Quilting bee

Having a few large companies based in a city give that city a certain cachet, and of course provide a large number of local jobs while generating much-needed tax dollars. So, the loss of a large company like Oracle is notable. But the loss of a large company can be made up for by a handful of smaller, lesser-known companies, and Redwood City is home to a surprising number of those.

On April 2, Redwood City inaugurated a quarterly series of talks highlighting innovation and innovative companies based in Redwood City. The speaker was Paul Lambert, co-founder and CEO of Quilt, a Redwood City-based company making “all-electric home climate systems combining high-efficiency heat pump technology with smart controls to deliver comfortable, lower-carbon heating and cooling.” Lambert began his talk by noting that roughly 50% of a home’s energy usage is from its HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning), and therefore improving their efficiency can not only save homeowners money, it’s a key step in combating global climate change.

Being someone very interested in technological solutions to our world’s climate problems, I made it a point to attend the talk. Although I personally have no need for their product — a couple of years ago we replaced our central gas furnace with a heat pump — I was nevertheless fascinated to hear about Quilt’s product. And I was delighted to hear Lambert talk about why Redwood City was ideal for a company such as his. With Quilt’s need for employees with experience gained from other Silicon Valley companies — companies such as Google, Nest, Apple, Tesla and the like — Redwood City’s location midway between San Francisco and San Jose means lets employees coming from companies like those remain in their current homes.

Quilt designs and manufactures ductless mini-split systems, which are extremely efficient ways to heat and cool one’s home. Mini-split systems consist of relatively small “indoor units” that you install in bedrooms, living rooms and the like, plus one or more “outdoor units” (Quilt lets you connect up to three indoor units to one outdoor unit), all of which either absorb or emit heat, depending upon whether you are heating or cooling your house. Each indoor unit is paired with a Quilt smart thermostat, giving you individual control over how and when each room is heated or cooled.

Heat pumps by their very nature are already much more efficient than traditional sources of heat, such as gas furnaces or electric radiators, since rather than generating heat they simply extract it from the outdoors and “pump” it in (to cool your house, they simply do the same in reverse). But whereas most central heat pump systems heat or cool your entire house to the same temperature, mini-splits allow you to more precisely control the temperature in individual rooms. By not heating or cooling the rooms you are not actively using, you can save even more energy over a central heat pump. And since Quilt’s thermostats have built-in occupancy sensors, they can automatically give you the added savings.

Other companies make mini-split systems, but where Quilt stands tall is through its efficiency — Quilt’s units are among the, if not the, most efficient you can buy — and the small size of their indoor units, which lets them to be installed where other systems won’t fit. Plus, the units themselves are more attractive than most, helping them to blend in with your decor.

As someone who has had a heat pump for a couple of years now, I can highly recommend the technology. For homes currently equipped with central heating, switching to a heat pump can be a fairly painless process. But Lambert noted that roughly half of Quilt’s customers who had conventional central heating abandoned their ducts in favor of mini-splits. So, if you are considering making the change, Quilt’s systems seem well worth looking into.

As I walk around Redwood City I see offices for a lot of companies that aren’t household names today, but that hopefully will be someday. Robotics companies, AI companies, you name it, Redwood City seems to have them all. Quilt is just one sterling example of how Redwood City can be the ideal place for a small tech company that someday may be a big one.