Open research & heat pump bulk deals for the benefit of the community.
Hyperlocal pricing benchmarks w/20+ contractors. Deep market research & vetting. Join hundreds of your neighbors (550!!) & save thousands.
FAQs
What's a heat pump/mini-split?
A machine that heats and cools your home. They're like ACs with a heating mode. Here's one that goes on the wall without air ducts. There are also ones that use central air ducts.
You can see a photo of a wall unit & an exterior condenser below :)
If you replace your oil or gas heating with heat pumps, Mass Save will give you up to a $10k rebate.
How do you vet contractors for quality?
This research memo gives you a pretty good idea of how we approach the contractor market.
And here's a more technical memo about what we look for in quality indicators.
Can you show me some previous installations?
You can see an early gallery here with a small fraction of the ~80+ installations we've facilitated at this point!
Does everyone get a $10k rebate?
Depends on your scenario:
- If you live in a triple decker, or a single family home: yes.
- If you live in a multifamily building: you'd qualify only for a partial rebate.
- If you are in an area with a municipal light plan (e.g. no Eversource/National Grid): maybe, but probably not. You may qualify for your local incentive, though.
(Update: rule changes in 2025 mean that you may get fewer rebates for smaller homes!)
If you're in Mass Save service territory & you complete a whole home installation, you'd qualify for $10k in MassSave rebates, and an additional $2k in the form of a tax credit from the Inflation Reduction Act. There's also a 0% HEAT Loan.
You may qualify for $16k (or more) enhanced incentives if you fall under these income ranges.
Who's running this?
You can find our team page here!
Is this free? How are you funded?
Yep, everything here is free for consumers.
We started off with a Mass Save Community Education grant, and transparently, we are charging contractors who participate in the bulk deal somewhere around 3% of installation volume to fund our research and organizing.
To ensure you're actually getting a good deal and we're not just taking the highest bidder, we publish our benchmarks publicly. That's why our benchmarks are free.
We spent half of 2024 concluding that it's the best way to fund operations for now. Here are all the other funding sources we considered:
- MassCEC: we're not really commercializing R&D technology from labs, so the Catalyst grant doesn't apply for us. We tried applying for Empower, but were too early in the process; in any case, that grant is focused on outreach to low/moderate income communities, which we legally can't do anything about because the entire process is handled by regional CAP agencies. Like, the only thing we can do is tell people to go visit the CAP agencies in person.
- Community First Partnerships: same problem as Empower. Though we play the role of an energy advocate in some towns, the fact that low-income is completely off limits to us means that we can't leverage any of our negotiating abilities to help. The CFP partnership is supposed to help with uptake of electrification in working class communities, so we don't think we're a great fit there.
- Mass Save/National Grid/Eversource: we already have the Community Education Grant, and we are thankful for that. However, that's limited to $25k and the bigger opportunity is Empower. There is no significant grant opportunity that can support a multi-city operation, and the utilities would take years to actually sign a deal. We need to move faster than that.
- Foundations: we need to be a 501(c)3 nonprofit, which we could convert to (we are currently a public benefit corporation), but they don't really fund nonprofits that serve market rate customers. Again, because the CAP agencies already have their own thing going on, and nobody else can really touch the process, we can't do that work. I'm not going to go nonprofit just to spend $100k telling people to drive to their local CAP agency.
- Cities & Municipalities: cannot strike bulk deals without a public request-for-proposal process, under Chapter 30B of Massachusetts procurement law. I agree with this stance, and I understand why it's essential for the public trust. Private funding allows us to operate outside of that.
Maybe we'll think of another way to fund operations in the future, but for now - that flat percentage is the simplest, and easiest way, to sustain operations.
Twice a year, we negotiate.
With more than $1.5M+ worth of volume per deal, we're able to negotiate heat pump installation rates with contractors at up to a 20% discount from the market average.
Here are the prices we negotiated for Fall 2024:
Other times, we advocate.
We're grassroots. We're close to the ground. And that makes us a voice for consumers & ratepayers in our communities.
Join us.
Read our full research blog. Participate in a Spring or Fall bulk deal. Help us sustain our work.