On a cold winter’s day, being warm and snug under the covers is a formidable temptation. Nonetheless, the day must begin, and up we must rise. The trouble is, keeping our homes as warm throughout the day can be a real challenge. As we’re forced to be increasingly conscious of the power we’re using thanks to heavy energy costs and grid strain, we want an efficient and effective way to heat our homes. Keeping thermostats at the best temperature helps avoid hefty electric bills, and former Google employees have devised a system that aims to do the same: Quilt. One of the biggest benefits of any smart home functionality is convenience and efficiency. Smart meters can tell us at a glance how much energy we’ve used in our home that day, and what the costs amount to. To augment this, it’s helpful to know exactly where we can cut down and how to do so. The concept behind Quilt is to separately heat parts of your home using controls that allow you to monitor the temperature in each and adjust accordingly.

If you work from home, your study or home office take priority for temperature control through much of the day. Other rooms, such as the bedroom, which you might not return to until the very end of the day, won’t require much heating. Room-by-room, then, you can optimize the energy you use by concentrating it where you are or will be. Just as leaving lights on in rooms nobody’s in is wasteful, it can also be heat those rooms to the same degree. Here’s how the Quilt system works, the difference between it and other heating/cooling solutions like air duct heat pumps, and how it’s designed to help with energy costs.

The smart system can be controlled using an included dial, or through the Quilt app.  Here you can see the current temperature of each room and adjust accordingly. Conceptually, it’s easy to adjust on the fly, but it would require significant micromanagement if the user had to make each change separately for each room throughout the course of a day. Users can instead set a particular schedule across the house to provide a degree of automation. If, for instance, you only work from home on certain days, Quilt can be set to boost the temperature in the office on those days. Of course, it’s nothing new for a heating system to be programmed to automate in this way, but Quilt is a little different to other HVAC options. Temperature sensors can be very useful, and this tech provides similar functionality.

“The typical room is empty nearly half the time,” Quilt reports, and the system aims to reduce the inefficiency of maintaining the same temperature throughout. The buyer isn’t forced to heat only certain rooms, though. For instance, you might be tidying your home and working room-to-room, or you might simply have a full house with everyone at home in separate corners. It may well be more practical to keep the whole home at a steady, comfortable temperature. The idea is to give the user the choice, and this is achieved through millimeter-wave radar sensors that keep the system informed of where household members are in the home in order to continue to use those resources as efficiently as possible. The next important thing to consider was the operation of the system itself, and how heating and cooling of a home is achieved by Quilt and the variety of systems like it.

One thing that heat pumps often have in common is that they’re not the most aesthetically pleasing or slimline of systems. What Quilt also claims to do is to improve the look of a system while focusing on the fundamentals of how such a heating system should work. In an interview with Volts‘ David Roberts in May 2024, Quilt CEO Paul Lambert explained that his system develops air source heat pumps. With this type of pump, he said, “You are sourcing energy from the air, either outdoors or indoors and outside of the home. So you always have an outdoor unit and an indoor unit, and on both those units, there’s heat exchange happening.” Different types of systems vary a lot, from swamp coolers to A/C units, so it’s important to understand your needs.

In addition, a Quilt air pump is ductless. The difference with such a system, also known as a mini-split heat pump, is that it doesn’t distribute air around a home through ducts, but instead uses refrigerant to capture heat through a unit outdoors. That heat is then transferred to units inside, typically mounted in an unobtrusive position on the walls of rooms requiring heating/cooling. It can also transfer heat from a room to the outside. Mini-split heat pumps don’t require the additional infrastructure that one requiring traditional air ducts will. Even so, the units are sizable. Lambert adjusted the form factor, noting, “there’s only so much space outside a house, even though we do think we made them a lot better looking, and we have shrunk the size of it.” He also said the team concluded that the most effective ratio was one outdoor unit to every two indoors, thereby ensuring efficient operation without an impractical excess of units.