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Need help electrifying your home? This startup has an app for that
Zero Homes aims to make electrification easier and cheaper by quoting projects — to install heat pumps, EV chargers, and more — without setting foot in your house.
Addressing climate change means getting fossil fuels out of about 115 million U.S. homes — ASAP. But right now, that shift is happening at a snail’s pace; by one expert’s estimate, it would take about 200 years to electrify all homes at the current rate.
Entrepreneur Grant Gunnison sees a way to speed things along — and the approach hinges on homeowners’ smartphones. In 2021, the MIT-trained engineer left a career in satellite communications and remote imaging at NASA to launch Zero Homes, a whole-home electrification company. The startup relies on users’ phone cameras to digitally scan their living spaces and inventory their appliances in order to devise a home-decarbonization plan.
Zero Homes scopes and sizes projects — such as installing heat pumps, heat-pump water heaters, induction stoves, and EV chargers — for homeowners without ever needing to set foot in their abodes. Gunnison likens Zero’s software-based approach to that of Aurora Solar, the tech unicorn that uses optimization software to remotely design rooftop solar systems so that they can be installed quickly.
Gunnison knows firsthand how much of a contractor’s time can be regularly wasted; from 2016 to 2018, he managed his family’s general contractor business, which entailed schlepping across Orange County, California, and beyond.
“You can only meet with so many people in a day, and most of the time is spent in traffic ‘mailing’ yourself to a house,” he said.
All that time driving and gathering data about a home in person is time that a contractor could spend actually completing a project instead. Years later, inspired by his NASA work, he realized that imaging technology and software could vastly expedite the home-data-collection process — and free up contractors to install the equipment needed to ditch fossil fuels. Moreover, some of those savings could in theory be passed on to customers, making clean energy upgrades more affordable.
Fast-forward to today: Zero Homes is a one-stop shop for home electrification and, working with local vetted installers, has served hundreds of homeowners collectively in and around Boston and Denver and in Northern California, Gunnison said. The 10-person company is also currently expanding its service into rural Colorado and Chicago. Venture capital investors, including Overture, FJ Labs, and VoLo Earth, have backed the Denver-based startup with roughly $3 million, he noted, while the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has provided about $1 million to date.
One of Zero Home’s installer partners, Bell Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electrical in Denver, has completed a half dozen installations with the startup in their few weeks of working together. Tom Teynor, Bell’s CEO, said his company of about 100 employees is effectively outsourcing its in-home assessments to Zero. And “the jobs are coming in fast.”
From digital scan to decarbonization plan
Here’s how Zero’s process works: After a homeowner downloads Zero’s app on their phone, they use it to take a digital scan of their home (a video walk-through of every room); share utility data; and upload photos of their appliances, electrical meter, electrical panel, and more — all of which takes about 45 minutes. Then, the homeowner has a 45-minute video call with one of Zero’s electrification advisors to discuss goals and needs.
With that info, Zero furnishes quotes for different home decarbonization projects. If a homeowner decides to move forward with any of them, they sign a contract with Zero, which locks in the price. Zero then notifies a local partner installer to schedule a time with the homeowner to do the job. (Zero acts as a general contractor, charging customers for the projects, paying subcontractors to do the installations, and keeping a chunk of the money for itself.) For a minority of projects, the partner installer will do a walk-through prior to the install in order to clarify any unknowns, such as where to place a mini-split heat pump system’s indoor units. All Zero’s projects come with a 1-year labor warranty.
