Lun helps heat pump installers decarbonize homes

Lun, a climate tech startup out of Denmark, is on a mission to help homes decarbonize fast — starting with heating systems and swapping out boilers for electric heat pumps.

What are heat pumps? The technology is a low carbon form of heating which is based on the principle of refrigeration that offers an alternative to environmentally unfriendly options like oil and gas-fired boilers. At a basic level, heat pumps work by using electricity to transfer heat from one place to another, so they’re able to both heat a house in winter and cool it in summer (or at least up to a balance point at which a supplemental system may be required).

There are several different types of heat pump (air-source, water-source, ground-source etc); and installations need to start with an assessment of the property which needs to consider a variety of factors before being able to go ahead — such as which type of pump is appropriate to the given property, land and climate; where to site units and components and whether to reuse elements of an existing heating system; how well (or poorly) insulated the property is; and even whether the heat pump brands a particular tradesperson prefers to work with are appropriate for the job in question.

The need for all this detailed up-front assessment complicates the sales process for heat pump installations — and that, in turn, slows down the decarbonization of households. Since in-demand plumbers and electricians may simply decide it’s easier to focus on other types of work (including, climate-horror-of-horrors, installing more fossil fuel burning boilers that pump CO2 directly into the atmosphere).

Helping redirect the energy (ha!) of installers towards decarbonization via fitting more heat pumps is what Lun hopes to do by building a platform for tradespeople — which it dubs an installation “operating system” — to provide them with “full stack” support so they can get on with ripping out boilers and replacing them with heat pumps. And, as they earn money doing that work, help decarbonize the planet faster.

Its software, which is currently in an alpha release with an undisclosed number of testers in Denmark, aims to take some of the strain out of installation assessments, design and planning, as well as handle other business elements like taking payments. It’s providing tradespeople with a suite of tools for gathering relevant data from householders and automating suitability assessments — doing the latter by drawing on public and/or open data (such as satellite imagery), as well as feeding in data from OEMs (such as price, specifications), as well as property type/location etc, to try to find the best match between a job and a professional installer.

“We start very small,” says co-founder and CEO Martin Collignon. “We start with where they lose the most time — which is in sales. Many of them go visit homes way too early, before they actually know whether the customer is interested or not. Or whether the house is relevant or not. And that’s what we focus on and then we build on the the entire stack all the way to payment… to make sure that they’re supporting every part of the journey. And they could focus on what they’re good at, what they trained at, and what they earn money on — which is installing the heat pump.”