Highlights
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2024-11-08 18:50 He started his career as a hardware engineer at Google X back in the Google Glass days. Since Then he’s worked on hardware for Oculus, Facebook and Google before founding impulse in 2021. Sam, I haven’t told you this, but I think you’re a very cool guy and I love what you’re doing. And you’ve actually been on my dream podcast guest list for almost two years since I first read about what you were doing. So, really happy to have you here.
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2024-11-08 18:46 You were limited by the power that was available at the home electrical connection
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2024-11-08 18:47 I went and like bought some components. I bought some Zoom pizza ovens from their bankruptcy sale. Like I went and kind of did some research on this pre pandemic and was realized that the best move was to integrate batteries in the appliance. And if you could, because the reason is 120 volt plug gets you 1500 watts. Augment that with high discharge rate, presumably lithium iron phosphate because of safety features batteries
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2024-11-08 18:47 And you could build an appliance that had north of 10,000 watts available in a multitude of form factors, not necessarily just ones that are installed, not necessarily tabletop ones, et cetera. And so that was kind of like the entry point and was like, yes, you can make this sweet pizza oven with like infrared lights and all sorts of stuff. That was step one.
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2024-11-08 18:47 what products would make sense here and what was the big picture and how big would the batteries be when practically deployed? And so the next step was kind of like, okay, you want to actually do installed appliances, which is counterintuitive because those are wired up to the building mains on 240 volts. Like they’re not like, and typically wired up on 240v. And what you could then do is, and then you’re like, how big is the battery? And then it was kind of okay. The appliance that now is installed in the house stealthily installs a reasonably large battery in the house. And then you think of how many appliances there are and what that sums up to in terms of total energy storage.
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2024-11-08 18:48 And it looks pretty dang similar to a Tesla powerwall. It’s just you built it from multiple pieces versus having a singular one in one position in your house.
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2024-11-08 18:34 And there are a number of companies I think some of which you probably have may have talked to. But like Renew Home is a good example where like okay, your nest thermostat, I mean it sells negative watts and sells like not heating or cooling your house to the grid.
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2024-11-08 18:49 But imagine if you do that with battery capacity. That works. Tesla’s got this program called Tesla vpp. There’s a number of programs where essentially they will bundle. Maybe it’s not just their assets, but it’s a number of other assets and offer that to utilities in regions where they’ve got enough capacity as like hey, here’s a product, here’s a, here’s a product.
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2024-11-08 18:49 We’ve realized that like because our battery is like 3 kilowatt hours and not 15 to 25 or something like that, the capacity that you can just internally consume in your house, it matches reasonably well to 3 kilowatt hours. So like you can end up playing with the virtual power plant abstraction layer versus the like
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2024-11-08 18:51 I personally hate how long it takes to boil water on my, on my gas stove. What else really? Seven minutes for a liter. The shape and size of the bottom of the pan. But it’s, it’s usually between six and seven minutes on a gas stove. On a typical gas stove, when I. Visited your office was talking about just how much heat is lost to the air to the sort of the surrounding 60%.
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2024-11-08 18:51 If we went and bolted on our like one, we couldn’t raise the power output of their standard stuff. Maybe you could hack it, but like, it would be kind of tricky.
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2024-11-10 21:04 When your stuff starts burning, you can actually set and hold an exact temperature. That changes the entire user experience with the product. Because now, and you can do things that no other stove can do. It’s not just like a. This is another induction stove.
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2024-11-10 21:04 It’s like, this is something new. We’ll figure out the branding for it very soon. But like, it is definitely something. It is definitely something new. And I’ve done demos that are really simple where it’s like I just walk up to it and I fry an egg.
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2024-11-10 20:58 My energy bill is lower because it’s lower there. Yet. There is yet to be a reason to sell consumers on any other use case for a battery that’s not like, hey, you can use this portable battery to go to the beach or, like, DJ in the park. So you can think of like the portable use case, like, why your laptop needs a battery, why your phone needs a battery. But like, why does your house need a battery outside of kind of this like doomsday scenario?
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2024-11-10 20:59 Then you also think, like, where do we actually need these batteries? We need them in cities where we need to upgrade all the electrical infrastructure. And having more batteries there would be very good. But like, how many outages do you get in San Francisco?
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2024-11-10 20:59 You get these awesome appliances, you’re convinced to buy them because that is the best appliance you can possibly get. And then we start incrementally deploying batteries. Not in a like doomsday prepper mindset or not in a, like I’m on M3 mindset.
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2024-11-10 21:00 like I Want these new capabilities I couldn’t otherwise have. And that looks a lot more close to why people got electric vehicles in the first place. They’re like, I want to get the futuristic spaceship car or the cybertruck or what have you or I want the autopilot feature.
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2024-11-10 21:01 Like there’s a number of reasons why people get EVs and they’re oftentimes around performance and quality of the vehicle and the fact that it’s got OTA updates and a lot of all this other stuff. Basically that’s like we’re now in that zone. Which then means that the flywheel will actually start for getting batteries deployed in homes.
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2024-11-10 21:01 And I’ve seen like we talked to Quilt doing taking a similar approach to getting heat pump adoption. As a mechanical product designer myself who’s always like really geeked out on product design, it’s really heartwarming to see that actually good product design can actually have an influence on climate change and sustainability. Yeah. And their argument is the consumer experience is you get a nest per room, which is actually kind of a crazy awesome experience. How the air is handled and how it heats it.
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2024-11-10 20:02 Preheat is a good example. Like it needs to use most with power for preheat and broil water heaters. When do people take a shower? You think of tankless. You also think of like there’s.
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2024-11-10 20:02 There’s a number of things that are interesting in that space. There’s already companies treating the water heater tank as a battery itself. Right. Like. Right.
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2024-11-10 20:03 Storing energy in water. Yeah. Storing energy in the water or superheating the water and having a mixing valve so you can store even more energy. So you. There’s already a precedent in that space for that laundry is another good example.
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2024-11-10 21:02 Like you’re like most people don’t have a desktop, they have a laptop, it has a battery. Most people, everyone’s phone has a battery. Like a lot of yard equipment is switching to having batteries. Like everything is starting to have a battery. Maybe like it’s going to be limit, like the things are not going to have batteries and oh, even light bulbs have batteries now too because you can get light bulbs that, that, that individually back themselves up.