the biggest challenges, a actually it's not the installation part. Yes, it's more complicated than furnace, but by and large it's just as complicated as installing air conditioning. The biggest challenges in design and, to, give some folks a little bit of perspective. The design problem when you're replacing a furnace or a boiler, takes about two minutes. You have a conversation with the homeowner around, are you comfortable in your home? Are there cold spots? So on and so forth. Okay. If the answer is no to those questions, great. I'm gonna size the new system for exactly the same size of system you currently have. Maybe it's higher efficiency. If there are cold spots or if we're talking about heating specifically, great. Then we're gonna go talk about what might be the issue there. Often it's not an equipment choice, it's something to do with distribution weatherisation of windows, some other externality that's happening there. And that's it. So there really isn't a design challenge, I would say in heating necessarily with fossil fuels. Such powerful pieces of equipment that can crank, push out a lot of BTUs that there isn't really much to, to design there. In heat pumps the equipment is just moving heat. It's not creating heat, so they tend to not have as pack as much of a punch necessarily in terms of how much they can output. You need a much bigger piece of equipment to output a lot of heat, and so what that really means is dialing in the right size of equipment is, is critical because it's very expensive to oversize equipment that, that's kind of one thing. So cost is a huge driver in design. Really dialing that in is gonna get you a well priced out system. And of course, homeowners are quite sensitive to price. So doing that well is, delivering a lot of value to them. That's the first thing. The second thing, and arguably more important for long-term value is just the actual comfort outcomes of properly sizing a system. And today, furnaces by and large are probably 50% oversized in homes. And that's not great. Doing that in heat pump world is, is even more problematic for humidification, dehumidification reasons. I mean, there, there's so many things to go through there and, and so, in order to really properly size a heat pump system, you really have to dial it, dial in between the, minimum loads needed in the home so you're not short cycling the equipment. You also need to make sure that you haven't oversized or undersized the equipment. There's sort of like this Goldilocks size that you need to, come up with and the challenge is like arriving at that is really difficult. You can talk about sort of how you do that, but ultimately there's, kind of a band that you need to size the heat pump in both for heating. And then also for cooling, because this piece of equipment's doing both. And so you're having to go through two design problems and making sure that you've sized the piece of equipment properly is, just more difficult. Maybe I'll just take one second to sort of define how do we even figure out what the minimum and maximum are for heating and cooling? In, the US there's a procedure for that called Manual J. It's how you define the heating load of a home for heating and, cooling. It's really a bottoms up approach. You're gonna go, figure out maybe 20 to a hundred different parameters of the home. So the size of the house, the orientation, the type of wall constructions, windows, et cetera. And then you're actually gonna do a quick sort of simulation of that to figure out on the coldest day of the year, how much heating does this home need in order to stay warm and on the hottest day of the year, what is the cooling that's needed to, to maintain the set point? And in order to do that really well, you have to be very accurate in every single piece of information you're collecting. And then do that across a hundred plus parameters, right? Or, depends on how accurate of a or precise of a calculation you're trying to do. And of course it's really hard, right? Even if you're in the home within a tape measure, to figure out all the measurements of a house is extremely time consuming. And in fact it's just very difficult to collect this information accurately. So, I'll say because of the challenge in designing heat pumps and, and cost outcomes and the comfort outcomes that are sensitive to that, size. We need to do a really good job collecting that information. We also need to do a really good job in making sure we pick the right piece of equipment, once we understand what the heating load of the house really requires. and I, I'll to say that's a ton of work. Right. And, even probably listening to this, easy for your eyes to glaze over. And the, the point in that is that doing that work relative to just sizing a furnace, which again takes just a couple of minutes, is not very appealing to contractors. Right. And we already talked a little bit about how expensive it already is to try to educate a homeowner on different products and whatnot. If you're gonna spend another hour plus while you're in the house to then collect all this information to then offer a heat pump solution, you gotta ask, well, what's the contractor's incentive to do that? And I think that in a lot of ways is a really understudied problem in this space, and that the answer ultimately is that there really isn't much of an incentive. And so the challenge here for us is to say, well, if we actually want to go electrify 60 million homes. what do you do with that? How are you gonna go solve a problem where the person supplying the solution isn't really incentivised to actually offer that as a solution? It's just way too laborous to actually put together all the information. And ultimately, I think that's really the core of the issue that we're trying to solve is that we're just trying to abstract away an entire problem for a contractor and saying, look, we're just gonna go solve this with a homeowner. We're just gonna turn around the scope of work. We've already sized it, we've selected the equipment. Making sure that we dialed in that solution really well. And then just hand you the work to go install so you can go drive revenue and not have to worry about the big, complicated sales mess, on, on the front end of the problem. And it turns out, they like that a lot, right? They don't want to go do work for free. They'd much rather go do work when they're getting paid. And, homeowners really like to work with us because of the transparent, highly collaborative process that we have in leveraging the design platform that we built to really design these systems well. When it's done. Obviously we're hoping that the homeowner is happy with the comfort level in the home. How about the utility bill they start receiving when they've increased their monthly or whatever it is, purchase of electricity, are they gonna get a sticker shock or how does that work? Yeah, so one of the sort of wonderful things about the piece of software that we've, built is that it doesn't just size heat pumps. It can also do energy simulations. And in fact, we, we started sort of in energy simulation land for a while. And so when we spec of a piece of equipment, we can also at least give folks a, a directional heading on whether this is gonna save them money, whether it's gonna cost them money on, on a day, day in and day out basis. I, I always do just caution people with that because it is extremely difficult to have very accurate energy simulations. And so, whatever we tell someone is sort of plus or minus 20% roughly. Right. And all I'll just to say it's directional enough for them to get comfortable with Okay, look like over the course of a year, maybe it's gonna cost me a couple hundred more dollars, or, depending on what fuel they're they're on, maybe it's gonna save them a couple hundred more bucks. That doesn't mean that in January their bill isn't gonna be $250 higher than it was before. Sometimes that definitely happens because they're making up for it in the cooling season because their air conditioner is, 50% more efficient than it used to be. So, there's a little bit of give and take there, but we can at least set some expectations for people out of the gate. Great. When people are approaching you, what tends to be their primary motivation? Is it emissions reduction? Is it cost reduction? Is it I'm cold and I want a, a better heater in my home? You know what, what? What are you seeing there? Yeah. So there's typically three or four sort of personas we see. We do see the climate warrior persona that's just saying, look, I'm gonna get all the gas out of my house. I wouldn't say no matter the cost, but they're not very price sensitive generally. They still want a good price, but you know, they're, they're gonna spend the money. Then we have I would say another group of folks that have, they'll say one or two problems, but they kind of mean the same thing. My utility bills are high or I'm uncomfortable in my home. Often that's a, weatherisation challenge. It can also be, an, equipment challenge, but by and large, they're probably in a harsh climate and they have a, poorly insulated home that's driving up utility bills. Sometimes it's really inefficient, appliance and whatnot, but often it's not that disastrous. It could also just be a very expensive fuel that they're on. So fuel switching will help with that. Then, and then the last persona is I'm about to have a broken appliance, or I do have a broken appliance, like, please help me fix this. And in the case where they have a broken appliance, we're really not the best solution for folks. We can't react quickly enough for it to really matter, especially if it's, in a poor part of the year. It's very cold outside. We're still probably 10 days to, to get it install done. But for the folks that are, I'm about to have a broken appliance, fantastic. They're, they're highly motivated. They're being very thoughtful and so they, resonate with our process quite well, and that they want to be really thoughtful about the choices that they're making. And that they have some amount of time, but they're kind of like, well, we need to get moving here. We, we can't just kind of hang out forever and, and just kick some tires. And do you see, you know, say someone comes to you and they're getting rid of a boiler and putting in a heat pump, do they then get to a point where they go, gosh, this is great. We should now try changing out our cooker or changing out our water heater, or whatever it is. Yeah, I, I think often the primary things that folks are coming to us for are water heating and space conditioning. And, then jumping into one of the other appliances. For whatever reason, it's still a little surprising to me that, induction cooktops have not really caught on as much as you, you'd think, and they're so high performing relative to the other, cooktop types that you just think everyone would be flocking towards them. But in many ways I sort of chalk that up to the fact that electric resistance cooktops just have really had a bad wrap for a long time. Induction's adjacent enough that people assimilate them with the being the same thing. And that, gas cooktops are good enough, but all to say that, they're wonderful to, cook on. If you haven't gotten a chance, they're, they're really fantastic. You can boil water in a minute flat as opposed to five or something on a, on a gas cooktop. So, they're, they're really great. And I would say that around a lot of the new appliances, I mean the, the new washer dryer combo units are phenomenal. I, I mean, they, again, the first versions of those weren't amazing, but, one of the, best things about those combo units, you don't have to switch over your laundry anymore. You can throw your laundry in one time. You can in, like, tell it when you'd like it to be done as opposed to starting it and then like having to keep track of that so you can get home from work and fold your clothes and, and whatnot. And they don't, they're not all wrinkled and whatnot. So, all just to say that a lot of these newer appliances, I think the second wave of, of these things has been fantastic. Heat Pumps service also had their first iteration in moment, and the second wave of them are, they're much higher performing. So, I think all in all the product suite that's available to, install in homes today is really excellent. The process just is still like really crummy to, to purchasing them. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I've never had a home with a gas cooker. It's always been electric and currently have an induction hob in the counter in my kitchen for cooking and, and a microwave as well. For me, the, the two big advantages apart from the climate advantages, the two other big advantages of using an induction countertop is a) much easier to clean and b), much, much, much better indoor air quality, you're not burning stuff. Well, sometimes I do burn stuff, but that's different. I live the pan on too long or something, or don't have enough oil, but you know what I mean. You're not, you're not setting stuff on fire to cook. It's, it's, it's so much better. And the, the studies around indoor air quality from having gas cookers show that it's deadly, particularly if you have kids who have asthma. It's really bad for their health. Totally. before I was really deep in this, space, professionally, I didn't think twice about turning on a gas cooktop or a range or something. And every time I do now, I definitely have a fan running. I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty crazy. Some of the studies are, are bananas frankly. But, at the end of the day, I, I think a lot of people just don't know that information. Yeah. and also they deal with what they have, right? Do people have 2,500 bucks to go out and install an induction range in their home? That might not be at the top of their list, which is understandable. But to, to your point, massive improvement in quality of life. Yeah. Beyond just the, the day-to-day usage of the thing. You mentioned that you're doing the, the remote side assessments with, with just a phone and we, we talked about the, the quality of the phone required, but how, how accurate can that be? Is it very accurate? Do you find glitches, you know, does it work? Obviously it works, you say, but. Sure. Yeah. And well, i, I'll say this. We did have two separate very reputable organisations do third party reviews of, the data it produces. So both in our assessment process, so the data that the phone is actually collecting and and processing. We did have the Department of Energy go through and validate that information. We compared a person going in. And assessing 25 homes. And then did the same thing with our technology. Sent them all of the data. They, basically wrote us a nice long letter, gave us a green check mark, Nice. which was nice. And that's really important, I think is a core thesis of the business. If we couldn't pull that off, it was basically like, let's just go do something else because that's really the, the core part of this business. Being able to digitise the home is the first step, and you can't really get around that. The second step of that is then, well, if you can collect really accurate information, can you turn that around into value? And arguably the difficulty level is 10 x the difficulty in digitising the home versus then turning that information into value, right? Because you can sit down on a piece of scratch paper and a pencil and, and take that information and turn it into value manually yourself. Can you build some software to do that so you don't have to do it manually? Absolutely. Right. And it's a pretty straightforward process, but getting that information accurately and consistently, accurately. Very, challenging to do. And, doing that across, a hundred different device types and all these different geographies, I mean, it, it's quite the, challenge. And so, all just to say, I think we've, we've done the first part really well. But we also then went and got our design software certified. So that manual J calculation, there's a, organisation in the US called the Air Conditioning Contractors of America. And they certify software to actually run that calculation. So we got both of those done last year. And off the back of that, have been able to really leverage that to, to message to folks. Yes, this in fact is quite, quite accurate, we're the first company to ever get our software validated to do remote assessments. And we're the 10th company to build a Manual J certified Manual J software. And so, we're the first to, to, do both of those things. And so, sort of unlocking a new capability that owner's love. The, outcomes for folks really speak for themselves in dollars and cents, but emotionally, they really speak for themselves as well. Like our, our NPS scores are phenomenal because of that. And people are saving a lot of time, they're saving money. And the ease of use is just, it's a, it's a big deal. Any unexpected things that your team has learned from scanning hundreds of homes remotely? Ooh, unexpected things. one thing that's always really funny is, and I, and I learned this being in, in homes, is that people feel, this social pressure to project ourselves as being like, well put together. And when a homeowner's hosting a salesperson in their home, they even feel that pressure to clean up their house before this person comes by. And then do that two or three, or four or five times. Right. The sort of interesting thing about our process is that people don't feel that pressure as much. I also didn't really realise, especially then, how much people don't love having contractors come over to their home. Like hosting a stranger in your house is actually like this, deeply uncomfortable, mostly unspoken, problem in, in doing any in-home or just home upgrade projects and, this is sort of a way around that is to say, great, a single woman living at home doesn't really wanna host a strange man in their house. I mean, as much as I wish that, that that wasn't a challenge in our society, it is. This is a way for those folks to get around this beyond the time savings and everything else. That was really unexpected for me. Just sort of getting around some of the, the social pressure and uncomfortability in the existing process that I didn't really know existed until we provided people an opportunity to get around that and they went, oh my gosh, wait, this is so great. I don't have to have these people come over. I don't have to waste all that time. And like, man, I really don't like hosting people in my house while I'm there alone. That was kind of a, just a, an awesome thing to, to find and just sort of an unintentional positive outcome for us. Okay. Interesting. And the rebate landscape is gonna be messy, obviously, so probably understating that enormously. So what, what are you doing to help out your customers with that? Yeah, I, I mean the, the rebate landscape is just kind of a disaster. You just see often programs repeat themselves. They offer cash incentives of varying sizes, everything from $50 to $10,000 for different appliances. And, and then different entities in the same ecosystem will offer varying levels of rebates. So, it, it is a crazy mess. We have rebates at, or incentives at the city level, the county level at the utility, even at the state. And the federal governments for five different incentives could be applied to one project with five different application forms that require different, requirements different install requirements, et cetera. So it is a super complex mess. And, I'll make it short and just saying that we handle that mess for folks in the equipment that we select to make sure that it, it's gonna work across all those, those incentives and try to maximise the, the dollars that folks can get. We don't wanna maximise the dollars at the expense of having improperly sized, heat pump and have a good comfort outcome in your project. Of course those things sometimes have some tension, but the important thing is that we're trying to deliver the most effective solution at the best price. And what comes with that is, capturing the incentives to offering financing. And we, go to great peril. I think frankly, to, do the, the latter component of that for folks. Maybe also just to say as well that that landscape changes, of course, by city, by county, by state, et cetera. So, you may be operating in, in one ecosystem and have that well figured out jump into another one. And it's a completely different challenge. And, we're operating in four states today and, and soon to be more. And so that, mess is getting messier at least for us. Okay. I dunno if it's a good thing or not, but good luck with that. Yeah. what's. What's I mean, apart from that, what's one thing that still keeps you up at night about scaling this kind of solution? The challenge that we have as a business no longer is technological. And, and that's sort of amazing to say, and that we really have solved that component of it. Surely there are improvements to make, to make it faster, to make it easier to use, so on and so forth. But by and large, like we've solved 95% of the technology problem. And nothing that's really scary in the last 5% in, in my opinion. The thing that we have to now overcome is people's mental model for going to purchase a new furnace or water heater is not to whip out their phone and scan their house. It is, shoot, I need to find a, a human who's well trained to then help me solve that problem. So they're going to Google and saying, Hey, plumber near me. They're looking at reviews, they're calling that person. And so really, in a lot of ways, like we have a marketing and distribution challenge to get over and, we have a very specific strategy on how to do that. But there's a, a lot that we are now starting to, to take on in terms of trying to make the world more aware that there's an alternative to having folks in your home. To, to understand what these projects cost and the right scope of work and, and the like. That's gonna be a fun different phase of, of this business for us. The engineer in me is, it kind of rolls my eyes a little bit at marketing, but I'm really understanding the, the value and the challenge for us in that, we have to reframe the entire mental model of how people go approach, solving this problem in their home and in their lives. And that's kind of a, a fun and different challenge that we just haven't had to, to work on really to date. Okay, and a left field question for you, Grant, if you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a champion for electrifying homes, who would it be and why? Ooh, wow. Let me think about that for a second. Well, it would probably have to be someone, maybe to try to solve the problem I just spoke about someone that has quite the reputation, positive reputation to them, that has maybe a megaphone of following whatnot. Maybe, maybe today one of like the, the large home improvement gurus, like, I dunno, Matt, Matt Resinger comes to mind in, in the US. I don't know if that's the actually perfect person, but, Matt's super knowledgeable about all sorts of building products and has a great following. And it would be very cool to have, a spotlight from him on this product and, tell people about what's the benefits and, and the like. Super, super great. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Grant, is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that it's important for people to think about? Geez, we went through so many things. Nothing comes to mind immediately. But I, I would say maybe just the, the last bit of this is if you haven't heard about a heat pump, and, you own a home. It's worth doing a little bit of research being thoughtful about the decisions that you make so that you don't get put in a hard spot. Having a broken appliance and having to make a decision quick and sort of being forced into, maybe not making the most optimal decision. Spend a little bit of time learn about this stuff so that when the time comes, you can make you know the best decision for you and your family. Yeah, I'm always amazed at the numbers behind heat pumps, because I've seen figures that you put a kilowatt hour of energy into a heat pump and you typically get 3, 4, 5 kilowatt hours back out of it, which seems totally insane. It's, it's ridiculous. That can't happen. That's impossible. That goes against the laws of physics, but it doesn't. It's just counterintuitive. They're an amazing machine. Totally. I mean it's, it's much like, what we see in in phones and like, I mean there, there're thermal transistors in, in a lot of ways. And that what a remarkable technology that is in, in all the things that that's enabled. This is sort of the, the thermal version of, of those. And I think we're seeing in a lot of ways the value that that can create. Both in dollars and cents and in comfort and, everything else. Great super Grant, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? You can find me on, on LinkedIn or go to our, our company website, zero homes dot io. We'll be pushing a lot more content out on the website, in the coming months as well both in terms of video and, and written content, et cetera. So if you'd like to learn more about heat pumps, our process, or any of the other technologies we help people install, feel free to, to take a look there. Super great. Grant, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Hey. Thanks Tom. Yeah, it's been great. Thanks for having me on. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.